"The old enemy is back." "Disintegrate!" "And in a fetching new shade." "I think the blue one's my favourite." "Cleanse the unclean!" "It's all-new Doctor Who." "What's the other thing we haven't changed?" "Let's change the Daleks, too." "And all that stands in their way is one man with a blue box and one man with a cigar." "Go to it, Group Captain!" "Go to it!" "My ambition with this episode, really, was to do a sort of 45-minute bank holiday war movie." "Mark Gatiss takes us to Churchill's Cabinet War Rooms..." "We don't know how lucky we are." "...for an inside view on how the war was won." "I would urge anybody who can to come and visit this place." "And how Mark pitted the Doctor's deadliest enemy against the best of British." "It's like British icons shoved together." "Bizarrely, the Daleks feel as though they're part of it." "Join us as we see the Daleks go bigger, badder and brighter." "They've improved, they're stronger, they're more powerful, they're more brilliant." "It's exciting, it's sort of what it's about, Doctor Who, I think, every monster gets a little better every time." "In a top-secret military installation, the Doctor Who team are filming the nerve centre of the British war effort." "...just ask everybody to go to the top." "And action!" "Action!" "You heard him, Group Captain!" "Send in all we've got." "Broadsword to Danny Boy, target the dish and stop that signal." "Over." "Understood, sir." "Over." "We're going in." " Well, good luck, lads!" "Direct hit, sir!" "Cut!" "Cut!" "This episode has been written by long-timeDoctor Who contributor" "Mark Gatiss, who's been asked to work his magic on World War II." "I remember, I took him out for a drink and said, "Look, I want you to do" ""the Daleks meet Churchill. "" "And he was, you know..." "Initially he was, sort of, "Yeah, okay. "" "I don't think he immediately leapt at it." "The Churchill bit, I went, "Oh. " The Dalek bit, I went, "Ooh!"" "Because..." "Yeah, I mean, it's thrilling, obviously it is." "So I just sort of took a deep breath, really." "And I got very, very excited very quickly about the idea of, first of all, writing a sort of war movie, of which I am inordinately fond, but particularly about doing my own Dalek story and contributing, continuing the mythos." "And it's so kind of Doctor Who, that pan in." "It is, I know, I know." "It sort of does something to you." "Yeah, it does." "To be in anything by Mark is, for me, a treat, because I'm just "ahh", you know?" "It's that I'm really awestruck by him, I'm really starstruck." "I knew that he would write Churchill really, really well." "I knew he'd do his research properly, because Mark always does." "I knew he'd get that part of it right and I knew he'd get the feel of the wartime characters brilliantly." "In his research," "Mark visited the Cabinet War Rooms in Whitehall." "Confidential took him back there to experience the real nerve centre of the British war machine." "So here we are." "Not in the room where Doctor Who is written, although it's very like this, but at the top-secret heart of the war effort, otherwise known..." "Cressida?" "This is the Churchill Museum and Cabinet War Rooms, which preserves the original Cabinet War Rooms." "And how far are we beneath the beating heart of London?" " We're only about 10 foot down." " Disappointing." "Yes." "People here would have felt they were a lot lower down." "And there is how much concrete between us and the pavement?" "There's about three metres." "There's a great big slab with reinforced iron rails in it protecting us a bit." "They had the rooms ready before war even broke out..." " Mmm-hmm." " ... in 1938." "And then moved in here more permanently during the Blitz, in 1940." "Speaking of which, let's go inside." "So this is the map room." "Yes." "Now, our version in Doctor Who is considerably bigger and has one of those big tables with a map of Southeast England and Waafs pushing things." "Now, that obviously never happened here." "Those are real, though, aren't they, those pictures?" " But not here." " Yes, those would have been" " in the RAF bases." " Right." "And this was a sort of combined services, bringing all the different services together..." " Right." " ... and co-ordinating the information." "And this was manned 24 hours a day throughout the entire war." "Good Lord." "And would have been, I suppose, in a fog of tobacco smoke." "Yes." " And everything else." "And you can see the huge cigarette end boxes, so..." "As far as we know, pretty much everybody smoked." " Gosh!" " Pretty horrible." "It's amazing they lasted through the war." "And the map is absolutely covered in tiny drawing pin marks." "Yes, this is a convoy map." "So, it would have been plotting the individual convoys of ships, which were coming across the Atlantic bringing vital supplies and men and battling against the U-boats." "So, on this notice board, they were keeping the score of the Battle of Britain from down here." "Somebody's painted it in for September 15th, 1940," " which was Battle of Britain day..." " Right." "...when the tide of the battle changed, finally, in Britain's favour." "God." "Extraordinary thought, isn't it?" "And they were realistically down here, being aware that they could be invaded." " Mmm." "And there were rooms further down the corridor where they were planning the defence of the country." "God!" "We don't know how lucky we are." "AndDoctor Who, as usual, found its own particular way to pay tribute to those magnificent men in their flying machines." "It was Steve's idea." "He just said, "We've got to have Spitfires in space." ""How can we make that happen?"" "Danny Boy to the Doctor." "Tally-ho!" "I wanted to fly one of the Spitfires, but I get a Tardis." "It's, you know, it's cool." "It's such an icon, isn't it, the Spitfire?" "It remains with you." "To realise the dream of Spitfires in space, the team go into the studio for some camera trickery." "I think you can go real warrior..." " I'm starting to enjoy it, then." " A little bit, yeah." "We shot a lot of the Spitfire with the pilot against green to create the CG dogfight in space between the Spitfires and their pilots and the Dalek spaceship." "So, what we did in order to help with those CG shots is to shoot the live-action elements, which is the cockpit and the main fuselage of the Spitfire." "Very good." " Cut then." " Cut it!" "Well, we have a World War II replica Spitfire here in the studio today, in a green-screen studio." "And this afternoon we're shooting the live-action element of what will become a CG Spitfire dogfight in space." "Danny Boy to the Doctor." "Going in for another attack." "Just to have a Spitfire in space is..." "Only in Doctor Who could it ever happen." "Which is why this show is so brilliant, I think." "Oh, hello, dear." "What's up?" "Tricky situation, Doctor." "Potentially very dangerous." "I think I'm going to need you." "Send in all we've got!" "What does he expect us to do now?" " KBO, of course." " What?" "Keep buggering on!" "Winston Churchill is kind of this great, heroic role in the episode, as he should be, it's Churchill." "My old friend!" "Every time!" "He has a lot of kind of similar traits to the Doctor, which is why they get on." "He's ferociously intelligent, quite dogmatic, very brave." "He and Doctor Who have got a great relationship because they go way back." "They've obviously worked with each other lots of times before." "Think of what I could achieve with your remarkable machine, Doctor!" "They're old sparring partners, you know." "They get on very well, but they're not afraid to say a cross word to each other." "They're Daleks." "They're called Daleks." "They are Bracewell's Ironsides, Doctor!" "Look!" "Blueprints, statistics, field tests, photographs." "He invented them!" "Oh-ho-ho, no, no." "No!" "I think it was Russell T Davies who said that there's something very World War II about them." "The idea of the original story of them seeking to destroy anything unlike anything other is a very Nazi concept." "And the concept of total Dalek racial purity leads to a new paint job for the new kids on the block." "Ah!" "I love the new Daleks." "It's all-new Doctor Who." "What's the other thing we haven't changed?" "Let's change the Daleks, too." "We wanted them bigger and more colourful and we wanted more of them." "My heart skips a beat when I open the script and it says," ""the Daleks," you know." "Because you just know that it's going to be fun." "Behold the restoration of the Daleks!" "The resurrection of the master race!" "Oh, they're just magnificent." "They're really cool." "I think everyone's going to like them." "Question is... what do we do now?" "Either you turn off your clever machine or I'll blow you and your new paradigm into eternity." "And yourself!" "Occupational hazard." "I think the blue one's my favourite." "And they've all got sort of different classes, there's a warrior, there's a scientist, there's a drone." "And the white one is the Supreme." "And he's got the big, great, deep voice." "You are the Doctor!" "You must be exterminated!" "Don't mess with me, sweetheart!" "They're cool!" "They're like these massive..." "I mean, they're taller than me." "The original ones are actually smaller than me, so they've made them huge." "And they're all these primary, bright colours." "Right from the start I wanted them to be very colourful." "I'm terribly fond of them and there's something so gorgeously impressive about those big, big, bloody Daleks with their colourful liveries." "They kind of looked like Minis, you know, you feel like you can get in one and drive one around." "So I just thought, you know, let's go for it, really." "And happily, everybody else thought the same." "There's a lot of art deco in there, there's a lot of new sort of angles, shapes to them." "They're much stronger." "Most of the things are still there." "The sucker's there, the eye stalk's there." "The little round bombs on the sides are there." "When you actually see them now next to the Daleks gone by, they're much more scary, I think." "Blimey." "What do you do to the ones who mess up?" "They're very exciting things to be around." "'Cause, I mean, look at them." "There's one now." "They're just..." "I'm sort of in love with them." "That's the problem." "I mean, they're my arch... greatest enemy, of course, but you know," "I mean, everyone in Britain sort of knows what that is, don't they?" "It's like British icons shoved together." "You know, Churchill is a British icon, the Union Jack is a British icon." "Everything about the war, it's somehow our noblest hour, surviving that Blitz." "Before I wrote the script, I'd read an awful lot of stuff, diaries and first-hand accounts from the Battle of Britain," "I mean, I admired enormously anyone who'd been through that war but by the time I'd finished, my admiration had gone through the roof." "It's the most extraordinary period." "Sort of..." "Almost everybody was amazing in their small way, however they coped or didn't cope." "I mean, it's the sort of thing we simply can't imagine today, the idea that you would see someone like this and then the next day maybe everybody else in this room is dead." "I was reading some extraordinary things about the RAF and, you know, basically in order to cope with the loss of their best friends, when they got back from a mission a lot of them would just go and get utterly hammered." "Understandably." "But the next day they had to be back in the air." "So they used to get up the next morning, go and sit in their planes and put their oxygen masks on, just to sober themselves up." "This is the way the war was won." "And it was a hairsbreadth between victory and defeat, absolutely extraordinary time." "I suppose it was a bit like..." "It's like if everybody had a newborn child." "People would go to work and they hadn't slept at all because of the bombings and cumulatively, everyone got rattler and more filthy and exhausted." "And then they got very used to it." "And then some people got slightly more scared and other people got incredibly blasé and they started to quite enjoy it." "You know, people go through all kinds of odd things." "I mean, it's the sort of thing that, in our existence, you would..." "It would traumatise you for the rest of your life, and probably did them." "But as an accumulation of horrors and extraordinary experiences, you know, it's an amazing time."