Doctor Who: 5 Best & 5 Worst Creature Designs From The Original Series

Best Creature no. 1: The Daleks

I don't think there's any question when it comes to Doctor Who's most impressive foes. Okay, so a pepper pot wielding an egg whisk and a sink-plunger probably isn't the most frightening thing you've ever seen, but that's probably more due to their overuse of late. I'm sure most people you ask will tell you of how they used to hide behind the sofa as a kid whenever the Daleks came on, and whilst that's not so true now (let's face it, the multicoloured Daleks from Series 5 were more pretty than menacing) they're still one of the most easily recognisable villains. Back in the 60s the first appearance of a Dalek sparked off a great surge of public interest, with a noticeable rise in viewing figures whenever an episode featured them. They'd become an instant hit, and with it the show. If it hadn't been for the Daleks (as well as Terry Nation's script and the inventive designing of Ray Cusick) it's fair to say that Doctor Who wouldn't have survived. Without them it was an innovative new show produced by a group of talented, hardworking people, but with the appearance of the Daleks it became a cultural phenomenon, as it still is today. Even now you can buy Dalek beachtowels and Christmas tree decorations, and it's no coincidence that they're the number one most-recurring bad guy, clocking up over thirty appearances to date (including the new series). They're also the only monsters (as far as I know) to be defined in the Oxford English dictionary, as "a member of a race of hostile alien machine-organisms"- which isn't bad going, really. I hope they're rested from the series for a little while, but I'm all for seeing them in the new docudrama "An Adventure in Space and Time" coming out later this year which chronicles the genesis of Doctor Who. Okay, so they're the Doctor's greatest enemy and were responsible for the massacre of the Time Lords during the Time War, but they've stood the test of time and have done incredibly well for an alien that is inferior in height to most humanoid species (unless you count the most recent adaptation) and are definitely the universe's most persistent baddie, even if they've failed to kill the Doctor every time so far. They've worked so hard to secure Doctor Who as a part of British history that to not have awarded them first place would have been something of an injustice. And I think they'd send me death threats if I didn't.

So there you have it: my five best and five worst Doctor Who creatures. Would you have rated the same monsters that I did, or is your list totally different? Feel free to discuss in the comments below!