Well, in those days, in the early 60s, I was with the only voice agent in London and I
was getting a certain amount of work now there.
Dozens and dozens of voice agents and I must have been sent up by the agency to the BBC
to test out for this voice.
And it was when I met Peter Hawkins, who was the, of course, the voice of the other Dalek.
And I think that was the basis.
I got the Dalek voices originally, I think, because I had a reputation by that time for
doing tricky voices.
My agent reckons that somebody phoned up from BBC bookings and said, she thought they said,
have you got anybody that's good at dialects?
And that's how I got the job.
It was a bad line.
We've been asked to do a voice for the Daleks and I'd just before and had been doing a play
for radio called Sword from the Stars.
And we had a rather polite robot called the Jones robot.
He was a sort of butler.
And I'd used my voice for that.
And we'd used a system of modulation to make it sound like a robot.
And so I decided it probably would be a good idea to use the same sort of treatment for
the Dalek because you get a nice grating sort of sound in it.
We had a very long trial session, a paid session as far as I remember, with David Graham, who's
a great old chum of mine, still chums now.
And we tried everything and everybody was chipping in with suggestions.
Once I worked out roughly what we were going to do, because you can only really do it roughly
with your own voice, we went along to the session.
And as far as I remember, there was Richard Martin and Peter Hawkins, which was good news
because I knew Peter was absolutely brilliant.
And eventually somebody decided that they should be a monotone.
And we were then lumbered with this particular voice.
I think in one session, more or less, we we got the style of the Daleks.
I have just come from the prisoners.
The old man is dying.
Which was this inhuman staccato rhythmic done with a lot of vocal intensity, with a sort
of intense full stop at the end of every sentence.
And then of course, the radio phonics workshop people were there.
There were a lot of adjustments we had to make.
We had to cut some bass from the voice, take a little top out of it, boost the middle.
I asked Peter if he could slightly elongate the vowels so we could get the modulation
working on the vowels.
And the sound supervisor obviously would have put his two pen at the end as well.
And between all of us, but I would say mainly with Peter, we got the performance.
And once Peter had set that performance, it became the pattern for all future Dalek voices.
Very well.
During the first week's rehearsals, I developed the voice myself because David only came on
the Saturdays.
And then I had to brief him what had happened during the week.
So I went to all the rehearsals.
And during rehearsals, I had to work out really how to use this monotone voice without it
becoming monotonous.
The voice is modulated using an old post office ring modulator and a sine wave of 30 cycles.
I do not understand his words.
This has the effect of turning the voice on and off at 30 times per second.
This gives the nice grating sort of sound.
And then Peter's performance adds all those extra sort of performance things into it.
We still had to act with full intensity before.
I mean, so it was a combination of us and the synthesizer.
But I think there wasn't a lot of trial and error.
We seemed to get it quite quickly.
Testing oral control.
I came to the conclusion the only thing was to rise in pitch as they got more venomous
or more excited and also to increase pace on the line.
So they started off with menace and then worked their way up to a screech.
Exterminate, annihilate, destroy.
Daleks conquer and destroy.
Within the mechanical, almost inhuman personalities of the Daleks, we tried to vary them.
We tried to give them personalities.
If they were hesitant.
Or if they were more angry.
Take in the light.
Or if they had a higher rank or a lower rank, which meant within the parameters of what
we'd established, this sort of voice, we'd go up in register or down in register and
get angry or fearful.
Help me.
Help.
Peter had a more mechanical, higher register.
Time to construct, 23 days.
So I think I had more of the base notes.
His words betrayed greater intelligence than normal inhuman beings.
I remember Peter saying, exterminate them, exterminate them.
And then, you know, there might be the controller, you know.
All Daleks report to headquarters immediately.
Immediately.
That was the sort of variety we'd give it.
We are the masters of Earth.
I know we went every Wednesday, we do the pre-recording late afternoon at Lime Grove
Studios.
We'd get the scripts, you know, several days before so I could work on the dialogue.
And then there'd be a studio manager.
I don't think there was any other direction because they allowed us license once they
knew the format and that we got the voices down and the different interpretations we
were going to give to the personalities of different Daleks.
They just let us get on with it.
And we just took off and did it that way.
And I'm not sure if it was marked out on the script who was going to do which voice.
But if it wasn't, we parceled it out between us.
I always think I used to defer.
I used to think that Peter was the senior Dalek.
At rehearsals, for want of somewhere better to stand, the director normally used to walk
around the rehearsal room and he'd stand facing, as a sort of very close audience as it was,
to the actors here or wherever it was convenient.
And I used to stand by his shoulder and fire all the Dalek dialogue at the actors.
Of course, during the rehearsal period, we didn't have the electronic distortion device
or what, I don't know what the proper word for it is.
So Peter Hawkins would stand there with his script and he used to put his hand over his
mouth and speak in a deep voice.
I can sort of do it now.
It used to be, which actually sounds fairly similar to how it did when they did all the
electronic stuff.
He was an extremely nice guy, I remember, and very clever in the way he did this.
And later on, he would do, I presume it was him, would sort of do different voices for
different ranks of Dalek and so on, which is a bit tricky because you've got absolutely
nothing to go on.
You can't say, I once met this Dalek who had such and such a voice as you can with ordinary
parts.
The Daleks would be around uncapped with the operators sitting like in little, they looked
like they were little bathtubs always without their tops on.
And I rehearsed all their moves and they were supposed to rehearse their lights.
Some of them weren't very good on synchronising the lights with me because they were a bit
lazy.
I don't think they learned the lines very often.
They should have done for synchronisation.
That's why those lights don't always quite work with the voice.
Once we got in the studio, it was very difficult because once they'd got their caps on, and
I was watching them on a monitor where the angles were completely different, then it
became very difficult identifying which one was speaking for.
One of the problems is that we didn't have very many ring modulators.
There was one that was loose and wasn't bolted down.
And of course television borrowed it and as usual with television, it went missing.
And that was a big problem at first because we'd lost a piece of equipment which was rather
important for us.
But there were new modulators coming along and very soon we were able to do it with voltage
control anyway.
I think my main memory of doing the Daleks, and I'm proud of it, is because they've been
loved so much and have given so much entertainment and fun and joy to a lot of people.
And that's what we're in the business for really, not to change society.
I would say the Dalek voice became popular because it was so easy for kids to copy in
the playground.
It was very strange.
You'd be going past a school on the way to work and you'd hear all the kids imitating
what you'd just done the previous Saturday.
And that was really quite nice.