The Doctor's greatest adventures have never been seen on screen.
They've ranged over the icy wastes of alien duvets.
They've climbed the perilous slopes of the stairs.
They've seen vast armies battle their way across the bedroom floor.
For this is the story of Doctor Who toys.
Shortly after the Daleks arrived on TV,
Doctor Who toys invaded the high street.
Well, Doctor Who was probably the programme that started
BBC merchandising.
The BBC brought in Walter Tuckwell,
an American, go-getting, enthusiastic entrepreneur
who was already working with some of the big film studios
to handle the merchandising for the Daleks,
who had become an overnight success after their first appearance.
He was certainly the person who
brought the modern concept of licensing into the UK
and made a lot of money from it as a result.
So it's not so much why do children want the toys,
it's why didn't every single person who owned a property
realise that children are a captive market for them?
They had Dalek models and they had a...
I think they had a Dalek suit,
a Dalek game, and I think there was a Dalek comic book.
I genuinely remember as a kid wishing there were Doctor Who toys.
There were. There were like push me, pull you
Daleks and Louis Marx Daleks and things like that.
I loved those things, and I thought they were
really valuable possessions.
NARRATOR: After Dalek mania,
other Doctor Who toys and monsters somehow failed to take off.
You look at the Mechanoids, and that's possibly because
Terry Nation did the Daleks.
The Mechanoids had been designed to be their enemy.
But then he takes the Daleks out of Doctor Who,
and a lot of writers think that they're going to be the ones to fill that void.
And for some reason, it just doesn't happen.
It took quite a while before we finally saw
a Doctor Who toy that wasn't a Dalek.
NARRATOR: As the show entered the 1970s,
there were still toys but some of them were a little odd.
This is the Doctor Who jigsaw.
With John Pertwee on the cover in Bessie,
his wonderful yellow roadster. And on the back,
Doctor Who says,
"Watch out for the other exciting new full-colour jigsaw.
"Also, look out for the new series of PLEASURE PRODUCTS
"for children of all age groups." Because PLEASURE PRODUCTS is...
There's nothing wrong about that.
NARRATOR: In 1975,
Weetabix launched a phenomenally successful range of collectible cards
which, if nothing else, helped keep Doctor Who fans extremely regular.
For any child of the '70s, you only have to say the word Weetabix
and there's a tingle of excitement.
You collected the Weetabix boxes.
You got kind of a board game on the back
and inside the packet were three figures.
Really accurate paintings of the Doctor Who monsters,
but in these odd situations.
Like this really creepy marshy planet
where the Krynoids, the Wirrn and the Zygons
- all lived together. - You've got to get them all,
and you don't know which ones you're going to get, so you suddenly start
eating tonnes and tonnes of Weetabix.
You got a repeat, you were just thinking,
"Oh, no, that's another 24 Weetabix to eat."
And you just had to keep on going.
I had cupboards full of Weetabix.
This was later followed by a Top Trumps game
which saw every fan's dream of Doctor Who teaming up with Annie Oakley
to fight Davros.
SANGSTER: The 1970s version had that kind of BBC ethos
in that it was slightly educational so it was Doctor Who
and a load of characters from history like Wyatt Earp
and Calamity Jane versus the monsters.
Like the Daleks. And the Ogrons and the Sea Devils,
which got strangely transposed on the cards
so that an Ogron looked like a Sea Devil and vice versa.
The 1970s finally saw the launch of a range of Doctor Who action figures,
which were almost compatible to Action Man,
apart from the blue pants.
However, they weren't entirely accurate.
And because we just used to have
the Denys Fischer Cyberman with a nose,
Tom with a too-short scarf and a strange, dirty Leela,
who was somehow related more to Hamble from Playschool...
SANGSTER: Louise Jameson is one of the most beautiful women
to ever appear in Doctor Who as a regular.
But as most young actresses,
she was perhaps a little bit insecure about her measurements.
So when Denys Fischer asked her
what the proportions should be, she upscaled her upper measurements,
which is why we get this rather top-heavy doll
with mad, fly-away hair.
We all had toys that we loved and I think a lot of people my age
feel the same about these Denys Fischer toys.
You know, they used to have some pretty rough adventures.
They're actually both missing a leg.
The original mould for the Tom Baker head
was destroyed accidentally.
And so, rather than go into the cost of remaking one,
they used one that was lying around, which I believe
was Garreth Hunt from The New Avengers.
The strange thing is it doesn't look that unlike Tom Baker.
But it doesn't look that much like Garreth Hunt.
This was about the most exciting thing I ever had when I was a kid.
And it's a Denys Fischer Tardis. And inside,
you use to have vortex, vortex being
a cardboard tube, one side of which had Velcro on it.
And you'd stick him to it, put him inside, shut the doors,
spin the light...
If you press the red button, you open the doors, and the Doctor had gone.
And then if you spun it again,
press the green button and the Doctor would come back.
And I thought it was just magic.
Literally, I thought it was magic.
For a while. I guess eventually, I must have twigged.
And then eventually, I got so many of these,
you know, I'd got various figures,
I used to play with them, and I used to think, "Well, you can only fit him
"in there with that vortex in."
So I'm going to rip the vortex out so that it's just,
you know, it's a box inside, which is what I did.
Of course, I regret that now.
The end of the 1970s saw the unleashing of the fearsome Tardis Tuner.
(BEEPING)
Quite often, we'd find adverts for toys in the pages of Doctor Who Weekly
or Doctor Who Magazine, as it became.
And one of the most perplexing was the Tardis Tuner.
I always wanted to find out what a Tardis Tuner was,
'cause I never saw them in the shops.
This is a Tardis Tuner.
Which is Doctor Who's handy space-radio-cum-hypnotiser.
I was slightly taken aback when I found out
what it really does. It starts off with an interesting sort of beat.
And then...
(BEEPING LOUDLY)
That is laser beep. I can put it on to morse warp for you,
which is quite similar.
(LOUD BEEPING)
Yeah, laser bleep, morse warp, they're fairly similar.
- Or it's just a radio. - (WOMAN SPEAKING ON RADIO)
And it was an astounding purchase.
Towards the end of the 1970s as well,
we got one of the most beautiful artefacts ever,
which was the Palatoy talking K9.
And what I really liked about this was that it had a record inside.
You see, you might get him saying, "Gravity readings normal."
And then I discovered that that record was exactly the same as the one inside
my talking Basil Brush, so like any enterprising child would do,
I dismantled my talking Basil Brush,
put the record inside my K9, and rejoiced as K9
started going, "Ha ha ha, boom boom!"
But that wasn't the most alarming piece of Doctor Who merchandise ever.
That prize goes to Tom Baker's underpants.
To have Tom Baker emblazoned on your crotch,
I'm sure every six year old in the country would have been proud of that,
and yet it's the sort of thing that if the family photos come out
when you're a grownup, it's an immense source of shame. I would imagine.
In the 1980s, something quite strange happened to Doctor Who toys.
When I was 12 years old, I got the best gift
from any parents that a little boy could get.
I got the Peter Davison Doctor Who Easter Egg.
I hid it in the linen cupboard and it stayed there for several months.
I mean, I would bring it out occasionally and play with it,
you know, because you can play with an Easter egg.
And eventually, it began to smell.
Because it was around also where all the clothes were.
So for a while in my house, everybody was walking around smelling
of decomposing Peter Davison.
As the Doctor Who audience grows up and they start getting things like
disposable income, it becomes obvious to some that,
as well as tapping the child market with slippers and underpants and tents,
maybe you can exploit the adult collectors market as well.
There was a company in the West Country called Sevans,
who produced Dalek kits for a while.
SANGSTER: The first time every single detail
was absolutely as it should be.
And I think that was possibly the tipping point,
where fans would look at this and go, "Well, if that can look like that,
"why have we had to put up with this lot for the last 20 years?"
Star Wars was what really polarised the toy market
into gifts for fans, collectibles for fans
and toys for children.
NARRATOR: In 1977, Star Wars had changed the face of children's toys
with their amazing range of action figures.
Only a decade later, Doctor Who joined in.
Model railway maker Dapol launched a range of toys,
allowing every child the chance
to exterminate Bonnie Langford whenever they wished.
Dapol were enthusiasts. David Boyle, who ran the company,
was a big Doctor Who fan himself.
Dapol got behind UKmanufacturing.
It did mean, inevitably, that the quality wasn't up to the standards
that top Chinese factories were able to produce.
Dapol didn't always get it right.
They famously released a Davros figure
with two arms instead of one.
Then, as now, I'd imagine
that servicing the needs of a toy producer,
I think back then it would have been even lower down
on the list of priorities that John Nathan-Turner may have had.
The conversation which David Boyle is supposed to have had
with John Nathan-Turner where he phones him up
and says, "The Tardis, from the look of this photograph,
"it only has five sides, right?"
John Nathan-Turner allegedly, again, says,
"Well, if it looks like it in the photographs,
"it must be right, then, right?" And he puts the phone down.
Nowadays, you'd send a PDF.
Back in those days, you would have been saying to the visual effects department,
"Can you draw me up some plans, please?
"I need to send them to a toy producer."
And it probably was something that he didn't get round to doing.
This is mine, and obviously the beauty is it's five sides rather than six.
And I broke it very quickly, because originally, there was a switch there.
And that used to rise up and down.
I broke it very quickly when I realised that you could take things out.
"I've got to get a black one with gold spots
"and a black one with silver spots.
"And a blue one."And I don't remember a blue one on screen.
I certainly don't remember a green one.
Here is the Seventh Doctor Dapol figure.
How cool I thought this was back in 1989.
For when it was made, I actually really like it.
I think they got a lot of things as good as they could probably get them.
The factory at Llangollen was chaotic, to say the least.
It was antiquated.
Dapol's workers were, on the whole, Welsh housewives.
They were middle-aged.
They were chatty, they were lively and enthusiastic.
They clearly enjoyed their work.
It's fairly common to look back at Dapol figures and think,
"Oh God, they're awful. They don't look anything like the characters."
But I have for comparison a Han Solo figure
from one of the early Star Wars ranges. And actually to think,
does this actually look anything like Harrison Ford?
Not really, but it's a close enough approximation.
And actually, I quite like the fact that they were nearly scaled almost
so that you could, if I wanted to, play a version of Doctor Who
that had more aliens than the Doctor Who series had at the time.
And have the Seventh Doctor fly the Millennium Falcon
if I had really wanted to.
But I didn't do that, because that would have been wrong.
NARRATOR: Dapol ploughed on, but by the early 21 st century,
Doctor Who hadn't been on the air for a long time.
Any children buying their toys would have grown up and gone to university.
Grownups faced a tricky challenge.
How to keep your Dalek on the shelf without staying there yourself?
A whole new approach was needed.
Doctor Who became retro.
It wasn't that you were buying a toy because it was good,
it was you were buying a toy because it's ironic.
It did, I think perhaps, become cooler by being off air.
And because of that, Doctor Who actually always remained
in the top 10 earning programmes of the BBC for merchandise,
despite the fact that it was off air.
Product Enterprises, they used to make little model Daleks
that I've still got in my kitchen. They're really beautiful replica Daleks.
I've got a whole shelf full of them in my kitchen.
Buying Daleks is the one thing I continue to do as an adult.
Nothing else toy-wise.
It's just my thing. I just loved Daleks. I still do.
Suddenly, I start running out of space.
Because each of these is a foot high and about half a foot wide.
And there are only so many shelves that are strong enough
to support this many Daleks.
In 2005, Doctor Who came back, and so did an army of toys.
I can remember at the beginning... Literally, this is how naive I was.
At the beginning... Because I loved Doctor Who and I don't...
All I really buy is like the magazines and the books.
But it's like 'cause I love it I thought, "Do you know what I'll do?
"I'll collect every piece of merchandise that we issue.
"Because that will be a really nice little souvenir.
"Maybe we'll have a year of this, maybe we'll have two or three years.
"Maybe it will be quite successful, but at the end of that,
"it would be a really cool thing to say I've got every piece of merchandise."
What a ridiculous thought. I mean, I'd have to have a shed.
I'd have to have a lockup.
In 2005, we literally ended up
having to do the Doctor Who toys in slightly less than five months,
which is pretty fast.
The hardest thing to get right was the Dalek, because we couldn't measure it.
So we were literally relying on photographs.
And as several people, including Russell T Davies
pointed out to me further down the line,
we did get the dimensions of the Dalek fairly wrong on the first one.
We now do 3D scanning.
So we scan our subjects so that there's no arguments about, you know,
does Matt Smith's nose look right or wrong
because if you've scanned his head, then it is as it is.
We still get asked to change things, but I'm not saying... (LAUGHS)
And it wasn't Matt Smith. The 3D sculpt
is then output in physical form.
This is the very first Christopher Eccleston.
This is the very first action figure we ever did.
So you get a sculpt out like this, which is hard resin.
From there, they then paint the figure
to get a physical representation for approval.
And the Far East engineering group start making a tooling model.
And a tooling model is literally like this.
It's the way that they look at how the figure is going to be
assembled and articulated. And then,
75 to 90 days later, because it takes quite a long time,
you will get these guys, an actual plastic version of our action figure.
We get to look at it, see if there are any issues or any detail problems,
and we can still correct them. And then eventually,
you get it to a point
where the figure will be manufactured and fully painted.
Then we go off and develop packaging to go with it.
And now we're joined by Winston Churchill himself, Mr Ian McNeice.
How does it feel having a model of yourself?
What can I say? I mean, I thought it was only people like
Superman, or Batman, or Robin that got these figures,
so when I was told that I was going to have an action figure of myself,
I was over the moon, I have to say.
And what was the strangest thing about the whole process?
Well, they actually scanned my whole body.
including my face as well.
They scanned it and put it into a computer,
which then turns into the model.
And I have to say, I'm quite amazed by how
lifelike I am. As you can see here from this sculpt that was created,
that my face, unfortunately, is very similar
to the face that I have here.
And my chins, as you can see,
are recreated several times, as I have myself as well,
so I'm really thrilled, thrilled that I look as well as I do.
My favourite toy, apart from that, is the Cassandra,
is the little model Cassandra, because I literally
laugh and laugh and laugh at the thought of a little boy saying,
"Moisturise me, moisturise me!"
And his mum's in the kitchen going, "Oh, there's no hope."
The totals at the moment are about 7.5 million action figures.
The David Tennant action figure holds the record
at something like 700,000 David Tennants out there.
I love the fact we've now got all these incredible toys
and I, of course, have succumbed to them like crack cocaine,
'cause they're so amazing and everything I always wanted.
The action figure line was doing incredibly well.
Immediately, you kind of think, where can we go from here?
Let's go and do classic.
We can have this
on the same shelf as this. We've come full circle, in a way.
I never thought I would own an accurate Mechanoid figure.
This is something from the '60s that appeared in two episodes.
It's funny to be able to get Mechanoids. (LAUGHS)
I think it's simultaneously brilliant and a bit insane.
But having said that, I think if we'd had anything like
that level of care in the merchandise when we were kids,
it would have meant so much.
I think the weirdest thing I ever got through for approvals in our office,
there was a Dalek that had been submitted which came in from Australia.
And it was almost completely round. It was like a cylinder.
And the licensee had been incredulous as to why it hadn't been approved.
"Well, it's a Dalek, isn't it?"
I think a kid knows when you buy something that's the wrong colour,
that's the wrong shape and stuff like that. They just know.
We have here a rather lovely David Tennant 12-inch doll
that has been picked up by our anti-counterfeit team.
It's a strange likeness. He looks somewhere between
waxwork and Barbie, when you look at the face.
And he appears to be wearing a boiler suit.
He's clearly got at least one broken arm.
There's some very strange angles going on with the limbs.
This is a fake Cyberman helicopter.
You'll remember, I'm sure,
the many episodes where the Cybermen flew helicopters.
There's a rather nice Cyberman pilot there,
stuck onto the side of this completely generic
and irrelevant helicopter.
I can't understand why someone would keep a modern toy in its box.
For me, a toy is always worth less if it's not been played with.
And yet, we look at the '60s toys
and a lot of those haven't stood the test of time.
The original Dalek dress-up suits. I mean, very few of those survive.
But if you were to have one of those original Dalek suits,
it would probably be so fragile, you'd be terrified to take it out of the box.
It's almost like a Schrodinger's Dalek of
is it still there? Is it still in one piece?
So what I have in here
is something that nobody else has got.
And these are some toys that my dad made for me
when I was probably about eight or nine.
And he decided he would make me some Daleks himself.
My Dalek army was very colourful.
And it was led by the Emperor Dalek.
There. And they've got rotatable domes.
These are heavy-duty drawing pins in here.
And so I used to play with these in conjunction with my Tom Baker figures
and the Tardis and so on.
This was his trade. He was a carpenter.
And so he made me a full-scale K9 as well.
I still have them on a shelf, even if they are a bit dusty.
I still have a Proustian rush when I open a packet of Weetabix.
My thrill at these... I got them off the shelf last night
and it all starts to come back to you.
You can remember playing with them
and the kind of adventures you used to have with them.
I had a little Dinky Tardis
which I used to cut out figures and play with and...
I took it on a secret Timelord mission
to the desert planet of Hartlepool and lost it in a sand dune.
I never got over it.
So in the spirit of having toys that are made to have fun with,
I'm now going to play Top Trumps with Winston Churchill.
Excellent, can't wait.
- Okay, pick a card. - Thank you very much, there's my card.
- Do I divulge who I am first? - I think so.
I am a Parthian Warrior.
And my special power's... No, mental ability of eight.
Ah! I am a Silurian.
My mental ability is only five.
Well, I think we know who wins.
- Yeah. - It's Winnie.
Wherever you are and whatever you do, if you've got a toy,
don't let it sit on the shelf. The least you can do is dust it off
and give it a chance of conquering the Earth.