The Evil of the Daleks

Story Code: LL / Season 4	UK Airdate: 20 May to 1 Jul 1967	Doctor: Patrick Troughton
First airings by location	UK Repeats / Foreign Cable and Satellite	Previous Story / Next Story

This story aired in the following four countries. They are listed in chronological order according to known airdate. (Refer also to Selling Doctor Who for expanded airdates.)

Australia	Jan 69	b/w
Hong Kong	Aug 69	b/w
Singapore	Dec 69	b/w
New Zealand	Jun 70	b/w

• A 38 second mute clip from episode 7 was included on the 17 May 1968 edition of A Spoonful of Sugar.
• The serial was repeated by the BBC from 8 June to 3 August 1968.
• The story screened out of sequence in Australia, airing between The Web of Fear and Fury from the Deep, instead of after The Faceless Ones in late January 1968. It is believed that this delay was due to the ABC having to wait until the rights had been cleared following the lifting of the sales embargo imposed by Terry Nation in late 1966, and after the serial had been repeated by the BBC, which it did from 8 June to 3 August 1968. The Australian censors viewed the prints on 30 October 1968, and the ABC formally purchased the serial in January 1969. (It's unknown if the prints supplied to the ABC were telerecorded during the first UK screening, during the repeat or at a separate session; if during the repeat, the Australian print would have contained the narration that had been dubbed onto the first episode.)

Gordon Hendry's labels put on the recovered print of Evil of the Daleks episode 2 in 1987

• It was probably this delay in getting the serial cleared in Australia that prevented Uganda from acquiring the serial, which is why it was not part of the season four package that had already been sold to Uganda in 1968.
• Hong Kong may have sent its film prints to Singapore soon after transmission.
• The serial was withdrawn circa 1972, after the sale to New Zealand, which meant that Zambia, the only other country that purchased the season four Troughton serials, could not purchase it in 1973.
• The New Zealand film prints were "DESTROYED", date unknown, but likely to be in 1974. (The NZBC's rights to screen the story had expired on 31 May 1973.)
• The serial was the only Patrick Troughton story that was no longer in the BBC's sales catalogues issued in mid-1974.
• The ABC in Australia returned its prints to the BBC on 4 June 1975.
• By April 1976, the BBC held at least one episode of the serial, as it was viewed by Terrance Dicks during pre-production work on what ultimately became "Whose Doctor Who".
  • Dicks described what he saw as "The Doctor encounters the Daleks again, this time in Victorian London". That he makes no mention of the Dalek Emperor on Skaro does suggest that he did not see the entire serial, but only one episode - and that brief synopsis (albeit slightly inaccurate, since the London scenes take place in 1966, and the Victorian-era action in Canterbury...) could easily be a description of just part 2. Since no episodes of "Evil" were held in November 1976 when the researchers for Whose Doctor Who accessed the available material, the BBC must have discarded it soon after Dicks had viewed it - but it was salvaged, and later resurfaced in 1987...
• In early 1987, a print of part 2 was found in the possession of film collector Gordon Hendry (along with a copy of The Faceless Ones part 3), which he had acquired from a dealer in 1983. (Hendry put new labels on the film -- see photo above).
  • If Hendry's print of part 2 was an overseas return, it may have been the Australian print (the episode was missing the first few seconds of the titles, and as such was also missing a tell-tale leader). But if it was not the ex-ABC print, it can only have been the Hong Kong / Singapore copy.
  • There's also the possibility that this print was one that was struck for the production team to refer to for the telecine insert for the cliffhanger ending to The Wheel in Space part 6 (where Kennedy is killed by the Dalek), which was recorded in May 1968. The episode was then filed at the Film Library, where it was later accessed by Terrance Dicks some eight years later but junked shortly after... (See also The Web of Fear...)
• See also the Troughton Junkings page.

Reconstruction

• The missing episodes were animated in full (in colour and b/w, both in a widescreen aspect) for DVD/Blu-ray release in September 2021.
• BBC America screened all seven episodes of the reconstruction on the morning of 30 October 2021 as a part of a marathon of Jodie Whittaker episodes in the run up to the debut of Series 13.

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