Vintage 1994 Doctor Who Daleks Foil Trading Card 🛸 Card 2 of 6

Daleks on Westminster Bridge? 🛸 Vintage 1994 Doctor Who Foil Trading Card, Daleks! Foil 2

Size: 2 1/2" x 3 1/2"

🛸 Four Daleks rolling across Westminster Bridge with the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben behind them. It's one of the great Doctor Who pictures, and here it is on a 1994 Cornerstone foil card, DALEKS! Foil 2, new old stock.

🔍 What's On It

The front is the bridge photo in a gold-sepia tone, framed in a swirly red, orange and gold foil border, with DALEKS! across the bottom, the Cornerstone CC logo up top and the Doctor Who diamond logo in the corner. The back is headed Designer of the Daleks and tells how Raymond P. Cusick turned the Daleks of Terry Nation's script into a real design: the "pepperpot" shape, the operator sitting down inside, fully enclosed but able to see out, and the skirt that hid the wheels, and the actor's legs. At the bottom it's marked FOIL 2, with © 1994, Cornerstone Communications, Inc., Doctor Who Diamond Logo © BBC 1973, Licensed by BBC Enterprises, and Daleks © Terry Nation, 1994.

🌉 The Dalek Invasion of Earth

That bridge picture comes from 1964. For The Dalek Invasion of Earth, broadcast on BBC1 in six weekly parts from November 21 to December 26, 1964, the crew took the Daleks out into London and filmed them at Westminster Bridge, Trafalgar Square and the Royal Albert Hall. It was the show's first big location shoot, and the shot of Daleks on the bridge in front of Parliament has been famous ever since.

🧂 The Man Who Designed Them

Raymond Cusick was born in Lambeth, London, in 1928, and joined the BBC as a staff designer in 1960. In 1963 the Dalek job was meant to go to a young Ridley Scott, but his schedule didn't work out and it landed on Cusick. Terry Nation's script said very little about what they looked like, only that they should glide along "like the Georgian state dancers."

The story goes that Cusick worked it out over lunch with Bill Roberts, whose company Shawcraft built the Daleks. He picked up a pepper pot, slid it across the table, and said that's how it would move, with no visible means. By some accounts he could never remember whether it was the pepper pot or the salt, and the card hedges the same way, "a pepperpot or salt cellar."

Cusick was on a salary, so while Terry Nation drew royalties on every Dalek toy, Cusick got none. He left Doctor Who in 1966, and the BBC did give him a one-off payment for the Daleks, about £100 by one account and a few hundred pounds by another. He stayed with the BBC until 1988, and he died in Horsham, West Sussex, in 2013, at 84.

🃏 Cornerstone's Doctor Who Cards

Cornerstone Communications put out four series of Doctor Who cards from 1994 to 1996. This foil is from the second series, which ran 110 base cards numbered 111 to 220, with nine Premier cards whose backs make a picture of William Hartnell when you lay them out in order, and six foil cards, three for the Daleks and three for the Cybermen. New Zealand's Doctor Who fan club reviewed Series 2 in March 1995 and called it a vast improvement on the first.

📏 Details

• Vintage 1994 Cornerstone Doctor Who DALEKS! foil card, Foil 2, Designer of the Daleks
• Daleks on Westminster Bridge with Parliament and Big Ben, gold-sepia photo in a foil border
• Standard card size, about 2 1/2" x 3 1/2", New Old Stock
• You'll get one card like the ones shown

🖼️ Slip it in a top loader for your Doctor Who shelf, finish off your Series 2 foils, or give it to the Whovian who still hides behind the sofa.