The Man Who Invented the Daleks Read online

  Much of the plot is gleeful nonsense – the Daleks are trying to extract the molten core of Earth so that they can use the planet as an intergalactic spaceship – and the denouement that sees their evil plan thwarted is confused at best, but Nation is clearly enjoying himself, and the absurdities are less intrusive than might be expected. The one exception is perhaps the Slyther, an alien creature kept as a pet by the Black Dalek, who is heading the mining operation. (The idea of a hierarchy within Dalek society was beginning to emerge.) As it appears on screen, the Slyther is patently a man in a monster suit, looking like a homemade approximation of a deep sea sloth; though it’s supposed to be a terrifying beast that eats humans, it gets killed without adding anything of any value to the story. It was, however, meant to be more impressive than that. Drawing on his radio experience, Nation was keen to convey the creature essentially by sound – ‘this awful panting, gasping sound’ – and his original conception of ‘a huge, black jellyfish’ that we never quite see, just ‘the hint of a shapeless, pulsating mass’, had a hint of Lovecraftian menace that was never realised. Even so, the creature prompted a number of complaints to the BBC about it being too horrific for children’s television.

  As was already characteristic of Nation’s writing, there are echoes of other stories. There is, for example, a hint of John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids in the account of how the Dalek invasion was preceded by a cosmic storm of meteorites, and by a plague that killed off a large part of the population: ‘The Daleks were up in the sky, just waiting for Earth to get weaker. Whole continents of people were wiped out: Asia, Africa, South America. They used to say the Earth had a smell of death about it.’ Likewise the Daleks’ plan to burrow to the Earth’s core is reminiscent of Arthur Conan Doyle’s When the World Screamed (1928), in which Professor Challenger drills through the Earth’s crust to prove his theory that the planet is actually a living organism in its own right. The result of his experiment is a series of explosions and volcanic eruptions all over the world, just as at the end of ‘Invasion’, and the Doctor’s comment could well have come from the mouth of Challenger himself: ‘The Earth rebelled and destroyed the invaders.’

  The story ends with the departure of Susan, Carole Ann Ford having become bored with the role. ‘I just felt my part wasn’t really going anywhere,’ she explained. ‘It seemed to me that the people coming in – our visitors – were always getting much more interesting things to do than I was.’ Behind the scenes, David Whitaker also left the production team, though his work with Nation on the Daleks was to continue. His replacement was Dennis Spooner, another client of Associated London Scripts, who had earlier been introduced to Whitaker by Nation as a possible writer for Doctor Who. Spooner specialised in historical tales, including ‘The Reign of Terror’ and ‘The Romans’, pointing out, as he took over the job of script editor: ‘Writers have to be divided into those who can cope with trips back into the past and those who can write adventures set in the future. Very few can do both.’ He too was to contribute to the emerging mythology of the Daleks.

  Meantime ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’, fuelled by the Dalekmania of Christmas 1964, was a major triumph, bigger even than ‘The Daleks’ had been. For the first time Doctor Who broke into the weekly top ten of the most watched programmes, and its position as the country’s favourite science fiction show was assured. That second story broke new ground for the series: the first monsters to return, the first invasion of Earth, the first attempt to establish continuity between two different serials. There was no guarantee that it would work, for much of this was without precedent in science fiction on British television. Quatermass may have enjoyed periodic revivals, but it was the humans not the aliens who were the common factor. Nor was there a parallel in the movies, with the possible exception of the alien children in Village of the Damned and Children of the Damned (1964), adapted from John Wyndham’s The Midwich Cuckoos, though the second film is a straightforward sequel.

  But the extraordinary wave of Dalekmania made the triumph seem like a foregone conclusion, and it was clear at the end of ‘Invasion’ that this was not the end of the story; the Doctor had encountered them twice now in their history and we knew that he would do so again. Nation was on a roll, but then he never admitted to harbouring any doubts. Even before the serial was broadcast, he was positive and confident of its success. ‘I met Terry after we’d shot about three of them,’ Richard Martin remembered. ‘We had a showing, and he was over the moon. He was a lovely, ebullient, rounded sort of Welshman, and he clasped his hand around my back and said: “Well, boy, we had to come back big, and by golly we did!”’

  Chapter Seven

  Action Men

  When the first ITV franchises were handed out in the mid 1950s, while Terry Nation was still struggling to establish himself as a writer of radio comedy, one of the big winners was ATV, which won the right to broadcast to London at weekends and the Midlands during the week. Fronted by Lew Grade, the theatre impresario and – as he never failed to remind people – the former Charleston Champion of the World, ATV became over the next decade the most powerful and profitable of the independent companies, pioneering practices that would become standard in the British industry. It was also to provide gainful employment for Nation through much of the 1960s and into the 1970s.

  At this stage a requirement was placed on the new channel that fourteen per cent of its broadcasting should be home-grown programmes, and Grade responded by commissioning – via his company ITC (Incorporated Television Company) – material from independent production companies to fill the quota. He struck gold immediately with The Adventures of Robin Hood, made by Sapphire Films and first broadcast in 1955, which proved so successful that it was rapidly followed by a slew of other swashbuckling series set in a fictionalised family-friendly history, including The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel (1956), The Count of Monte Cristo (1956) and Ivanhoe (1958). Even more influential than its subject matter, however, were the commercial opportunities that Robin Hood opened up. Grade sold the show to the CBS network in America, thereby providing a blueprint that ATV was to spend much of the next two decades striving to emulate with other productions. So fixated on American sales were these shows that Sir Lancelot was even made in colour, a full ten years before the first experiments in colour broadcasting were made in Britain.

  Much of this enterprise was dominated by the charismatic figure of Grade himself. Born in the southern Ukraine in 1906 as Lev Winogradsky, he was just five years old when his family fled the anti-Jewish pogroms and arrived in Stepney in London’s East End. He and his younger brothers, Boris and Laszlo (later known as Bernard Delfont and Leslie Grade respectively), found an escape from the poverty of their childhood in the world of show business. ‘If you didn’t want to starve, you earned money,’ remembered Bernard. ‘It all bred a desire to achieve something better. That feeling came as naturally as breathing.’ All three brothers were to become hugely powerful players in British entertainment, but it was Lew who really captured the popular imagination. A natural showman who never displayed less than absolute faith in whatever he did, he revelled in the public role that came with his reincarnation as a television mogul, even though he faced considerable hostility from the outset. ‘Is this the man you want to choose the programmes for your children?’ asked the Daily Express, with just a whiff of anti-semitism, over a picture of Grade looking the very embodiment of the Jewish plutocrat, complete with his trademark eight-inch cigar.

  Grade displayed a personal, paternal concern for his shows, though he had little interest in the mechanics of making programmes; Roger Moore remembered him paying just one visit to the set of The Saint throughout its seven-year run. His preference was rather for the wheeling and dealing involved in selling the work to other companies in the ITV network and, preferably, abroad, priding himself on his buccaneering salesmanship. He boasted in 1966, for example, that all three American networks were interested in a new series, to be titled The Champions, which h
ad not even been cast, let alone filmed: ‘We have two scripts so far,’ he explained to the press, revelling in his ability to make bricks without straw. His other great boast was that he never broke his word, so that – in a reversal of Samuel Goldwyn’s famous formulation – a verbal contract was worth more than the paper it was written on. He was in many ways the perfect television executive: impulsive in his commissions, intensely loyal and supportive, and with no great appetite for interference. Consequently he received the same loyalty and support from those in his employ. ‘Lew was a wonderful human being,’ said Moore simply.

  After five years of heroic histories, ITC moved into new territory in 1959 with an adaptation of Edgar Wallace’s thriller characters, The Four Just Men, followed by Danger Man, a secret agent series starring Patrick McGoohan, and by the television debut of The Saint. The latter was something of a coup, for the character of Simon Templar, the gentleman vigilante known internationally as the Saint, was already one of the most successful British cultural exports, having appeared in more than thirty books, in several movies, in cartoon strips and in radio series in both Britain and America (where he was most famously played by Vincent Price). Indeed his creator, Leslie Charteris, had moved to America in the 1930s, as the Saint’s fame began to spread across the Atlantic, and subsequently became a US citizen. Templar had never, however, appeared on television, though it was not for want of trying. Most recently, Roger Moore, the star of Ivanhoe, had been advised by his father when that series ended that, in the interests of controlling his future career, he should buy the television rights to one of the old action heroes, either John Creasey’s Toff, or the Saint, and he ‘made a half-hearted attempt at acquiring the rights’ but without success. Charteris, it appeared, had one overriding concern: ‘Money – I have had negotiations with many people at various times but I held out for more money.’

  The men who came up with the right offer turned out to be the British production team of Robert S. Baker and Monty Berman, whose previous cinematic work included Blood of the Vampire (1958), The Flesh and the Fiends (1960) and The Hellfire Club (1961). ‘After many years of noble and lofty-minded resistance,’ explained Charteris, ‘I finally broke down and sold the Saint to the Philistines of television.’ Having failed to sell the idea of a series to Associated Rediffusion, Baker and Berman approached Lew Grade at ATV. The character of the fantasy hero had an instant appeal for Grade, who defined his approach to television in distinctly un-Reithian terms. (‘I am not here to educate the public,’ he insisted, ‘I am here to entertain them.’) With his blessing, Simon Templar made his television debut in October 1962, in the same week that Dr No, the first James Bond movie, was released. Despite the prior claims of Danger Man and The Avengers, the latter already into its second season, this was the true start of the action hero genre that would dominate 1960s popular culture, much of it harking back to the style of the 1920s and 1930s.

  The Saint, indeed, was of precisely that vintage, having first appeared in Meet the Tiger in 1929. Simon Templar was a wealthy daredevil about town, cosmopolitan enough to explain to a French-Canadian waiter – in his own language – how to mix a perfect Rumhattan cocktail, while roguish enough to steal the man’s wallet on the way out of the bar. Conceived as a latter-day Robin Hood, he was a freelance campaigner for justice in a society riddled with corruption and career criminals, a man who didn’t baulk at breaking the law if it was in a worthy cause. He was ‘a terror to the underworld and a thorn in the side of Scotland Yard, a gay crusader in modern dress’, and his enemies tended to be upper-class domestic tyrants, confidence tricksters, crooked businessmen and anyone else who might be tempted to place a damsel in a position of distress. He sided with the oppressed, but remained aristocratically arrogant and anti-democratic, with a particular distaste for nouveau riche types who don’t know their place in society. At times he would admit to a contempt not only for modern society but for most of humanity, and despite his leaden attempt at humour, the message was clear: ‘The human race is a repulsive, dull, bloated, ill-conditioned and ill-favoured mass of dimly conscious meat, the chief justification for whose existence is that it provides a contrasting background against which my beauty and spiritual perfection can shine.’

  He was thus a step further on from his near-contemporary, Sapper’s creation Bulldog Drummond, whose exploits filled books from 1920 to 1954. Like Templar a wealthy crime-fighter, independent of the police or other agency of the state, Drummond was above all a simple man of action with little discernible intellect, who leapt from one implausible scenario to another, including – to take random examples from just the first book in the series – an acid bath, a deadly tarantula, even a gorilla loose in an English country garden (the latter Drummond slays with his bare hands). Templar, on the other hand, while retaining much of this spirit of exotic adventure, had ostentatious trappings of sophistication and style, an ability to concoct complicated plans of action on the spur of the moment, and – after the carefree nonchalance of his earlier years – an air of slightly pained world-weariness that could only be stirred into action by the sight of injustice or of a woman in need of assistance. He was part of society, even of high society, but somehow remained aloof from it, an outsider rather than an outlaw. He was, in short, the prototype of Ian Fleming’s James Bond.

  Much of this survived into the screen incarnation of the Saint presented by Robert S. Baker and Monty Berman. Three decades on from his creation, he was still an international playboy who revelled in conspicuous consumption, still a deadly foe of wrong-doers, even though he himself enjoyed an ambivalent relationship with the law. Charteris wanted David Niven as the star of the series (Niven was also Ian Fleming’s preferred choice to play James Bond), while Grade was keen to use Patrick McGoohan, but Baker and Berman chose instead to give the role to Roger Moore, a younger, more casual, less overtly English presence. Among his other credentials, Moore had, following Ivanhoe, just starred in The Alaskans and Maverick on American television, gaining valuable exposure in the target export market; he was also a client of the management agency run by Lew Grade with his brother Leslie.

  It was an inspired piece of casting. Moore looked superb in the role, boasting a highly lacquered, swept-back hairdo and an enviable ability to wear beautifully cut clothes, while his deceptively easy acting style allowed him to inhabit the character of Templar and yet maintain a slightly amused distance from him. The result was the definitive portrayal of the character, providing all the thrills and excitement a viewer could ask for, without demanding that any of it be taken too seriously; he was always a raised eyebrow away from commitment. ‘We wanted to do the show slightly tongue in cheek,’ noted Baker, and Simon Templar started every programme with a direct address to camera, welcoming us into his world while establishing a light ironic tone which ran as an undercurrent through the ensuing episode. The show’s American script editor, Harry W. Junkin, once claimed that there were three reasons why The Saint was such a successful series: Roger Moore, Roger Moore and Roger Moore.

  Changes were made, of course, a slight smoothing of the darker side of the original. In the old days, for example, Templar used to carry a knife strapped to his forearm; as the novelist Colin Watson noted, this was uncharacteristic in an action hero of the pre-war years, when the convention was clear: ‘only foreigners and very low-grade criminals used knives for fighting purposes.’ The practice was dropped for the television series. ‘I made a decision that knives were definitely out,’ remembered Baker; ‘he had to fight by the Marquis of Queensberry rules.’ Such weapons were to be again restricted to those with no sense of honour and fair play, though the change didn’t go unremarked even within the show itself. In one of Terry Nation’s scripts, a French villain (we can tell that he’s a villain because he puts his cigarette out in Templar’s drink) pulls a knife from his jacket sleeve with a dramatic flourish. ‘I used to carry one like that,’ shrugs Templar. ‘Found it frayed my cuffs.’

  Also played down was the implici
t xenophobia that permeated much of the adventure literature of the 1930s. Charteris, born Leslie Yin, the son of a Chinese father and English mother, was much less inclined than many of his contemporaries to break out into explicit racism, but there was still an occasional tendency to refer ‘to the birds with the fat cigars and names ending in -heim and -stein who juggle the finances of this cock-eyed world’, or to ‘foreign-looking birds with ugly mugs’. The latent anti-semitism, which attracted little or no attention at the time, looked horribly inappropriate in a world coloured by the Holocaust, whilst a fine line had to be trodden, in a series aimed at overseas sales, between a celebration of traditional British culture and anything that smacked of superiority It was possible, however, to detect an implied nostalgia for imperial dominance, a sense of using the past as a stick with which to beat the present. Templar ends a 1967 episode, Michael Pertwee’s ‘When Spring Is Sprung’, by telling his Russian enemies: ‘For some years now the rest of the world has been systematically underestimating the British. To them – you – we are a second-rate power. Which means that everything about us is second rate.’

  This belief in Britain’s post-war decline, in the enfeeblement of the national character, and in the need for heroes who might keep the flame of freedom alive, was a common theme in the popular fiction of the time, but it was not a theme to which Terry Nation found himself attracted; in his scripts for the series, the Saint simply didn’t express such opinions. More broadly, although his heroes were almost exclusively British, either overtly or – as with Doctor Who and Blake’s 7 – by depiction, and although he drew heavily on the pre-war tradition, there was never a trace of jingoism in his work. There is even a suggestion that nostalgia for the bold days of exploits and exploration is misplaced. ‘We’re the last of the adventurers,’ a character named Miles Hallin boasts to Templar, trying to ingratiate himself. ‘Living for excitement is a lost art.’ The Saint is decidedly unimpressed, reviving the argument that Richard Hannay had made forty years earlier in The Island of Sheep. ‘I wouldn’t go that far,’ he replies dismissively, but Hallin won’t let it go: ‘Why, sure it is. Today, kids get their kicks by taking pills. They don’t hunt big game or climb mountains. How can they know what life is about unless they’ve looked at death?’ We’re not much surprised when Hallin turns out to be a bad sort.