2. There Were No Daleks
Ill most probably get flayed alive for saying this but here it goes: without the Daleks, Doctor Who would probably have flopped. Or at most had a very short life and become a piece of largely forgotten 1960s ephemera like Jukebox Jury and Four Feather Falls. Initially, the mandate for Doctor Who was No bug-eyed monsters in an attempt to keep the tone up. Verity Lambert (the programmes first producer) took a gamble with the Daleks and it paid off enormously, cementing both their popularity and that of Doctor Who. The Daleks were a ratings and merchandising juggernaut in their own right and by being the programme that featured them, Doctor Whos popularity took off like a rocket, enabling it to build its own reputation on the back of the boost that the Daleks gave it. If Verity Lambert hadnt taken that chance and BBC producer Sydney Newmans decision to steer the series away from aliens and snarling monsters had been kept, wed most likely think of Doctor Who as that weird kids show from the sixties about the old man in the police box while making crude jokes about him travelling with a fifteen year old girl.