THE DALEKS: IN COLOUR

BRINGING THE DALEKS: IN COLOUR TO LIFE

• SFX
• 24 Jan 2024
• WORDS: ROBBIE DUNLOP

Things aren’t so black and white on Skaro any more.

TO CELEBRATE 60 YEARS OF Doctor Who, the BBC not only gifted fans a brand-new Doctor in Ncuti Gatwa, but a brand-new way to experience the original: William Hartnell. The Daleks: In Colour, broadcast on BBC Four in November, marked the series’ very first official colourisation. The 1963 story has special significance, being the one that introduced the Doctor’s most notorious enemies, and this month it’s released on disc.

According to lead colourisation artist Rich Tipple, the idea came from Russell T Davies, whose plan upon returning to the show was to “put the entire back catalogue on iplayer and begin to colourise the archive”. Who executive producers Joel Collins and Phil Collinson sounded out Tipple in early 2022 after they saw some of his unofficial work on Youtube. He had the experience and the contacts to make a full-scale production happen.

The important first step was to assemble a team. Tipple approached Scott Burditt and Kieran Highman – his collaborators on an unreleased colourisation of an episode of 1965 story “The Daleks’ Master Plan” – and Timothy K Brown. Work began on the project in November 2022.

The Ordeal

So, just how did the four colourists set about regenerating, so to speak, 75 minutes of black and white telly? According to Highman it begins by breaking down each scene into its constituent frames (there are 24 frames in a second), with every fifth or so individually coloured “as if doing a painting on a computer”.

“And then,” Tipple picks up, “you tell some motion interpolation software, ‘This is frame one, this is frame five; crossfade between the two. This is frame five and frame 10; crossfade between the two.’ However, if the camera’s moving in or out, or there’s high motion, it’s going to fall flat on its face. You have to go in and fix it. It’s time-consuming.”

Highman stresses that none of the colour is automatically generated, being “painted into the key frames by the artist.” Early on in the process, Tipple allocated each team member a different location in the story which would be their responsibility to colourise. “That gave us consistency in those frames,” he explains.

Consequently, Brown oversaw the TARDIS control room scenes, Burditt the caves, Highman the jungle, and Tipple the Dalek city. “There’s a really lovely moment where Susan is in the TARDIS and when the doors open you see the jungle outside,” Tipple says. “Kieran did the jungle elements inside Tim’s set. Consistency, consistency, consistency was basically what we were looking for.”

The team referred to colour photos taken during filming to ensure a degree of continuity between the colours of original costumes and props. However, creative licence was strongly encouraged by the producers. “It was hammered into us very early on that we were not making a documentary of exactly what it looked like,” Tipple says. “This is, ‘What if Doctor Who had original Star Trek money to produce something in colour, on colour cameras? Obviously, they would have painted the sets differently, so how would they have looked?’

“But of course, you’re working with something that a lot of people care about and is television heritage. We were never going to change the colour of the balls on the Dalek skirt or make the TARDIS red.”

The TARDIS console threw up a problem all in itself. “Some people really passionately believe it should be green, and an equal number of people really passionately believe it should be white,” Tipple explains.

“Both of them have completely valid arguments,” he continues. “It just comes down to well, yeah, it was actually green” – that’s the colour it was painted to avoid causing flare on the cameras – “but it was intended to look white, so both opinions are valid.”

On that note, we have to talk about other debates. Had the team been prepared for the rowdy online discussion surrounding Barbara’s bright pink shirt? “It was totally inevitable,” Tipple laughs. “We knew Barbara had a pale blue top, but we also knew that Susan had a pale blue top. A lot of the city walls were pale blue, and the floor was blue.”

“And Ian had a blue shirt,” adds Highman. “The Doctor had a blue tie, the TARDIS is blue, and all the Thals were in blue.”

“We did six different versions of Barbara’s shirt,” says Tipple. “We looked at it in yellow and green; almost every colour that you can imagine. If people think we plucked pink out of the air, believe it or not, no, we put a huge amount of thought into it.

“The one that really spun it for us was when she’s up against the silver door being menaced by the plunger [at the end of episode one], you could have a more sympathetic colour against the silver than pink.

“However, when you’re in the cave and it’s incredibly dark, and you can almost see nothing with really harsh spotlight lighting, it’s so important that she’s wearing a bright colour. If she had been wearing pale blue, the scenes would have looked really drab and we wouldn’t have got the look that we wanted.”

Highman observes that the shade is reminiscent of Barbara’s trousers in the 1965 film Dr Who And The Daleks: “That was one clue that it was a colour she’d wear.”

The producers made the final call. Tipple says they “100% made the right decision.

For Highman it was the jungle scenes, “just because of the amount of detail in the set already. You also have 10 Thal characters over-crossing. The more moving colour elements you have, the more difficult it is. Things like that you can’t take a lot of shortcuts with.”

Tipple nominates a scene in the Dalek city’s radiation room. “You can’t cut it because it’s essential to the plot. Scott Burditt had his work cut out because it’s really dark with really bright spots of colour and you’ve got characters moving in and out of colour – moving in and out of the light. So that was a really, really difficult one to do.”

Were you a Doctor Who fan?

I didn’t watch many episodes when I was growing up and there’s a good reason for that: they frightened the life out of me! I was a bit of a wuss. As I got older and less fearful, my interest grew. I’m a fan. I’d say everyone on the show is, really. It’s an amazing production to work on. It’s iconic.