Peaceful Thals Ambushed and Lady Penelope Investigates
In an early attempt at breaking the fourth wall, TV Century 21 treated the Peter Cushing films as in-universe historical dramas - alongside crossovers with Thunderbirds, Stingray and the Daleks themselves.
Peaceful Thals Ambushed and Lady Penelope Investigates
TV Century 21 Issue 28
“This was the first frightening news of the Daleks to hit the Universe some eighteen months ago on B.B.C. Television.
Now the exciting film, ‘‘Dr. Who and the Daleks”’ is on the cinema screen in glorious Technicolour. You can see it at your local cinema soon.”
As part of the promotion of the film Dr Who and the Daleks starring Peter Cushing, the comic magazine TV Century 21 devoted several stories to the film and its advertisement. Published by City Magazines and edited by Alan Fennell, TV Century 21 was presented as a “newspaper from the future”, with its front page story written in the form of a news report. Alongside its regular Dalek focused comic strip, the magazine also featured a number of other characters from popular British sci-fi series, including Thunderbirds, Stingray and Burke’s Law. The crossovers between them, including in these two stories, strongly implied that all were set within the same universe.
In issue 28, the cover article was a short story reporting on a news bulletin from Skaro, featuring a battle between the Daleks and the Thals. Later, they announced that the film Dr Who and the Daleks is a dramatisation of these “real” events. Later on in the issue, the character of Lady Penelope from the TV show Thunderbirds by Gerry Anderson arrange to meet the stars of the film in question: Roy Castle, Jennie Linden and Roberta Tovey. The article itself is a blend of fictional reporting and a celebrity feature piece.
While generally not the most exciting of stories - it is an early example of in-universe media about the Doctor. Many decades before later stories explained similar ideas, the writers of TV Century 21 had already reframed the Cushing films as fictional retellings of Ian and Barbara’s adventures. This is later revisited in the novelisation of the 2013 special The Day of the Doctor by Steven Moffat. The article itself suggests that the film is filmed in 2065 instead of 1965, to bring it more in line with the futuristic elements of Gerry Anderson’s Universe.
The TV Century 21 issues are well archived digitally on Internet Archive. They also have been collected and restored by this archive. However, physically original copies of this issue remain extremely rare.