Daleks as a force for good?

Breaking a lengthy silence, Archeology of the Future emerges from deep cover to share this clip of alien fighting machines bringing their might to fight an earthly battle...

The originator of this clip ( stevethedalek!) describes it thus:

"[A] Compilation of my appearances on Sky, BBC and ITN News at the G8 finance ministers' meeting in London on 11th June 2005 (the day that 'Bad Wolf' aired!)"

There's something quite beguiling about the deployment of fictional characters in actual situations. Archeology of the Future finds it very difficult not to join the fictional dots and find a story to explain why the scourge of the universe are spending time on our lowly planet, hemmed in by policemen. It's like, in some way, the fictional has punched through into the real, visitors to our reality coming from a secondary, fictional, reality. I'm sure there's a fairly long history of this, take for example Reagan and his 'Star Wars' programme, the fact that Florida elected The Terminator rather than a real person, the way that the British Space Programme was held aloft on the wings of Dan Dare...

I think the Situationist maxim 'Take Your Dreams For Reality' is a double edged sword here, especially politically. Introducing the fictional into political situations leads to the carrying over of feelings attached to a fictional object into feelings about the real world... The Situationists, Debord especially, believed in creating ruptures in the flow of society with art and irrationality, small autonomous actions that call into question the suppositions that common sense is based on. It makes me think of an old EC comics story from the fifties where a cute glove puppet of a crocodile becomes president of the United States.

Imagine that the Daleks really were a political force... Where would they fit in? Who would they support?

That aside, seeing the Daleks in mundane circumstances is always terrific. Archeology of the Future remembers a Sunday morning in Lancaster as a child, glancing down an alley way near the castle and seeing a Dalek, quiet and stealthy, rattling across the cobbles. Maybe a manifestation of longing for something unearthly to happen, or a sherbet fountain induced hallucination, this event underlined that the Dalek casing is a thoroughly British design classic, as much part of the landscape of our cities as Minis, red post boxes and system built housing developments.

Thinking about it, the Dalek on the cobbles is my own version of Robby in the Suburbs, a point where Science Fiction and ordinary events meet, causing some kind of rip in time and space that causes fantasy to spill out like a modern version of Pandora's Box.

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