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DE-MON-STRATE! How a DALEK SAVED AUSTRALIA from a Dr Who drought in 1977

You can make a difference, with Daleks

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.

Daleks in Australia

“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!

Daleks in Australia

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 magazine

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.

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