The History of Skaro's Swamp Monster
To understand what was actually requested for this monster we need to turn to the original draft script (or second draft script), which is what the design team would have worked from. Unfortunately, as far as I can make out, nobody in fandom has these scripts and they may not even exist.
For those of us fans who like to understand the minutiae of Doctor Who’s production history (and that does seem to be quite a lot of us), the reminiscences of those who worked on the show can be a crucial resource. But they can also be inaccurate.
The fallibility of anecdotal evidence is easily explained: people misremember. But also, some interviewees will enhance an anecdote for effect or fill a gap in their memory with creative extrapolation. Many of these people are entertainers after all and it’s unlikely that they attach the degree of importance to strict accuracy in these matters that scholars do. At least one interviewee has admitted to simply inventing their stories to entertain convention audiences and there are others who, without naming names, are clearly telling tall tales because that’s what people enjoy hearing.
Frustratingly, sometimes inaccurate anecdotal evidence becomes accepted as proven fact and later reproduced as such. I’ve written about this phenomenon in detail in relation to a non-Doctor Who production elsewhere. Research into Doctor Who, and many other subjects, requires both anecdotal evidence and the drier facts of contemporaneous written records, if we are to strive for accuracy.
The history of Doctor Who was traditionally written based primarily on anecdotal evidence and consequently included much that it is now suspect. In the 1990s fans started to be able to access the BBC’s internal records and new, more accurate histories began to be written. Anecdote still has a role to play in these, plugging gaps in documentation (of which there are many) and enhancing the dry facts of the paperwork. Conversely, as this article will illustrate, the reverse can also happen, with paper records filling gaps in anecdotal evidence to make a complete picture.
I’ve recently been reading about the production of The Daleks, and I was particularly interested in the origins of the octopus-like swamp monster seen in the story’s fifth episode, ‘The Expedition’. My research included reading many interviews given by those who had worked on the story. One of these people was designer Ray Cusick, who surely needs no further introduction here. Cusick died in 2013 but, happily, he had given many interviews about his work on Doctor Who.
We begin with one of his later interviews. He spoke to Paul Winter for an article published in the January 2006 issue (#334) of Celestial Toyroom, the fanzine of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society (DWAS). Recalling his work on The Daleks, he explained how the swamp monster came to appear as it did:
“I remember an episode of ‘The Daleks’ where one of the Thals had to go to a swamp to collect some water. The script called for two lights to be seen over the tops of some trees, representing the eyes of a dinosaur or something similar. Well, this was a problem. The back cloth was only 12 feet high! I explained to the director that if we tried to do that we would end up showing the audience the studio lights in the ceiling. So, instead of that I did a simple trick with the swamp using a bed ring. The water was only about 4 or 5 inches deep and covered with a dry ice effect but it was very effective. So we inflated the bed ring within the water and made it look as though the monster was coming out of the swamp instead of from above the trees.”
Notably, Cusick recalls the sequence involving a Thal collecting water, whereas it’s actually Ian washing his face when the swamp monster appears. It’s a minor detail but indicates his recall is not perfect (nor could we expect it to be after more than 40 years). However, later the same episode a Thal does go to collect water and encounters an unseen creature which, accompanied by a whirlpool effect, drags him under the water. Cusick appears to have conflated parts of both scenes in his memory.
Now we step back to 1977, when Cusick was interviewed by Jan Vincent-Rudzki and Steven Payne for TARDIS (volume 2, number 3), another fanzine of the DWAS. Here we do not get the anecdote in Cusick’s own words but instead it is mediated by the writers:
“[T]he script called for Ian to look up from the edge of the swamp to see two eyes staring down at him from 40 feet. Something like this would have been too difficult and expensive to build, so Mr. Cusick suggested an animal coming out of the swamp, a kind of slimy octopus.”
The article goes on to describe how this was achieved, much as we’ve already heard. In this instance, Cusick correctly refers to Ian at the edge of the water, although as this part of the interview is paraphrased we can’t be sure that this detail wasn’t added by the writers rather than recalled by Cusick. This sort of editorialising is another way the usefulness of anecdote can be compromised, muddying it with another person’s view of what is correct.
To understand what was actually requested for this monster we need to turn to the original draft script (or second draft script), which is what the design team would have worked from. Unfortunately, as far as I can make out, nobody in fandom has these scripts and they may not even exist. We do, however, have the camera script, i.e. what is supposed to be the final version, to be used in the actual recording. This has the party of Thals and Barbara hearing a “terrible screaming roar very near at hand”. Ian, at the swamp edge, pulls his head out of the water “in terror.” The roar is repeated. Ian looked into the water and sees “two huge malevolent eyes, staring up.” He runs back to the others and tells Barbara about these eyes which, he says, “seemed to light up”.
The final programme follows this closely, only substituting the monster rising from the swamp (which does indeed have eyes that light up) for the eyes beneath the water, and Ian is interrupted before he can report what he saw.
There’s no suggestion in the script of a towering monster as Cusick recalled. Although we don’t have the draft script, Nation did previously provide a rough storyline and then a more detailed one. The latter is not known to exist but the former does. This makes no reference to any towering dinosaur-like creatures, stating of the swamp sequence: “The terrible sounds of the marine creatures, Leeches like octopuses that seem to lurk in every pool.” That seems pretty consistent with what we get on screen.
So, was Cusick misremembering being asked to provide a towering, dinosaur-like monster behind the trees? Actually, no, not as such, his anecdote is merely slightly incomplete and inexactly phrased, leading to us (well, me at least) misunderstanding it. A final entry in the evidence file helps fill in the gaps…
The BBC Written Archive Centre retains many documents from the production of Doctor Who. The earliest ‘general’ file for the series also contains many story-specific documents, including a detailed, but undated, breakdown of design and special effects requirements for The Daleks. This document describes the swamp, concluding: “In this set there is also a place where one of the Principals tries to wash in the lake. He looks up and sees two enormous eyes staring down at him, of some monster from the lake itself.”
Now the penny drops. By putting these documents and Cusick’s recollection together we can come to a more accurate understanding of what actually happened. The first interview reported above had Cusick referring to changing the monster so it was “coming out of the swamp instead of from above the trees”; the second stated that “Cusick suggested an animal coming out of the swamp…” It is these phrases specifically which implied the towering monster wasn’t originally in the swamp itself, the inference being that it must therefore have been on land amongst the trees at the edge of the swamp. This inference was wrong.
This is the only detail Cusick got wrong, and even then his meaning is ambiguous, particularly as the second example is paraphrased by his interviewers. The new document makes clear the monster was supposed to tower over Ian, but from within the swamp itself, not from the land. Presumably this is what the now-inaccessible draft script had requested.
We can also deduce that Cusick’s reference to the monster’s appearance over trees was because the body of the creature had to be shrouded if only its eyes were to be visible, and the only way that could have been done was to place some swamp vegetation between the monster and the camera’s viewpoint.
Presumably Nation’s intention had been to suggest a long-necked creature, akin to the plesiosaur (broadly as seen later in Carnival of Monsters), hence Cusick’s reference to a dinosaur-type creature, or traditional depictions of the fabled Loch Ness Monster, looming up out of the water. Nation* later created the aquatic Horrorkon and Terrorkon monsters for Dalek spin-off comics, which were essentially two-headed versions of the same thing and are probably suggestive of the image he had in his head for the swamp monster. Nation finally succeeding in having a creature emerge from water to tower over its victim in the location sequences in Death to the Daleks featuring the ‘root’ monster.
With the benefit of both Cusick’s recollections and the paperwork, we can now imagine how the monster went from the towering creature as originally written to what we see in the episode. Cusick’s objections to the achievability of such an effect, broadly as he described, probably resulted in the scene being rewritten initially to feature underwater eyes as we see in the camera script before this too was found to be impractical.
Underwater filming was an impossibility for Doctor Who at this time and, when shot from above the water, any submerged lights may have been indistinct, or the shot would have revealed how shallow the water really was. There are probably dozens of reasons that a shot through water would have been tricky to achieve effectively, and it’s notable that the film version of the story doesn’t attempt it either, although it does have Ian react to “a great big thing” beneath the water (the film’s comic book adaptation does show a pair of eyes, suggesting this had been the intention of the script but was changed late in the day, as on the TV original).
This led to Cusick taking forward his inflating octopus design instead of either of the ideas written into the scripts, and with the passage of time he presumably forgot about the rejected interim underwater eyes variant.
Considering both the anecdotal evidence and the written records together has enabled us to come to what I think is an accurate understanding of how the swamp monster came to look as it does. The anecdote alone, whilst largely accurate, gives only half the story and leaves out enough detail that it was possible to infer an inaccurate account.
Returning to Cusick, in another interview with Celestial Toyroom (#290) he was asked about the veracity of a detail of Dalek design given in the book The Doctor Who Technical Manual. Cusick responded: “No, he [the author] just made it up! They make up lots of things about Doctor Who. It’s like you, you ask people questions, and they think up an answer if there isn’t one.”
Cusick neatly underlines my early point about the (un)reliability of anecdotal evidence. But in this case at least, he’s in the clear.
Images © BBC and TV Century 21/Rebellion for the comic strip panels
Thanks to David Brunt and Andrew Pixley
*The spin-offs referred to (1964’s The Dalek Book and The Daleks comic strip which ran in TV Century 21 comic between 1965 and 1967) were at least co-authored (possibly largely written) by series story editor David Whitaker, but he had worked closely with Nation on The Daleks so the exact division of labour is moot.
Sources
Interviews with Ray Cusick in Celestial Toyroom issues 290 (2001/02) and 334 (2006), and TARDIS volume 2, number 3 (1977).
The Daleks episode 5, ‘The Expedition’, camera script.
BBC Written Archive Centre’s Doctor Who file ‘General A’, T5-648-1.
Dr. Who & The Daleks comic book by Dell Publishing Co (1966).