The Man Who Invented the Daleks Read online

  The house was Lynsted Park, a mansion dating back to Elizabethan times, complete with the crypt of what had been a family chapel, standing in 35 acres of ground near Sittingbourne, Kent, and it was purchased in the summer of 1964, just in time for Nation to celebrate his thirty-fourth birthday with a party. ‘He threw good parties,’ remembered Doctor Who actress Carole Ann Ford, who went on that occasion, though her chief memory was of his excitement at having a swimming pool in the garden, and then discovering that ‘it was full of rubbish’. Deb Boultwood went to a later party with her father, Dave Freeman, and reflected the general impression that Nation was enjoying his new-found wealth: ‘They had loads of champagne and food, and there was Roger Moore in a blue jumpsuit with Luisa Mattioli. And Linda Thorson and Patrick Macnee and all these people. It’s one of my happiest memories. I think we stayed till dawn before we drove back; Terry and Kate were very good hosts.’

  It was a time when a new, supposedly meritocratic, showbiz aristocracy was emerging from popular culture in Britain, an era when pop stars and photographers, designers and hairdressers were being courted and celebrated by the media. Nation was, if not a member of this aristocracy, at least a peripheral part of their world, embodying the rewards that talent and (in his case) enduring dedication could bring. After nearly a decade of trying to make ends meet in London as a writer, he was determined to enjoy his moment in the sun. ‘He sort of invented a life for himself,’ was Brian Clemens’s perception of Nation in the 1960s. ‘He wore wonderful Liberty-print shirts. He looked American. He was a bit flamboyant and he drove a big American car for a while. And when he swapped that, he had an open E-Type. He was a bit of a poseur.’ As the Guardian put it in January 1966: ‘He is proud of his material success, of his country house and the nearby cottages he has bought for his parents and his wife’s mother and father.’ In fact, Nation was spending less time at Lynsted Park than he might have wished; pressure of work meant that he mostly lived in a flat in Swiss Cottage in North London, not far from the Hampstead flat that he had recently vacated, supposedly to move to the country. His own memory of the period was the way that the Daleks seemed to be taking over his career: ‘They became such a large business concern in their own right that I had very little opportunity to do much else.’

  In all the noise and excitement of Dalekmania, it was sometimes possible to forget that the Daleks were not officially supposed to be the stars of the show. The BBC as an organisation was, of course, earning as much as Nation from the merchandising, but he was the only individual from Doctor Who to benefit directly from the bonanza. As the extent of the marketing enterprise became clear, Raymond P. Cusick asked his boss: ‘Is any of this money coming my way? I got an answer the following week, and that was: No!’ As a BBC employee, Cusick was entitled to nothing more than his salary for having produced the original Dalek design, though he was later given ‘an ex-gratia payment of £100, which after tax came to £80 10s 6d’. He left the show in 1966, partly because he felt he was not being given the recognition he deserved: ‘I worked on the programme for three years but quite honestly I got fed up with it. Nobody, apart from my bosses, was actually saying thanks to me.’

  Terrance Dicks insisted that there was no resentment among the other Doctor Who writers then or later about Nation’s wealth: ‘Envy, I think, not resentment. You thought: good luck to him.’ But there was a very real danger that the series itself might get swallowed up by the burgeoning Dalek empire, a fact of which the production team were well aware. Their concern was presumably the reason why the press were able to report that the creatures would definitely be killed off in ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’, and that this time it would be for good: ‘this, according to Television Centre, is positively their last appearance.’ When the Daily Mail journalist John Sandilands interviewed Verity Lambert during the run of the serial, he found the message being spelt out very clearly: ‘Tall, dark and shapely, she became positively forbidding when I suggested that the Daleks might one day take over Doctor Who. “I feel in no way obligated to bring them back for a third time even if this present story is a tremendous success,” she said with a noticeable chill.’

  In fact a third story had already been commissioned, though Nation’s own comments suggested that there might be some disagreement between the BBC hierarchy and the programme-makers. ‘I don’t want to bring them back,’ he told the press in December 1964, as the new serial ended. ‘They’ve hit such a level of popularity that nothing they do can be quite as popular again. The Beatles and pop groups have dropped a bit in popularity, and the Daleks seem to have filled the gap. I can’t see them hitting this level for much longer. But what can one do? I don’t want the Daleks back, the BBC does. They’ve insisted on it.’

  If this had indeed been the swansong for the Daleks, they would at least have gone out on a high, for ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’ was one of the best scripts Nation was to contribute to the series. It was written at weekends, he later explained, because he was busy at his day job, writing episodes of The Saint, during the week, and consequently there was a two-month gap between the delivery of the proposed storyline and the finished scripts; he still insisted, however, that it took him only eight hours to write each episode.

  The first problem to be solved was bringing the creatures back from the extinction to which he had consigned them. There had been precedents for such resuscitations, of course, most notably in the case of Sherlock Holmes, who was killed off by Arthur Conan Doyle in the 1893 story ‘The Final Problem’ before making a return in ‘The Empty House’ a decade later. Then too it had been public demand that forced the change of heart, and Doyle dealt with the issue by revealing that Holmes had not actually died in his struggle with Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls, but had gone into hiding for a couple of years. In between those two stories, however, Doyle had published the novel The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901), set retrospectively before Holmes’s disappearance, and this was the model that Nation chose to follow. ‘I remembered Conan Doyle’s problem with Sherlock Holmes,’ he later explained, and he wrote in a simple lesson in time travel, delivered by the Doctor: ‘What happened on Skaro was a million years ahead of us in the future. What we’re seeing now is about the middle history of the Daleks.’ It was the first time that one Doctor Who storyline had deliberately referenced another, a toe in the water of continuity, even if for Nation at this stage it was simply a neat solution to an immediate problem. Having wrapped that up nicely, he got on with making the creatures even more scary than before by bringing them into our own world.

  The story opens under a semi-derelict bridge, on which there is a poster bearing the enigmatic and sinister message: EMERGENCY REGULATIONS: IT IS FORBIDDEN TO DUMP BODIES INTO THE RIVER. A man appears, tearing away in anguish at the helmet encasing his head. He walks down some steps and plunges into the river, apparently committing suicide. It’s an instantly arresting image, topped only by the closing shot of the first episode: we’re back at the same point on the river – which we now know is the Thames – and, as we watch, a Dalek emerges slowly and menacingly from beneath the waters, its weapons pointing directly at the camera.

  Having delayed the appearance of a Dalek until the final shot of the opening episode in the previous storyline, Nation repeated the trick here to what should have been startling effect. Except, of course, that the massive blaze of pre-publicity was such that the revelation of a Dalek was never going to be a shock; apart from anything else, the front cover of the Radio Times that week had been given over to the show, heralding the return of the monsters. As a result the late arrival was distressing for all the wrong reasons. ‘A howl of anguish went up all over Britain,’ reported the press. ‘Angry viewers protested that the Dalek’s appearance was far too brief; that children who had waited months for another sign of the monsters were weeping and refusing to go to bed.’ A BBC spokesperson admitted: ‘Our switchboard was flooded with calls from viewers who thought the Daleks would be on for the major part of
the programme.’ Undeterred, Nation was to make the shock reveal in the final scene something of a signature for his Dalek tales.

  It transpires that we are in London in the year 2164, exactly two hundred years into the future, and that Earth has been taken over by the Daleks. Some humans have been brainwashed to act as the occupying force’s henchmen – these are the Robomen, one of whom we saw in the opening scene – while others have formed a determined, if largely ineffective, resistance. It would be difficult to see this as being anything other than a development of the Nazi associations of the Daleks, an extension of that theme into an invasion of Britain (for, despite the title, we don’t leave south-east England). The serial’s director, Richard Martin, was more than aware of the connections: ‘Terry and all of us who were making it were very influenced by the Second World War, because those images and those wrecks were still abundant. There were still bits of London where you could find the weeds growing, that they hadn’t rebuilt. So when I was looking for locations, and when he was describing locations, he was describing the stuff that we had intimately known during the Second World War.’

  It was an impression reinforced by key scenes over the course of the six episodes. Daleks swagger – inasmuch as Daleks can swagger – around London landmarks like Trafalgar Square and the Albert Memorial; human beings are used as slave labour in a mine, under the direction of uniformed Robomen; and there is a genuinely shocking scene when Barbara and Jenny, a member of the resistance, having escaped from London into the country and found refuge in a cottage, are betrayed to the Daleks by the two elderly women who live there. ‘We’re old, child,’ one of the women tells Barbara in a deleted passage from the original script. ‘Times are difficult. There’s only one law now – survive.’ And just in case there might be any mistake, in the last episode the commander of the Daleks issues the ultimate orders: ‘Arrange for the extermination of all human beings – the final solution.’

  Nation was not the only person pursuing such imagery. A coincidence of timing had seen the release a month earlier of Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s film It Happened Here, which had been eight years in the making. The movie’s portrayal of what Britain would have looked like in the aftermath of a Nazi invasion in 1940 bore some striking, if accidental, parallels with ‘Invasion’, not only in broad terms – both are set some years after the invasion has actually taken place – but in particular scenes: the shots, for example, of German troops around key London landmarks, including the same two sites of Trafalgar Square and the Albert Memorial. (Nation had also suggested, but didn’t get, Daleks at the statue of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, in symbolic destruction of existing children’s fiction, and – a fine piece of self-aggrandisement – Daleks invading the BBC Television Centre.) The central figure in It Happened Here is a nurse named Pauline Murray, who a doctor friend tries to recruit into the resistance, using arguments not dissimilar to those employed in ‘The Daleks’: ‘The appalling thing about fascism is that you’ve got to use fascist methods to get rid of it.’ But Pauline is worn out by standing up for her principles, and has no appetite for a prolonged struggle: ‘My point is we’ve fought a war and lost it. There’s been a terrible lot of suffering on both sides, so why prolong that suffering?’ Many of the same issues had also turned up in Robert Muller’s novel, The Lost Diaries of Albert Smith, published earlier in the summer of 1964, which told the story of contemporary Britain sliding into fascism, while Gillian Freeman’s The Leader, on a similar theme but a smaller canvas, was to come the following year.

  This was not the image of the country that was being propagated for international consumption. London was fast approaching its anointment as the swinging capital of the modern world, but that development could hardly be deduced from these works, or from ‘Invasion’ – the scene of Daleks in Trafalgar Square could only have been less swinging if they’d actually blown up a red double-decker bus. And reality was no more encouraging than fiction; when the production crew arrived at 6 a.m. one Sunday morning to film the Daleks, they had to move out of shot not the dedicated followers of fashion stumbling homewards after a night on the town, but several vagrants who were sleeping rough in the West End. The General Election in October 1964 had seen the removal of an ageing, tired Conservative government, to be replaced by a Labour Party under Harold Wilson, who made great play of his meritocratic credentials, his comparative youth (he was the right side of fifty) and, therefore, his alleged solidarity with the thrusting new generation that was threatening to transform the popular culture of the western world. But already doubts were being raised within that same cultural movement about Britain’s self-image; there was a stark discrepancy between, on the one hand, Wilson’s vision of a country reforged in the white heat of the technological revolution and, on the other, Nation’s grim portrayal of the English countryside overrun by Daleks.

  And some of it was very grim indeed, especially in the context of a teatime children’s show. Some viewers found even the opening scene, with the Roboman committing suicide, too much to take. A woman from Uxbridge wrote to the BBC to complain: ‘My two children aged 5 and 7 were quite looking forward to seeing more adventures with these weirdly amusing robots. Unfortunately I found the beginning of the series so horrifying as to compare with the Quatermass series of some years ago where at least it was for adults.’ She spared the children further horrors by switching off, but still, ‘the little they did see caused them considerable distress at bedtime’. For those who stayed with the serial, there was more horror to come. The fratricidal reality of a society under military occupation achieves literal expression when a resistance fighter named Larry discovers that his brother has become a Roboman; in an ensuing fight between the two, they slay each other. As David, another member of the resistance, warns Susan: ‘Not all human beings are automatically allies. There are people who will kill for a few scraps of food.’

  Meanwhile the debate about pacifism in the first serial has a successor in the shape of an argument, spread over two episodes, about how best to respond to the Dalek occupation. ‘What’s the point in running away all the time?’ asks the history teacher Barbara, and Jenny replies: ‘I’m not running. I’m surviving, that’s all.’ She later spells out what she sees as Barbara’s illusions: ‘You’ve got this romantic idea about resistance. There is nothing heroic about dying. There’s no point in throwing lives away just to prove a principle.’

  The idea of surviving, of simply living in the face of overwhelming odds, was a concept to which Nation was repeatedly to return, and in his original script for ‘Invasion’ there was a more explicit statement of the theme than finally appeared. ‘The world you have come into is one where friendships mean very little,’ David was to have told Susan. ‘There’s been no place for sentiment in society. Just staying alive is the most anybody has time for.’ Susan reflects on her own experience of extreme situations, the positive element of how they can build stronger ties between people: ‘The four of us faced dangers together and it seemed to give us a greater understanding of one another.’ So it was to prove here, for the story ends, after the defeat of the Daleks, with Susan staying behind on the future Earth to help David in the reconstruction of society, a prospect they have already contemplated. ‘One day this will be all over,’ says David. ‘It’ll mean a new start.’ Susan is enthused by the challenge: ‘A new start? Rebuilding a planet from the very beginning. It’s a wonderful idea.’ One might see here the germ of the idea that would become Survivors.

  There were other elements that would recur in Nation’s work, including the central conflict between a totalitarian state and a scattered resistance movement. And the resistance is painted in the same, extravagantly idealist colours that would become a feature of Nation’s writing. The group we meet are led by a wheelchair-bound scientist named Dortmun, who – having developed a hand-held bomb that he believes will be effective against Daleks – organises a raid on a ship at their launching pad. As it turns out, the bombs are completely ineffectiv
e against the Daleks’ casings, but it is in any case a deeply flawed plan; this is intended as a symbolic strike that will galvanise other resistance groups, but how anyone would hear about it when the Daleks control all the communication systems is far from clear. Here, as elsewhere, one gets the impression that while Nation’s enthusiasm might be of use to the leaders of an underground movement, they would be loath to turn to him for practical advice. Like Barbara, he often seems seduced by ‘this romantic idea about resistance’.

  None of these themes, of course, is allowed to get in the way of what is at its heart a thundering good tale about terrifying aliens invading our world and being seen off. As a piece of television, it also benefited hugely from a move to a more spacious studio and from the extensive location shoots used for the first time in a Doctor Who story; consequently it looks much bigger than ‘The Daleks’ or ‘The Keys of Marinus’. Much more than the first story, this felt like a major piece of work, a modern myth in the making. In particular, the scenes of Dortmun being hurriedly pushed in his wheelchair through deserted London streets, with the knowledge that Daleks might be lurking around any and every corner, were disturbing in a way not previously seen on British television, though it had been fore-shadowed in literature with the chapter ‘Dead London’ in The War of the Worlds. (Nation suggested getting footage of a depopulated London from the 1950 film Seven Days to Noon, a thriller about a scientist trying to force the country to abandon nuclear weapons, which suggests another source of his vision.)