In 2012, the foremost collector of alien artefacts is the wealthy Henry van Statten. The TARDIS is drawn to his underground museum in Utah by a distress call from van Statten's latest acquisition. He has dubbed it a “Metaltron”, but the Doctor is horrified to recognise it as a Dalek. The creature is badly damaged and virtually powerless, but it is inadvertently freed by Rose and Adam Mitchell, one of van Statten's brilliant young researchers. As the reinvigorated Dalek rampages through van Statten's compound, Rose begins to uncover the awful truth behind the Doctor's hatred of his enemy.

The Daleks were Doctor Who's most iconic monster, having originally ignited the programme's popularity when they were introduced in its second serial back in 1963. As such, when Russell T Davies reached an agreement with the BBC to revive Doctor Who in September 2003, Controller of Drama Commissioning Jane Tranter assumed that the Daleks would feature prominently in the premiere episode. She was surprised to learn that Davies had other plans: he felt that the inclusion of the Daleks would overwhelm the show's debut, and he instead chose to pit the Doctor against the Nestene Consciousness and its Auton servitors. His inclination was to save the Daleks until the middle of the season, when they could provide a publicity boost -- or even an opportunity to relaunch the programme, if ratings had not fared well to date.

Davies wanted to reintroduce the Daleks without the continuity baggage that had accompanied their latter appearances during the Seventies and Eighties. He was keen to focus on the aspects that made the monsters popular, while subverting the elements which had become a source of mockery over the years, such as their toilet plunger arm and apparent inability to navigate stairs. Davies had also begun to envisage a backstory for the revived series in which the Daleks were responsible for the destruction of the Time Lords, and their first appearance was an obvious opportunity to hint at these developments. Davies thought that it would be effective to initially confront the Doctor with an isolated Dalek, setting the stage for the Daleks' return in force later in the season.

Adam would illustrate that not everybody possessed the temperament to become the Doctor's companion

Earlier in 2003, Big Finish Productions had released a Sixth Doctor audio drama called Jubilee which boasted a similar narrative: a lone Dalek, held captive on Earth for decades, who nonetheless managed to pose a grave threat. Davies had been very impressed with Jubilee, and used it as inspiration for an adventure he referred to as “Return Of The Daleks” in his pitch document of December 8th. Eschewing the audio play's setting of an alternate-universe Britain, Davies set the story in 2010 Utah; he facetiously gave the Dalek's captor the name “Will Fences” in joking allusion to Microsoft founder Bill Gates. Davies also introduced a “whizzkid” named Adam, who would join the TARDIS crew at the story's conclusion after Rose developed a crush on him. Adam would be used to illustrate to the audience that not everybody possessed the temperament to become the Doctor's companion.

Of the thirteen episodes which would comprise Season Twenty-Seven, the Dalek adventure was one of six which Davies did not intend to write himself. Instead he turned to Robert Shearman, an award-winning playwright who also happened to be the author of Jubilee. He was commissioned in November, and began writing his Doctor Who script in February 2004 under the title “Creature Of Lies”, which would be the sixth episode of Season Twenty-Seven. The setting was shifted forward slightly to 2014.

Shearman's first draft gave the “Will Fences” character the name Henry Duchesne. His wife, Eleanor, featured prominently and Adam was their son. The Dalek had the ability to infect humans and turn them into its agents; this was not only Henry's fate, but also that of several of his employees. The latter included Simmons and Elder, who were named after Jubilee actors Kai Simmons and Steven Elder. Rose reinvigorated the Dalek by reaching into the casing and touching the mutant housed therein. Its gun then gained sentience and broke free from the museum, eventually compelling Elder to reattach it to the Dalek casing. The episode ended with the escape of Richards, one of the infected staffmembers. Shearman envisaged the Doctor's confrontation with the Dalek in its cell as being akin to the scenes between FBI agent Clarice Starling and cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter in the 1991 film The Silence Of The Lambs. He struggled to make the rapport between Rose and Adam work effectively, until Davies suggested that he portray Adam as sharing some key characteristics with the Doctor.

The Dalek's sentient gun was the first element to be dropped

The initial draft of “Creature Of Lies” was deemed to have too many competing elements, and the sentient gun was the first to be dropped. Instead, Shearman and Davies agreed that more use should be made of the various components of the Dalek casing, such as the balls around the skirt section being explosive devices. Goddard was introduced as Eleanor's secretary; she was named after Shearman's wife, actress Jane Goddard. Also added to the script were guards called Bywater and Briggs: Shearman had edited the Doctor Who fanzine Cloister Bell with Owen Bywater in the early Eighties, while Nicholas Briggs was the regular voice of the Daleks for Big Finish.

The third draft of “Creature Of Lies” made significant changes, including the elimination of the Dalek-controlled humans. The compound now belonged to Hiram C Duschesne, whose trophy wife Mary-Beth was secretly planning to divorce him and run off with their lawyer, Fewell. Goddard no longer appeared, and Adam was Duschesne's employee rather than his son. Rose only touched the Dalek on its casing, since Shearman's original version was felt to have been too horrific. Instead, the first sight of the Dalek mutant was held back until the episode's climax. The Dalek's ability to levitate was initially going to be revealed when Rose tried to escape it in a lift. However, elevator sequences already appeared in Davies' scripts for both episode one, Rose, and episode five, World War Three, so the set piece was revised to take place on a set of stairs. By mid-June, the billionaire had become Henry Vanstatten, reusing a name which had appeared in Davies' Mine All Mine. Shearman's fourth draft eliminated the wife and lawyer characters altogether.

Meanwhile, concept designer Matthew Savage had begun redesigning the Daleks. Davies indicated that he should avoid deviating too much from their twentieth-century appearance, with the major change being a new emphasis on the sturdiness and solidity of the Dalek casing. To accentuate the notion that the Dalek was an armoured creature, a variety of metallic finishes were considered for the casing, although the bronze effect finally selected had been Davies' preference all along.

Unfortunately, it was precisely this process of redesign which threatened to cripple Davies' and Shearman's plans. The BBC did not own the concept of the Daleks outright; they had been created by freelance writer Terry Nation and, although Nation had died in 1997, his estate retained authority over the use of the Daleks. Months of negotiations with agent Tim Hancock had culminated in his demand for a degree of creative control over the Dalek design which was greater than the BBC was prepared to relinquish. Hancock also complained that the BBC had been permitting the use of the Daleks in various productions -- including a cameo appearance in the 2003 feature film Looney Tunes: Back In Action -- without his consent. As a result, on June 30th, it was announced that the Daleks would not be appearing in the revived Doctor Who series.

The Dalek would be replaced with the Sphere, a new monster which Russell T Davies had been developing

With little alternative and time running short, it was suggested that Shearman should revise “Creature Of Lies” to replace the Dalek with a new monster which Davies had been developing. A deadly floating orb known as the Sphere, it would have its origins at the far end of time, and would eventually be revealed to contain humanity's final evolutionary form. Davies had intended the Spheres to feature prominently in a later season of Doctor Who, should the programme continue beyond Season Twenty-Seven, but he now decided that they would supplant the Daleks in both Shearman's script and the 2005 finale. Davies and Shearman decided that the Sphere would have the personality of a sadistic child, which was how Shearman had been approaching the Dalek in the first place.

By July 6th, the production team was referring to episode six as “The Sphere” while Shearman began a sixth draft of his script under the tongue-in-cheek title “Absence Of The Daleks”. Since he would no longer be able to rely on his monster's star power, Shearman placed a renewed emphasis on the human characters. Vanstatten was now more overtly villainous, torturing the Doctor and planning to add him to the museum's collection; he was later killed by the Sphere. While the frenzied rewriting was taking place, however, executive producer Julie Gardner kept an open line of dialogue with Hancock and, on August 4th, it was revealed that an agreement for the use of the Daleks had been reached. Shearman blended his last two drafts -- having concluded that the temporary loss of the Dalek had helped make his script stronger overall -- while Davies returned to his original plan, with the Spheres eventually becoming the Toclafane of 2007's The Sound Of Drums / Last Of The Time Lords.

Shearman's script would continue to undergo minor modifications. The date was moved back to 2012, Henry's surname was amended from Vanstatten to van Statten, and a character called Gunther was renamed Goddard. Gardner requested the inclusion of a Cyberman helmet in the story's opening scene. Fellow executive producer Mal Young asked Davies to address the level of coincidence implied by the TARDIS randomly arriving at the location of the Dalek's imprisonment, prompting the addition of the distress signal. Davies also inserted the identification of van Statten's helicopter as “Bad Wolf One” to tie into the Bad Wolf story arc which was running throughout Season Twenty-Seven. By October, the script had become known as Dalek at Gardner's suggestion.

Dalek was originally grouped with episode seven, The Long Game, and episode eight, Father's Day, as Block Three of the season's production schedule under director Joe Ahearne. At an early stage, however, it was decided to defer The Long Game due to its substantial special effects requirements. To play the new companion -- now called Adam Mitchell -- casting director Andy Pryor suggested Bruno Langley, who was just wrapping up a multi-year stint on the soap opera Coronation Street. He had previously been cast by Pryor in Linda Green. The press reported Langley's involvement in Doctor Who on October 7th.

Russell T Davies wanted to return to the original Sixties shape of the Dalek casings

The task of fabricating the new Dalek fell to Mike Tucker of the BBC Model Unit; he had previously been a visual effects assistant on Remembrance Of The Daleks in 1988. The mould used to construct Daleks for 1985's Revelation Of The Daleks was still available, but Davies wanted to return to the original Sixties shape of the casings. As such, Tucker contacted longtime fan Andrew Beech, who owned two Daleks which had been built in a similar style. Beech's Daleks were used to prepare a new mould, from which Tucker's team made two skirt sections (one pristine, one damaged) and two upper sections (one opened, one closed). The height of the revamped Dalek was chosen, in part, so that it would be roughly as tall as Billie Piper.

Some thought had been given to making the new Dalek entirely remote-controlled, but it was finally agreed that this would be limited to the dome. The casing would otherwise be operated by a person seated inside, as with the twentieth-century Daleks. For Dalek, this would be actor and artist Barnaby Edwards, who had appeared in a number of Doctor Who audio dramas for Big Finish. Although the character named for him had been dropped during the script's development, Nicholas Briggs was hired to provide the Dalek's voice. Having established his expertise on Big Finish's audio plays, Briggs decided to model his approach on Peter Hawkins, one of the original Dalek voice artistes.

Production on Dalek began on October 25th, with an unused area of the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff dressed as van Statten's exhibit room. Focus then shifted to the major location for the episode: Cardiff's Millennium Stadium, where most of the compound's interiors were filmed. Work there took place from October 26th to November 3rd, breaking only on Hallowe'en. The appearance of a “Jubilee” pizza box on the first day was another allusion to the story's source material. The remainder of Dalek was completed in the studio at Unit Q2 in Newport. Ahearne's team started filming there on November 4th with scenes in the lift, which had originally been intended for a location shoot at Quantum Electronics in Newport. The day ended with some of the material in van Statten's office, and this work continued on November 5th and 8th. This left sequences in Adam's workshop to be recorded on the 23rd, alongside a close-up of Rose at the bulkhead. Various inserts for Dalek were completed on November 26th.

• Doctor Who Magazine Special Edition #11, 31st August 2005, “Fact File: Dalek” by Andrew Pixley, Panini Publishing Ltd.
• Doctor Who: The Complete History #49, 2017, “Story 161: Dalek”, edited by John Ainsworth, Hachette Partworks Ltd.
• Doctor Who: The Inside Story by Gary Russell (2006), BBC Books.