Doctor Who @ 50 A small Australian boy's tricycle once made a massive contribution to a small antipodean slice of Doctor Who history.

The boy was named Geoffrey Dougherty and was lucky enough to have two trikes - an old and small vehicle and a new and larger ride. Big sister Kerrie and some friends from the University of Sydney planned to pinch the older machine to build and enter a Dalek in races to be staged at a 1976 science fiction convention. But Kerrie accidentally took the larger trike instead!

De-mon-strate! De-mon-strate!

“By the time we realised the mistake, it had already been built into the Dalek,” Dougherty recalls. How poor Geoffrey reacted to the loss of his trike is not recorded by history. But Kerrie Dougherty said the racing Dalek was made of plywood, with the carapace’s signature studs made from spherical money boxes given away for free by a local bank and sliced in half with a hot wire.

“Someone’s mum or dad worked for the bank and we got a box of them for free,” the one-time Dalek driver remembers.

Dougherty is now glad the larger trike was pinched: it was easier to pedal, which helped Sydney University beat Adelaide and Melbourne Unis in the test of speed and skill.

The Dalek made many more appearances around the University of Sydney, where the Science Fiction Association (SUSFA) wheeled it out on Open Day and similar occasions.

That Dalek races took place in Australia in the mid-1970s bespeaks the emergence of antipodean fandom. By 1977 the nascent community had a cause to rally around: the ABC (the Australian Broadcasting Commission as it was back then, Commission became Corporation in 1983) wasn’t screening new episodes of Doctor Who in a timely fashion.

The belly of the beast: ABC HQ, Sydney

Letters to the ABC protesting this state of affairs produced a devastating answer: the broadcaster had decided not to continue buying Doctor Who, so was uninterested in screening the episodes it already possessed.

Dallas Jones, also a SUSFA member in 1977, says the next course of action was obvious. Australia in 1977 was more radical than it is today. Massive anti-Vietnam war rallies had been a feature of the early 1970s, and the 1975 dismissal of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam by the Governor General, the British Monarch’s representative in Australia, had also seen hundreds of thousands gather in protest.

“A demonstration of some sort was the sort of thing that you would do at the time,” Jones told The Reg.

“The other reason to do something public was that we had a Dalek and we thought it would be good to take it onto the streets of Sydney. We were not that savvy but we thought if we turned up there might be publicity."

“We thought they might pay a bit of attention to us,” Kerrie Dougherty adds. “I’m not sure in our heart of hearts we thought we could make a difference, but with the enthusiasm of youth we felt we could be heard.”

Dougherty’s father had a trailer and enough time to bring the Dalek to town, so in August 1977 - the exact date is lost to time - between 15 and 20 Who fans arrived outside the ABC’s central Sydney headquarters, accompanied by the Dalek, waving placards and handing out pamphlets Jones had prepared to describe their grievances.

Victory of the Dalek

The Dalek’s driver called for the extermination of the ABC’s leader, and the small band made as much noise as possible to attract the attention of the lunchtime crowd.

Jones says the demo quickly drew attention from within the ABC, as staff craned their necks to figure out what was going on. A lone radio station – the ABC’s then-radical youth station 2JJ – interviewed the protestors.

“Are you sure you’re not Mary Whitehouse?“

Then came a scary moment.

“We all nearly wet ourselves when a very high-ranking police officer showed up,” Dougherty remembers. “We thought we were in real trouble. It turned out he was a big Doctor Who fan and wanted to see the Dalek!”

ABC staff eventually agreed to meet a delegation of two fans, Tony Smith - no relation to El Reg’s Features Editor, though he too is an ardent Whovian - and Dougherty, who says they enjoyed a polite but non-committal reception.

“They gave us the usual, ‘We are still looking at it, we have not made up our minds’,” she says.

Once the delegation returned the protest dispersed, partly because the demonstrators felt they’d achieved their goals and partly because Dougherty’s father needed his car elsewhere, which meant the Dalek had to catch its ride home.

And then nothing happened for several months ... until the arrival of news that they protestors had triumphed!

Bloody hoons

The ABC started to screen the episodes it had been sitting on and decided it would continue to buy new episodes of Doctor Who after all.

Dougherty and Jones don’t think the demo changed the then ABC bosses’ minds, both feeling that it was a change of management and budget that did the trick. Dougherty thinks the demonstration made it easier for ABC managers to change their minds by showing the existence of an eager audience for the programme.

Another outcome of the demonstration was the formation of the Doctor Who Club of Australia, which thrives to this day. ®

Bootnotes

Another early Sydney Doctor Who caper saw Dougherty and friends work on a fan film that, in true Australian style, saw Daleks invade Sydney to steal Australian beer because it had an enzyme they needed.

Data Extract: out of the ashes of the 1976 protest rose what would become the Doctor Who Club of Australia

“The basic idea was that we would have the Daleks roaming around Sydney,” Dougherty says. “We never got to the end but the idea was that the Daleks would store the beer inside Sydney Opera House and the grand finale would be the Opera House taking off with all the beers in it. We wanted the Daleks to win.”

Dougherty later became Curator of Space Technology at Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum, where she’s helped out on exhibitions for Star Trek, Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings.