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As Classic Doctor Who’s ultimate villain, Terry Molloy last wore a Davros mask on TV nearly 30 years ago, but as his upcoming Davros Variety Hour suggests, there’s life in the old Kaled scientist yet. Nick Joy caught up with the fan favourite at SF Ball 23 and found him in playful mood.

I’m shortly off to a convention in Baltimore called ReGeneration. It’s their third year and I’m going to be performing The Davros Variety Hour.

The mind boggles!

Well, you’ll finally get to see the fluffy side of Davros – playing the ukulele and all of that! We did it last year – myself and Cat Smith, who performs as Miss Nerdstiles; she’s a lovely ukulele player and does a lot of sci-fi numbers. I’ve also done a couple of adaptations of songs to make them Doctor Who relevant and… ukuleles are very silly instruments and very easy to play.

Dare I say it: Davros with his single claw hand – that sounds like a significant limitation for being a successful ukulele player?

True. Well, I am Davros and I’m supported by the Davettes; two pretty girls playing ukulele. We also add into that mix a stand-up comic, a fan group that do little sketches, belly dancers – anything that happens to be around. This year I’m planning to do a song called My Brother Sylveste: [Clears throat and sings] That’s my brother, Sylveste (What’s he got?) A row of forty medals on his chest (Big chest!) Sylvester [McCoy – Seventh Doctor] used to sing that with Ken Campbell [in the ‘Human Bomb’ days of stuffing ferrets up his trousers] so I’m going to try and hook Sylv into doing it in the show with spoons and ukulele.

I can’t imagine that it will take much convincing for Mr McCoy to take his spoons out.

He will take no convincing at all. The first year there we were jamming at the tables and out came the spoons in the middle of an autograph signing. It’s a fun convention where all sorts of silly things happen, much like this one, the SF Ball. I like that. And yes, it’s a very well organised convention, but there’s room for lateral bursts of creativity to happen, maybe in the lobby at 2 o’clock in the morning – it’s all part of the weekend of nonsense.

Is the ‘fun factor’ part of your rationale to attend these events?

Yes, especially those that have an extended family feel to them. These events are run by fans for fans. There’s a very distinct difference to corporate events where they’re basically just looking at the money. When we set up Archers Addicts back in the early 90s it’s was because a few of us felt that the fans of the programme [The Archers, where Terry plays Mike Tucker] weren’t being served in terms of interaction. The programme makers didn’t have the time to do it because they were pumping out product 52 weeks a year. So, I went to the BBC and asked them if I could set up a fan club to give the fans news about what we’re doing.

It’s the same with Doctor Who conventions – when it comes from love, it produces love. Someone said to me today that it’s a bit like family weddings, and I said: ‘No it’s not, because at family weddings all they do is bitch and shout at each other. Here you’re choosing your friends, and not your family.’ I’m sure there is in-fighting within fandom – indeed, I know there is – but generally at conventions everyone is on a level playing field and having a good time.

Is it gratifying for you to meet a younger generation of fans who have initially grown up on 21st century Doctor Who and have gone back to see your portrayal of Davros? The show has such a rich vein of episodes for a novice to dip into.

Very much so. Some come up to me because their parents were avid watchers at that time (in the 80s), were shown in it in their own youth, and then got hooked into it. And others have started with the new series Davros [The Stolen Earth, Journey’s End, The Magician’s Apprentice and The Witch’s Familiar] and then gone back to revisit. But I’d also been doing it on Big Finish audio [the four part miniseries I, Davros among others] and extending the life and range of what Davros did. Again, people got hooked into that and saw it as a bridge – as indeed a lot of Big Finish was – into the new series. When Davros returned, people already knew about him; it wasn’t as if he was a new monster. He’d been there all along and people were aware of him and his part in the Dalek Empire.

Are you still recording Big Finish and other audios?

Yes, when they ask me, I try to. I just finished doing Hamlet not long ago for them and we’re going to be doing another The Scarifyers [from Bafflegab Productions]. I’ve finally managed to badger Simon Barnard [creator] into writing it, so hopefully we’re going to be recording that in March or April this year.

The stories originally featured Nick Courtney [Doctor Who’s Brigadier] and we wondered what were going to do when he died. But we’ve replaced him with David Warner, who is playing a similar character, and so it goes on… getting more and more bizarre as it goes!

I thought you were great in Season 1 of the Big Finish Survivors audios where you played senior civil servant John Redgrave.

Thank you. Yes, Survivors was good. They came to me later and said: ‘What have we done?!’ And I said: ‘Yes, you’ve killed me off!’ And they agreed maybe they shouldn’t have done that because he was such a good character – they’d really missed a point there. Survivors was the first ‘dystopian virus blows the Earth apart’ TV show – like The Walking Dead… without the zombies.

Terry, most recently you recorded the audio book of Beast of Fang Rock, the fourth of Fantom Audio’s Lethbridge-Stewart releases. 

Oh yes – ‘The Beast of Fang Rock!’ [Delivered in booming radio presenter voice]

I’m really enjoying reading those. I also seem to be doing a lot of the Target book adaptions now [including The Space Pirates and The Curse of Fenric]. When I did the first one to feature Sylv and Ace with Davros [the unabridged reading of Ben Aaronovitch’s Remembrance of the Daleks] I discovered that I could do a really good Sylv and a passable Ace, but when it got to me… [chuckles] I couldn’t remember how my [Davros] voice went! I had to stop a minute and have a think – you can get caught out.

So, are you suggesting that you’d only win the runner’s-up prize in a Terry Molloy impersonation competition?

Ha ha! Yes. Roy Tromelly obviously came into do it that time and was much better at playing the role than I was than I was! [Roy Tromelly was the pseudonym used for Terry’s screen and Radio Times credit to disguise the fact that he was playing the Emperor Dalek, thus preventing the spoiling of the big reveal that the Emperor Dalek was actually Davros.]

Terry, thank you for your time. I’ve had great fun

And with that, he’s gone, with a bound and a smile. Luckily we didn’t anger him: Remember, he can destroy us AND this miserable planet! 

With thanks to Andrew, Anne, B and the crew at SF Ball, raising funds for the Teenage Cancer Trust. SF Ball photos by Stephen Wright