Speaking ill of the dead.

When a person dies it is always deemed customary to gloss over the mistakes that the deceased made and concentrate on the positive achievements of their life. For example, when people talk about someone like Jesus, they talk about the fact that he fed 5000 people with one fish and one loaf of bread, they dont talk about the hundreds of sheckles of damage he caused when he smashed up a sunday market. When people talk about Hitler, they talk of him glowingly, the fact that he rescued Germany's ecconomy after a long and difficult war, defended his nation against the oppressive Versailles Treaty and made the trains run on time. It is rare that you hear anything about Hitlers involvement in the Second World War or the Holocaust.



And the Dogs loved him.

A third example, in what will complete the rule of three is the recently deceased Roy Skelton. Skelton is so imprinted on my childhood, he played a major part in my development. Rainbow is one of the earliest memories in my consciousness, I remember the bear Bungle who stomped around the house naked all day but wore pyjamas to bed.



It is almost impossible to look back to rainbow without feeling anything but warmth, nostalgia and a slight suspicion that 4 male various animals all sharing a house who all shared various aspects of femininity, might have been trying to tell us something.

Anyway, Rainbow's homosexual subtexts are another blog for another day, but in all of Skeltons obituaries jounalists are glossing over a voiceover for one of the most hideous scariest threats to humanity that ever came from the imagination of a british person since the second world war.



Yeah laugh it up, but these things caused nightmares for 2 generations, in no small part due to skeltons voice, he could do annoying bizarre handbag type organism voices but where he really excelled was screaching "EXTERMINATE!" into a voice warping effects unit that left children cowering behind sofas, I would even go as far to say that my dad positioned a specific sofa so I could hide behind when a series of Doctor Who started, simply so I could one day relate to something he did as a child.

Now I'm not someone who watches Doctor Who these days, for me the magic went a long time ago, but I have always had a thing with the Daleks and could never understand why. They couldn't go upstairs, downstairs, and they didn't move very fast.

In no small part the sound effects played a major part in generating fear, Skeltons voice could be fucking scary as well as annoying, the sheer deleberateness of their movement, slow, meticulous, you were always under the impression that they never moved fast because they never needed to. But to truly know what the crux of the fear of the Daleks entailed you have to look at when they were created. They came not long after the second world war, the first truly mechanized war. The Daleks "EXTERMINATE" mantra, was as close as could be to the Nazi ideology of expansion and extermination.



In short, the Daleks are humanoid Panzer's, a weapon of choice of the Nazi's. They were a reminder of nazism, dangerous, destructive but ultimately, defeatable (Doctor Who defeated the Daleks 35 times.)


But beyond that, Skelton was the voice of the Daleks, in essence Skelton was the voice of the Nazi's, the voice of war criminals who indiscriminately murdered millions of Jews, and here are the journalists spitting on the memory of the dead of the holocaust, but its easier to remember him as the voice of zippy isn't it, which is why I'll probably finish this one with a picture of Zippy, seeing as there has been plenty of pics of Nazis and Daleks and bungle in Hawaian get up.



Roy Skelton, Actor, Voiceover artist, war criminal. 1937-2011