Sojourn in Sydney, Day #5 of 6: Opera Of The Daleks (from the aborted 1990 series)

The day began with my helping Scottish Dave move a desk across town from his workplace. This was strangely reminiscent of helping move his house in 2003.

Afterwards he, Fionnuala and myself headed off to see the Sydney Opera House in daylight.

It be an evil-looking building up close, bain't it? We'll return to this point.

Afterwards we headed down to The Domain park for a sort-of rainy open-air concert by the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. Here we discovered that all the best seats had been reserved for VIP guests, so during the interval we, well we, well, well what would you have done? It was raining, and they all got free food for goodness sake.


The theme was, rather loosely, science-fiction, allowing for us to enjoy Star Wars, Holst's Mars and the obligatory closing 1812 Overture with fireworks. Two things to note about this final track:

1. It was sort of a Farscape track, although I think I was the only one present who was aware of this.

2. The fireworks started off beautifully. First a few rockets were let-off from the roof of a nearby skyscraper, beginning a lovely subtle build-up to the final devastation that this piece always excels at. Except that it never got that far. Those few rockets off that building over there - that's yer lot. A month later, Auckland would do it so much better. (6.5/10)

After that, Scottish Dave and Fionnuala headed back home, whilst I carried on back to the Sydney Opera House with Mary-Ann, Sonia, Danny and Rita, the last of whom was now apologising for having insulted Britain's fine tradition of weather on Thursday. Smart girl. By now it was bucketing down. I'm starting to like her.

Finally I stomped in the rain around the full perimeter of the opera house, determined to snap a moody shot of it's rugged features at night. Which brings us back to the start of today's entry. Just why does the Sydney Opera House hold such a fascination for me?

Well, back in 1995, while I was working at the BBC Film and Videotape Library, we received some returned 'lost' Doctor Who footage from Patrick Troughton's debut serial Power Of The Daleks. There was only about 2 minutes of it, as it had survived purely as a trailer that Dalek-creator Terry Nation had put together to try to sell a series about the Daleks to Hollywood with. For reasons that probably died with him in 1997, he'd just taken these stock shots of Daleks from the episode, and intercut them with a big evil alien-looking building to appear to be their base. The building? The then still under construction and hence publicly-hated Sydney Opera House. So was this curious design, supposedly based upon orange peel, intended to look like the Earth of the future, or a building on the Daleks' home-planet of Skaro? I'll let you decide...




Daleks, yesterday.

(day #1 here)
(day #2 here)
(day #3 here)
(day #4 here)
(day #6 here)