What serial was originally planned instead of "The Dead Planet" ("The Daleks")?

[Redfern]

The thread title pretty much spells out the situation. I read somewhere that supposedly a different story was planned to follow the jaunt to prehistoric times with the "Tribe of Gum" trying to rediscover the creation of fire. However, there were issues that forced a delay (or maybe an outright abandonment), so the idea of encountering the mutated descendants of a nuclear holocaust was Bumped" into that slot, becoming episodes 5 through 11.

Was that actually the case or did I merely read unfounded fannish speculation and hearsay? If true, what was the delayed (abandoned?) story and what exactly were the problems with its production. I mean, "The Daleks" was not really a "sitting room drama" which could be produced by building "conventional" sets and retrieving props from BBC storage. Almost everything for that first Dalek story had to be built from scratch, so how did that prove faster, easier or cheaper than the other story?

 

[Brendan Moody]

It was a story called “The Masters of Luxor,” and it was dropped not for cost reasons but because its intended writer, Anthony Coburn, was too busy doing rewrites on “100,000 BC” (and in a larger sense because the producers weren’t enormously enamored of Coburn’s work, which is why he was rewriting the first story). Big Finish eventually released an adaptation of it as part of the Lost Stories line.

 

[Redfern]

Thank you, Brendan! That's probably the fastest I've received not only a reply, but one covering the notable points of my question.

Makes one wonder what would have happened had "...Luxor" been recorded and broadcast instead. Would have "The Daleks" eventually been created anyway, or would Sydney Newman held firm on his original policy of "no bug eyed monsters!"? And, if "The Daleks" had been merely delayed, let alone dropped, would have "Doctor Who" become the long running success it actually did? (That question, I realize, can only have speculative answers.)

 

[Brendan Moody]

The Dalek story existed before The Masters of Luxor was dropped; it was initially planned as the fourth story (after 100,000 BC, The Masters of Luxor, and Marco Polo), then briefly slid back to fifth after an attempt to bring back a serial about the TARDIS crew being miniaturized that had once been planned as the first story (and was eventually realized by a different writer as Planet of Giants) before being brought forward when it was the only thing ready after The Masters of Luxor fell through.

It is interesting to wonder whether a version of the first series with the Dalek story later in the running order would have caught on in the same way.

 

[The Nth Doctor]

For what it's worth, the Big Finish adaptation of The Masters of Luxor (starring Carole Ann Ford and William Russell) is well worth listening. I remember really enjoying the story and dramatization. I don't know enough about the original script (or at least now, I might have at the time I listened to the audio play) to comment how loyal it was in its adaptation. Their Lost Stories line varied on script loyalty from story to story, sometimes reworking the whole thing into something different (not arbitrarily so, there usually was a very good reason for doing so).

 

[Redfern]

Again, thank you for the information. Weird how events unfold. If presented later in the series, "The Daleks" might have been viewed as a "silly romp" a bit like we now perceive "The Web Planet"...provided the show didn't "die" early and was still being discussed today.

EDIT:

Wait, the Big Finish adaptation features Carole Ann Ford and William Russell?! Dang! I'll have to buy it for that glimpse of "what might have been"!

 

[The Nth Doctor]

Yup! All of the Lost Stories entries have the original Doctors and companions whenever possible, except for the one or two stories that were recast to another Doctor (I believe one of the Sixth Doctor entries was originally for another Doctor, but I forget which one). All of the first seven Doctors have at least one entry, where the Sixth Doctor, unsurprisingly, has the most. You can get a good rundown of all of them in this Wikipedia article.

...and I just noticed that two more came out in 2019 and two more coming out next year! I had no idea!

Edit: Oh, wait, I did know about Return of the Cyberman because of the recasting of Sarah Jane and Harry.

 

[diankra]

In hindsight, assuming the same design was used (not a given as the Perfect One is a robot that seems human, perhaps more like Data than a Dalek), the big thing about Masters is that the Doctor seems religious, and pretty much Christian.