“Everything’s sort of white and ashen” says history teacher Barbara moments after stepping from the TARDIS onto a bleak planet. Not for long though, as the black & white of this opening sequence soon makes way to glorious colour.

From this moment it’s clear that this project is going to be bold with its choices, and not just with Barbara’s electric pink top. The palette for Skaro is clearly borrowed from the 1965 Dr Who & The Daleks movie, as well as a nod or two to the Dalek Chronicles comic strips from TV 21. The TARDIS interior takes a more conservative approach with only the bright blue floor making a statement. While it’s well known that the TARDIS console was in reality painted a light green in order to reduce flare from the studio lights, it’s here presented in a more familiar off-white, and quite rightly so in my opinion.

The Dalek city is a bit of a mishmash, mostly grey walls with splashes of colour in the detailing and various bits of electronic equipment nod to the movie without aping it. The metal meanies themselves aren’t tampered with and keep their real-life original colour scheme of blue bumps and eye discs. It was probably the right choice not to try to make them more like their movie counterparts with their blue heads and gold shoulders, but this viewer wouldn’t have minded.

On the whole the colourisation is well done, I believe mostly by hand rather than using often inaccurate AI, and goes big when it can get away with it but is also sympathetic to the material. Colourising is always controversial and there will be a camp who won’t be happy about it irrespective of its quality. It’s a camp I’ve sometimes been in, when monochrome was a deliberate choice over colour. That doesn’t apply here though; I’m sure everyone involved would have loved this to have been in colour at the time but that wasn’t feasibly possible. Hartnell himself is said to have always wished his era had been in colour. Irrespective of that controversy, it’s nothing compared to what else this presentation does…

Fans of a certain age will remember any number of cut down versions of certain stories. In the 1970s omnibus repeats were fairly common, usually about 90 minutes for a six-parter, maybe an hour or 75 minutes for a four part story. This though takes the scissors to the original like never before, apart perhaps from the LP version of Genesis of the Daleks at an hour. That version had commentary from Tom Baker to fill the gaps and cover the joins, so how does this presentation get about 2 hours 50 mins (including titles and reprises) down to a pacy 75 minutes?

On average each episode retains about 11 minutes of its original footage. It might have been possible to do this by simply removing whole scenes and subplots but by and large the storytelling is retained. Scenes not relevant to the story are either gone or curtailed – we don’t get an in-depth explanation of the TARDIS food machine for instance, and there’s a lot less of the Thals mooching about and staring wistfully into the distance. The focus here is rightly kept on our heroes and is achieved by clever editing techniques.

One thing that has always hampered edits like this is the music which obviously can’t be cut around easily. I’m not privy to exactly how this was got around but it seems as though Tristram Carey’s original music (more an atonal soundscape in reality) has been removed in places to allow for much more precise cutting. Scenes and even individual shots can begin later and end earlier, creating a much faster pace more akin to a modern production, which seems to be the whole idea of this. Fans of Billy-fluffs will be sad to hear that Hartnell’s wonderful flub about anti-radiation gloves is gone – fair enough in this context of course. Brief flashbacks and cutaways to establishing shots are used to cover joins where necessary. While this sometimes jars it’s really the only viable solution so it’s completely forgivable – there is of course no raw footage to make use of and I appreciated the inventive ways around this problem. Similarly on-screen titles and credits have had to be cut out and worked around, no small achievement when it comes to those former cliffhangers.

It doesn’t end there. The Daleks of course have no lips so they can be made to say things they originally didn’t and as such Nick Briggs has provided some additional dialogue for them. I think this is predominantly used to make a bit more sense of the climax, clarifying just how it is that the Daleks are defeated. Excitingly they now also use a certain word they never did in the original story, I’m sure you can guess it! They also fire beams from their guns and have a more sophisticated POV for the odd occasion we see through their stalks (another useful device for cutting dialogue). The TARDIS soundscape is now more familiar too – making the “proper” noises as it arrives and departs and there’s even a certain sound effect from many years later that surprised me.

I suspect the biggest controversy among fans will be the new music by Mark Ayres. It would be disrespectful to Mark to say it’s in the style of Murray Gold, but it certainly wouldn’t be out of place in modern Doctor Who. It’s the one aspect that initially really threw me, it’s just so far away from what I associate with this era of the show, but it is in keeping with the intentions behind this. Russell T Davies has explained that he wanted to provide an entry point for early Who for youngsters who just won’t watch black & white telly and having an exciting action score in the appropriate places can’t help but add to its appeal.

Ultimately this wasn’t made for the likes of a middle-aged fan like me, but I really enjoyed it anyway. I think even the biggest fans of the original version would agree that it has its issues with pacing, partly a result of just how multi-camera studio TV was made back then – surely no one involved really wanted 20 minutes of throwing ropes across chasms? I would have liked an extra ten minutes or so just to let some of it breathe – on occasion it feels a little like you’re watching a trailer as it cuts back and forth quite quickly, but again that may just be a limitation of what’s available to use. A few more cross fades or similar might have helped mitigate the occasional sense of characters teleporting from the city to the forest and back in an instant, but that’s a minor gripe.

Verdict: On the whole this is pretty great and I love the idea that someone who may have resisted early Who may now have something they’d happily watch. There are rumours of more to come and I’m absolutely on board with that. 8/10

Andy Smith