On Necros, Davros is posing as the Great Healer of Tranquil Repose, where dying patients sleep in suspended animation. He is allied with Kara, whose company produces a food concentrate which has eliminated famine in the galaxy. But Davros has become extortionate in his demands, prompting Kara to send the disgraced knight Orcini to assassinate him. Meanwhile, the Doctor and Peri arrive on Necros to attend the funeral of an old friend, Arthur Stengos. Also present is Stengos' daughter, Natasha, who discovers that her father has become a victim of Davros' experiments to create a new race of Daleks...

For Doctor Who's twenty-second season, producer John Nathan-Turner and script editor Eric Saward decided to place a significant emphasis on the return of elements from the past. Patrick Troughton had accepted an invitation to return as the Second Doctor -- ultimately in The Two Doctors, which would also bring back the Sontarans -- and it was agreed that the Master would reappear in The Mark Of The Rani. To start and end the year with a bang, the production team decided to lead off with the Cybermen -- prompting the development of Attack Of The Cybermen -- and wrap up the season by pitting the Sixth Doctor against the Daleks for the first time. Saward had already written for the Doctor's oldest foes in the previous year's Resurrection Of The Daleks, and it was agreed that he would tackle their latest appearance as well.

Saward was commissioned to write a storyline called “The End Of The Road” on March 27th, 1984. The BBC did not generally permit a script editor to write for his own programme, so it was agreed that Saward would compose his Dalek story while on holiday between contracts. An early idea had been to depict the Daleks working with or against another monster, but this was made difficult when Dalek creator Terry Nation imposed a number of conditions on such a pairing. Instead, Saward decided to draw upon Evelyn Waugh's 1948 satire The Loved One: An Anglo-American Tragedy, which was set in the Los Angeles funeral trade. He was entranced by the idea of a story which ruminated upon the treatment of the dead by the living.

Eric Saward's holiday on Rhodes influenced the scripts in several respects

On July 13th, shortly before Saward began his vacation, the scripts for “The End Of The Road” were commissioned. Part of his holiday was then spent on the Greek island of Rhodes, which influenced the development of the scripts in several respects. Most notably, Orcini was inspired by the Knights Hospitaller who had occupied the island in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Several names were also derived from Saward's time in Rhodes. Tasambeker came from Tsambika, a monastery where barren women prayed in the hope of conceiving a child. Kara was suggested by a local potato called the cara. The planet Necros itself was derived from the Greek word nekros meaning “corpse”.

Other names were adapted from The Loved One. Mr Jobel was taken from Waugh's odious mortician, Mr Joyboy. Vogel was a porter in the novel, while Bostock was a reference to the unpleasant Mrs Komstock and her son. Arthur Stengos was partly influenced by cosmetician Aimée Thanatogenos, although Saward had also met a ferry boat owner called Stengos in Rhodes. On the other hand, Natasha was named for Saward's eldest daughter.

The inclusion of the DJ was inspired by a very bored late-night disc jockey Saward heard on his car radio. The DJ's attempts to destroy the Daleks using beams of focussed sound represented Saward's efforts to improve upon a similar scene in his first Doctor Who script, 1982's The Visitation. The Doctor wore a cloak throughout the narrative partly because Saward wanted to obscure the Time Lord's intentionally tacky costume, which he felt to have been poorly conceived by Nathan-Turner. The colour of mourning on Necros was originally white, before eventually being changed to blue. Most Dalek stories since the mid-Sixties had followed a common title convention and “The End Of The Road” was duly rechristened Revelation Of The Daleks in late 1984. By referencing the apocalyptic final book of the Bible, it echoed similar allusions in the titles of both Resurrection Of The Daleks and 1975's Genesis Of The Daleks.

Directing Revelation Of The Daleks would be Graeme Harper, who had last worked on Peter Davison's swansong, The Caves Of Androzani, the year before. For the first time, an actor would reprise the role of Davros: Terry Molloy had also played the part in Resurrection Of The Daleks, whereas the character had been portrayed by Michael Wisher and then David Gooderson in his first two appearances. One casting conundrum for Harper was the DJ. There was some hope that a well-known name from the music industry might be attracted to Doctor Who, with an initial approach made to Roger Daltrey, lead singer of The Who. In the end, the part went to well-known comedian Alexei Sayle -- who had recently published an article explaining why he should be cast as the Doctor! More bizarrely, Nathan-Turner offered the role of the Mutant to seventy-five-year-old stage legend Sir Laurence Olivier; the producer would later deny that this had been entirely serious.

Visual effects designer John Brace was able to negotiate a deal to co-finance four new Daleks

No complete Dalek casings had been constructed for Doctor Who since 1973's Planet Of The Daleks, and even those had been lower-quality “goon” Daleks. Of these, one top section and one bottom section survived. Apart from a skirt section made for exhibitions, the remainder of the BBC's complement of four Daleks consisted of parts originally fabricated back in the Sixties. For Revelation Of The Daleks, they were given a grey-and-black livery to serve as the Supreme Dalek's forces. Fortunately, visual effects designer John Brace was able to negotiate a deal with BBC Enterprises, the Corporation's commercial wing, to co-finance four new Daleks. Constructed by the BBC Visual Effects Department, they would appear in Revelation Of The Daleks wearing the white-and-gold scheme of the Necros Daleks, after which BBC Enterprises would have use of them for promotional engagements. The glass Dalek, meanwhile, was actually constructed out of perspex. It was the realisation of a concept Nation had proposed when writing The Daleks back in 1963. At the time, the idea had been abandoned due to the prohibitive cost of building such a prop.

Filming for Revelation Of The Daleks began with three days in Hampshire, which represented the first work on Doctor Who in 1985. On January 7th, the TARDIS materialised near a pond at Bollinge Hill Farm in Buriton. Unfortunately, cold temperatures and a significant snowfall hampered efforts to reach the location, and tractors had to be hired to assist Harper's team. The last part of the day and all of January 8th were spent at the Queen Elizabeth Country Park in Horndean, for the material culminating in the Mutant's attack on the Doctor and Peri. Harper had to abandon plans to record a sequence in which Orcini and Bostock destroyed two flying Daleks: the deep snow meant that the equipment needed to launch the Daleks could not reach Butser Hill, deep within the park. On January 9th, the IBM North Harbour Building in Portsmouth offered a venue suitable for the Garden of Fond Memories. IBM donated its fee to a school in Cosham, which Colin Baker visited to present the cheque to the headmaster.

The last location day was January 10th, with Harper's team shifting to West Sussex. First, material at the long wall encircling Tranquil Repose was filmed on the Goodwood Estate in Halnaker. Cast and crew then travelled to the former RAF Tangmere. Harper's first order of business was to stage a new version of the sequence which he had been unable to capture at Butser Hill. Orcini and Bostock now confronted a single Dalek, who was no longer airborne. Also taped at Tangmere was the footage of the Doctor and Peri approaching the Garden of Fond Memories.

Studio recording for Revelation Of The Daleks began with a two-day session spanning January 17th and 18th at BBC Television Centre Studio 1 in White City, London. Both days dealt with material in the reception area and the new catacombs. Harper also taped all of the scenes in the DJ's studio on the first day, and those in Natasha and Grigory's cell on the second day.

Cast and crew then moved to TC8 for the second block, from January 30th to February 1st. All three days featured recording on the sets for the old catacombs and Davros' laboratory. Sequences in the incubator room were completed on the initial day of the session, followed by those in Kara's office on the middle day. On the final day of production for Season Twenty-Two, Harper opted to reshoot some of the material involving Natasha and Grigory in both the cell and the new catacombs.

After viewing a working print of the serial, Jonathan Powell, the BBC's Head of Series and Serials, strongly criticised Jenny Tomasin's portrayal of Tasambeker. As such, both episodes were edited to reduce Tomasin's screen time. Meanwhile, Season Twenty-Two had now begun transmission, with Attack Of The Cybermen Episode One scoring Doctor Who's best ratings since the end of the nineteenth season in 1982. Buoyed by this success, Nathan-Turner and Saward had already begun readying scripts for Season Twenty-Three. Indeed, the Doctor's closing line in Revelation Of The Daleks saw him promise Peri that he would take her to Blackpool -- the setting for 1986's intended debut serial, “The Nightmare Fair”, by former producer Graham Williams.

Jonathan Powell confirmed that the start of production on Season 23 was being deferred from Spring 1985 to Spring 1986

However, the first sign that something was very wrong came on February 21st. Both Robert Holmes -- who was writing “Yellow Fever And How To Cure It” for Season Twenty-Three -- and fan adviser Ian Levine alerted the production team that they had heard rumours that Doctor Who was being cancelled. On February 25th, after returning from a convention in the United States, Nathan-Turner learned the truth from Powell: Doctor Who was not being cancelled, but Season Twenty-Three was being postponed, with the start of production deferred from Spring 1985 to Spring 1986. The news was leaked by the press the next day.

During the weeks that followed, the Controller of Programmes for BBC One, Michael Grade, would offer a number of reasons for the hiatus, all of which likely played a role in the BBC's decision. After a promising start, the ratings for Season Twenty-Two had dwindled to the lowest levels since Tom Baker's final year as the Fourth Doctor in 1980. Doctor Who had been criticised in some quarters for being too violent and humourless. But probably most relevantly, the BBC was facing a financial shortfall in early 1985, as the organisation tried to fund the premiere of its expensive new soap opera EastEnders and the debut of its Daytime News Service. On top of this, Powell vocally disliked Doctor Who, while Grade was dismissive of science-fiction as a whole; this meant that the programme lacked a champion at the top of the BBC hierarchy.

Fan campaigns to save Doctor Who were quickly under way, soon joined by various media outlets. Levine even co-wrote a charity single called Doctor In Distress to protest the decision, with Baker and Nicola Bryant amongst the vocalists. Indeed, Powell would later confess that the ferocity of the public response precluded any possibility of the BBC using the hiatus as a pretext for cancelling Doctor Who. On March 1st, BBC Television Managing Director Bill Cotton took the unusual step of telephoning David Saunders, Coordinator of the Doctor Who Appreciation Society, to confirm that the programme would be back on television in the autumn of 1986. As was reiterated in a formal press release the same day, when Doctor Who returned it would revert to twenty-five-minute episodes instead of the forty-five-minute duration which had been introduced for Season Twenty-Two -- a decision made in part, Cotton claimed, to ensure a larger footprint in the BBC schedule.

Revelation Of The Daleks Episode Two aired on March 30th, bringing Season Twenty-Two to an abrupt conclusion: the final scene had now been edited to end on a freeze-frame, just before the Doctor uttered the word “Blackpool”. This was also the only installment of Season Twenty-Two to be followed by a programme other than Jim'll Fix It, which had ended its run the week before. Instead, the Doctor Who finale led into the eighth-season premiere of the sitcom Terry And June. The following week, The New Adventures Of Wonder Woman -- a repackaging of the late-Seventies Lynda Carter series -- took over Doctor Who's timeslot.

The scripts for Season 23 would have to be heavily reworked for the 25-minute format

By now, it was obvious that the scripts in development for Season Twenty-Three would, at the very least, have to be heavily reworked for the twenty-five-minute format, but Nathan-Turner and Saward hoped that much of their plans could still be salvaged. Both men were unhappy with the abandonment of the forty-five-minute episodes, to which they were confident they would have been able to better adapt with a year of experience under their belts.

Soon, however, the production team's designs were dealt another blow when it was learned that the thirteen forty-five-minute episodes originally planned for Season Twenty-Three would not, in fact, be replaced by twenty-six twenty-five-minute installments. This possibility was first mooted amongst fans at a convention on April 6th, when Levine announced that he had been told that the BBC would be cutting the order to just twenty episodes. Nathan-Turner refuted this claim but, during May, Powell informed him that the situation was, in fact, much worse: Season Twenty-Three would run to just fourteen episodes. With less than six hours of total screen time, it would be the shortest by far in the history of Doctor Who.

It was now clear to Nathan-Turner and Saward that an entirely new approach for the post-hiatus season was required. They jettisoned the original scripts -- although some thought was given to retaining Holmes' “Yellow Fever And How To Cure It” -- and began to develop an entirely new concept which would link the fourteen episodes together. Much as Doctor Who was on trial within the BBC, so too would the Doctor be put on trial by his own people...

• Dalek 63·88, edited by Jon Green and Gavin Rymill.
• Doctor Who Magazine #188, 8th July 1992, “Archive: Revelation Of The Daleks” by Andrew Pixley, Marvel Comics UK Ltd.
• Doctor Who Magazine Special Edition #3, 22nd January 2003, “Everything Must Change” by Andrew Pixley, Panini Publishing Ltd.
• Doctor Who: The Complete History #41, 2018, “Story 142: Revelation Of The Daleks”, edited by John Ainsworth, Hachette Partworks Ltd.
• Doctor Who: The Eighties by David J Howe, Mark Stammers and Stephen James Walker (1996), Virgin Publishing.
• Doctor Who: The Handbook: The Sixth Doctor by David J Howe, Mark Stammers and Stephen James Walker (1993), Virgin Publishing.
• In·Vision #84, May 1999, “Production” edited by Anthony Brown, Cybermark Services.