TOBY THE DALEK

Today, I’d like to introduce you to my pet, Toby. Now, Toby might not be much of a looker, nor indeed does he say very much, and you probably wouldn’t really consider him to be a pet as such, and I’m pretty sure that I’ve never taken him for a walk, but we’ve been together for rather a number of years now, and it’s only fair that he finally gets the recognition he deserves, after his years of loyal service guarding the other bits and pieces that proudly adorn and clutter the various surfaces hereabouts.

Toby was fashioned by my own clumsy hands from a model kit created by the mail order firm of “Sevans Models” (set up, I seem to remember, by a young entrepreneur called Stuart Evans) way back in the time of the Thatcher administration when “Youth Enterprise” was quite the thing, and when all a young cove had to do during the long summer months between grant cheques was to idle away his time trying to find ways to fritter away his allowance on small objects of desire that had become available at a point way too much later in his life than was decent for a young man of his age, but proved irresistible to his inner geek.

For Toby dates from simpler times, times when the only memorabilia you could get for many TV shows was a vague approximation in plastic of things that actually managed to look much better on a TV screen. Yes, I know… but back then we could still believe that those images looked pretty good. We were occasionally even impressed by them. Nowadays, with hindsight, we can now see how shoddy some of those props actually were and recognise them to be possibly the objets d’tat that they truly turned out to be, but then, well… it takes true genius to fashion household utensils and old mini parts into the stuff of nightmares.

When it came to TV-Tie-ins and merchandise, those were the days when your Tom Baker doll (they were yet to be termed “action figures”) could be sold with a smiling head that could probably have served similar duties upon a “Starsky” doll, and where blank faced, evil automatons like Cybermen could be given anachronistic cute little button noses so as not to frighten the grandparents come Christmas morning, or a Warrior of the Sevateem like Leela the savage would be fashioned with massive Barbie-style hair so that little girls could play with them ‘properly’ instead of finding wicked uses for her miniature knife to get their own back after many years of  their previous dolls suffering at the hands of “Action Man”.

When I was a tiny Wholet, I was terribly envious of my friend the future airline pilot who had in his toybox the battered remnants of an object given to an earlier generation of  toy-wranglers, a silver “Louis Marks” Dalek toy. Now anyone who had an eye for these things could clearly see that this object did very little to replicate the versions that glided and bounced across our television screens and stimulated our imaginations. These versions had windows and a completely different shape, as well as the hooped middles that had been superceded by the slatted version in an early sixties “pimping”.

Strangely, and if only we’d known it back then, these variations were indeed 100% accurate as they had been used on screen to bulk up the numbers in some mid-sixties episodes that, even as we thought about such things, were probably being cast into the BBC furnaces to protect future generations from harm. Now, of course, I can wonder what kind of brave little soul it was who went around and sold a faction of the Dalek hordes some double glazing to keep the draughts out of their bonded polycarbide casings, and mull over the fact that this particular section of Dalek-kind were probably the ones that the “celebrity”, in-your-face, front-line Daleks that managed to hog all the close-ups never talked about, a bit like the “smoothie” Klingons that aren’t ever mentioned by their chunky-faced cousins. Later on, these objects of desire would be re-released in bright, garish colours for a new generation, but I never saw one fashioned in the silver body with gold trim of the one that my friend so casually owned, and probably blithely and thoughtlessly tipped into a dustbin when he finally ‘grew up’ (whatever that might mean…).

So a company like Sevans came as a godsend to me. My kit-building skills were never that impressive to be honest, as I always got terribly impatient with them. Model-making magazines I acquired at around that time would talk of such things as filler and custom-making certain parts, and spraying with airbrushes and only using liquid adhesive, and none of these mystical items were available around the Humbrol racks of Pennington’s the Newsagents just next door to the Spar, where much of my model kit purchasing was done.

The Sevans kit came with exhaustively researched notes telling of the many variations of props that had occurred over the then twenty two years that the TV show had then been on, telling of each and every colour scheme change, blob movement and eyeball variation, and telling you how to adapt the basic kit for every eventuality. There are websites dedicated to much the same sort of thing nowadays, but back then, the attention to detail seemed both impressive and a tad terrifying. Later generations of Toymakers would of course latch onto this obsession with completism and variation and produce ready-made versions in every possible option for the kids-who-don’t-know-they’re-born to fill their own bedrooms with, but back then, such fantastic possibilities were far, far in the future.

Knowing my own limits, Toby was lovingly fashioned on one of the more recent, anything goes, tattier TV incarnations with the best approximations of colour I could get from Mr Pennington. For quite a few years he stood on the windowsill of my bedroom, in the opposite corner to my space rocket, telling anyone who should pass by the back of our house that within there lurked a “fan”. Occasionally he would be sent flying by a thoughtlessly passing cat who thought that he looked more solid and weighty than he truly was, but, with the occasional application of a bit of glue and the odd bit of insulation tape, he has survived such perils.

In later years, and with a slight sense of irony that attempted unsuccessfully to hide my inner geek, I went to a pet shop and bought him the collar you see him wearing, and had a name-tag inscribed for him at the same time. For years afterwards he sat proudly on the top of the very first Television set I ever bought, a TV/VCR combi, until such villains that used to raid the homes in that particular part of outer Manchester (and were once rumoured to be the same charming fellows who would go on to make up a hefty chunk of what became an internationally famous rock and roll combo…) snaffled it away one dismal day.

Thankfully, they left Toby behind, but his glory days were behind him. Perhaps I had been disappointed that he had failed to strike appropriate terror into these mysterious interlopers and protect my few prized valuables, or maybe it was just that I was still trying not to look too rubbish to the then girlfriend, but Toby got confined to a box in a dark cupboard and spent a few years in his own version of a Metaltron Vault which was transported from home to home as I moved about in the world.

Lately he has emerged back into the sunlight and proudly stands once more, almost shoulder-to-shoulder with his comrade and modern day equivalent, the remote controlled, all singing, all dancing Black Dalek, the kind of thing that the tiny Wholet I once was could only have dreamed of ever having. Ironically this toy for a new generation was built to a very similar scale in a completely new century and, whilst it may very well totally eclipse him in terms of style and substance, it can never take away his value.