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Everything I Need to Know I Learnt from the Daleks

TOBY FINCH

This week we're going back to the swinging Sixties to check out the adventures of those engines of extermination, the dreaded Daleks - as depicted in the late great 'TV21'.

I don't know whether you know this, but comics (or at least old British comics) have smells. Not merely the real smells of musty yellowing paper, but subtler metaphorical aromas that one apprehends purely through the mind's nose as it were. Thus the pages of the Eagle give forth a distinct nasal suggestion of Ovaltine and Vic's Vapour Rub, just as those of 2000AD carry the unmistakable stink of testosterone and engine oil.

But there was only one comic that reeked with the burnt-circuitry stench of the cathode ray tube, with perhaps just a dash of Irn Bru or Vimto. And that comic was TV21.

Ah, TV21! Before there was the videotape or even the audio tape recorder stuck next to the television speaker, it was only in this august publication that the telly-addicted tyke could get something more than his regularly scheduled weekly fix.

This went double for those stricken by the condition known as Dalekmania - a pandemic in the country at the time which afflicted male pre-teens just as surely as Beatlemania overcame their older sisters.

And so it was that the Daleks got their very own comic strip. Of course, I didn't read it during the first run (my only excuse being that I wasn't born at the time) but I caught up with it when it was reprinted in the Dalek annuals of the seventies. And I'm glad I did, for there was much to be gained from it. After all, just because the Daleks are a race of hyper-aggressive destructionist multi-genocidal imperial ultra-fascistic psychopaths doesn't mean that they're bad people.

Well alright, yes, actually it does - but that still doesn't mean that we have nothing to learn from them. And those things are as follows…

Make Use of What You've Got.

Firstly, the Daleks are nothing if not resourceful. Why, take the time they were invaded by the rather-obviously-named Monstrons and their rather-less-obviously named Engibrain robot servants for instance. With their city in ruins, things go from bad to worse for the Daleks when they are attacked by a giant electric eel. But do they despair? Never! They merely shoot the eel and then wire it up to the mains! Talk about a natural energy source - and it assures them their victory over their unimaginatively-monikered oppressors! Well, that and the fact that the Monstrons have rather incautiously landed their mothership in a live volcano…

Don't Panic

Now, you or I, were we to spy a rogue planet hurtling towards our homeworld might just worry a tiny little bit. Not so the Daleks, they don't worry a jot -not even when said planet ploughs right through a sun just to prove how tough it is. They merely redirect its course using a handy 'mag-ray ultimate' device they just happen to have lying about, and casually send it careening towards the planet of their latest punchbags, the Mechanoids - who are due a severe drubbing for the sheer bloody audacity of being neither Daleks nor dead.

Don't Worry About What Others Think of You

It cannot be denied that a Dalek, for all its lethality, is hardly a sensible-looking object. It's really not possible to get away with a sink-plunger arm, even if it is capable of enough suction to pull a house brick through a urethra. You'd think that this would make the Daleks sensitive to looking risible, but if anything it seems to goad them on to greater heights of silliness. Take, for example, their method for uncovering planets that have faced up to the challenge of the Dalek menace by valiantly hiding themselves behind invisibility fields; they build a gigantic space vibrator that just keeps banging away until it pops the planet's cherry, as it were. Maybe it's because a Dalek is incapable of a single entendre let alone a double that they feel secure in such behaviour. Or maybe it's simply because they know that sniggerers will be exterminated.

So there you have it. If we all lived by such easy, uncomplicated rules the world would enjoy a lot more peace.

After all; what's more peaceful than a graveyard?