Dalek billboard - Hucknall, Nottingham.
August 2003

For a brief period this summer, Terry Nation's Daleks could be seen on billboards around the city. Dr Who's evil adversaries were pictured in ads for Energizer batteries with the strapline 'Are you power mad?'

I have a soft spot for these uniquely BBC TV sci-fi monsters. Ever since my sixth birthday party, when I was presented with a 'real' Dalek outfit and took to the streets of Blidworth, red plastic sink-plunger in hand, terrorising stray dogs and old ladies.

The Berwick Dalek outfit was quite a novelty in its day and it certainly made a big impression on my school friends at the time. I was intrigued to learn from Marc Almond's autobiography that he also used to walk around his native Southport wearing a red Dalek outfit during the early 1960s. I always suspected that Almond was a kindred spirit.

One of these pint-sized outfits recently went for sale on eBay a few months back and cost several hundred pounds. The auction photograph gives an indication of just how unconvincing the design was.

Decades after they first appeared on British TV screens, the cult of the Dalek can still bring about obsessive behaviour. During the mid-nineties, fellow designer Ian Lawrence and I toyed with the idea of animating a futurist disco populated entirely by ranting Daleks.

Though the project never got beyond a few computer models, we did create chaos in the design studio one morning after sabotaging the computers alarm clocks so that they triggered a ranting Dalek sample at full volume. The poor technophobic designers had only just made the transition from their drawing boards and were seriously traumatised by the sound of half-a-dozen unsynchronised Dalek voices barking 'Obey, obey!'

Imagine our delight when comic author, prankster, and journalist Victor Lewis-Smith launched the 'Gay Daleks' slot on his irreverent Channel 4 series 'TV Offal'

'They're camp ! They exterminate ! Better watch your backs ! It's the Gay Daleks !' A parody of both the Daleks and gay stereotypes, each episode ended with an over-excited Dalek ejaculating in a juvenile display of "white wee, wee".