When presented with the script for last Saturday’s epic Asylum of the Daleks Doctor Who Producer Marcus Wilson didn’t so much punch the air in excitement, more like slammed his head on the desk:

It’s one thing to bring the Daleks back to our screens but uniting every single type of Dalek in the shows history; well that required men made of much sterner stuff.

Speaking to Wired, Wilson has recounted the moments leading up to two of the episodes most challenging scenes; the Asylum and the more grandiose Parliament set.

Wrangling Daleks, the crew put out a carrion call to the BBC, exhibitors, renovated a few battle damaged troops and, most importantly, the fans – whose dedication to build exact replicas meant they could stand up to the scrutiny of a HD close up:

Filling out the other hundreds and thousands of loyal drones was the powerful Solid Angle rendering software, Arnold, a batch renderer that allows you to render multiples and multiples of Daleks that Wilson comments would not have been achievable years ago on a television schedule.

However, to render all those pixelated pepper pots, there had to be Daleks present on set:

One of those ‘poor guys’ is Barnaby Edwards, who along with Nicholas Pegg, has been the principle operators since the show returned in 2005; faced the unique challenge of mimicking the little tricks previous operators to get an authentic Dalek performance:

Who would have thought managing an army of Daleks could be so tough? Well, other than Davros?