The Man Who Invented the Daleks Read online

  For Nation, whose love of adventure tales had been honed on the noble heroism of Biggles in childhood, a figure like the Saint was something of a gift. He had been an impressionable ten-year-old when Terence de Marney began appearing as Simon Templar on Friday evenings on the Forces Programme, around the same time that George Sanders was creating the first great screen incarnation of the character in a series of movies for RKO. He knew this material, and the genre whence it came, intimately, and he displayed considerably more enthusiasm for the idea of writing The Saint than he had shown for Doctor Who. Here, he knew, he would be in his element; even though he was working with characters – and sometimes plots – that were not his own, there was a sense of him coming home with his ITC work. ‘I think he felt more comfortable in this niche,’ commented Beryl Vertue. ‘It was something really new, more his own.’

  Nation’s entry into the world of The Saint came via Harry W. Junkin. ‘I was given a terrible story by Leslie Charteris,’ he recalled. ‘There wasn’t much to it, and very little you could do with it, but I was supposed to adapt it. All those original Saint episodes were supposed to be adapted from Charteris’s stories.’ Evidently his adaptation was successful enough, for he was then commissioned to write more, and turned out nine scripts for the show in 1964–5. The stories ranged across the globe, from South America to London, from Haiti to the grouse moors of Scotland, and covered a similarly diverse range of subjects: there were revolutionary groups, voodoo priests, blackmailers, murderers and jewel thieves. And, despite his complaints about the source material, most of his adaptations stayed close to the originals.

  The 1964 episode ‘Jeannine’, for example, relocated the action from New Orleans to Paris and added a minor sub-plot about ‘a couple of rather unsavoury French hoods’, but the essential story – of Templar and others trying to steal a pearl necklace – remained intact. He did, however, make a change to the denouement.

  Early on in Charteris’ story, Templar tells a police officer the tale of Cleopatra giving Caesar a goblet of wine into which she drops a pearl; it promptly dissolves and is lost for ever, thus demonstrating the extent of her wealth and power. Having subsequently acquired the necklace, he then confounds the police by reminding them of the tale and directing them towards the oxtail casserole he has spent all day preparing. In the casserole, heavy with red wine, the police find just a two-foot-long loop of thread, and they troop out despondently, having lost any desire to pursue what they know will be a fruitless search. The Saint, of course, is bluffing; he has the pearls in his pocket and he’s merely slipped an empty string into the stew. In a final twist, it’s revealed that ‘the story of pearls being dissolved in wine was strictly a fable, without a grain of scientific truth’. Nation’s version garbles the sequence of events, missing the point of the casserole bluff, but it also omits that last detail about it all being ‘strictly a fable’, conveniently leaving the idea in the public domain, available for future use. And he did reuse it in ‘Legacy of Death’, a 1968 episode of The Avengers, in which a pearl is successfully dissolved in a glass of wine, again with reference to Cleopatra. ‘I thought everyone knew,’ says Steed. ‘Pearls dissolve in wine.’ (On a purely factual note, a pearl will actually dissolve in wine, but only if it has first been ground into a fine powder – this was not how it happened in The Avengers)

  Nation also added a political edge, updating the story from the aftermath of Indian independence to the present, so that the owner of the necklace is now Madame Chen (Jacqui Chan), the representative of a dictatorial oriental nation, and one of those chasing the pearls is Lo Yung (Eric Young), a hotel waiter from Chen’s own country, intent on striking a blow for freedom: ‘My people starve. They are taxed beyond endurance. Any voice that is raised in complaint is instantly silenced by force of arms.’ He plans to steal the necklace so that he might sell it to raise funds for the revolutionary cause. ‘In the history of all oppressed people, a leader emerges from the crowd and takes his people into freedom,’ he explains, after a failed attempt to lift the pearls. ‘Until that man appears, the suffering goes on. The pearls would have brought some relief – food, medical supplies.’ It is he who ultimately benefits, when Templar gives him the stolen necklace, having concluded that Lo’s need is greater than anyone else’s.

  Elsewhere in Nation’s scripts, lest he be misunderstood, the Saint makes clear that his is not a dewy-eyed celebration of revolution for its own sake. ‘Whenever people get killed, I’m bothered,’ he explains. ‘That’s what revolution means: death and misery on a large scale.’ But he’s always keen to take sides in a political dispute, particularly in the context of decolonisation. In ‘The Sign of the Claw’ (1965), his opening address to camera abandons the usual tone of dry detachment, striking instead a much more serious note: ‘The jungles of South-East Asia are amongst the hottest spots in the world right now. There is a full-scale war going on, except nobody calls it a war. Officially, it’s an anti-terrorist campaign. But no matter what the politicians call it, it’s a battleground. Probably the most savage on the face of the earth.’ The references are seemingly rooted in the long-running Malayan Emergency, which had seen British and Common-wealth troops battling communist guerrillas throughout the 1950s, though the resonance with the recently escalated conflict in Vietnam could hardly be avoided.

  The story itself is set in an unnamed post-colonial country and features Max Valmon (Godfrey Quigley), who’s lived here all his life and is now in cahoots with a mercenary, Dr Julias (Leo Leyden), to destabilise the new government, for reasons that he explains to Templar: ‘Six months ago when this country became independent, the government was taken over by a bunch of wogs. They started ordering us about, telling us what we could do and what we couldn’t do.’ Templar replies laconically: ‘Seems reasonable. It’s their country.’ Valmon is outraged: ‘Their country! Without us, they’d still be in their straw huts.’ But the Saint has no time for such arguments, and no inclination to stand in solidarity with white colonialists: ‘I’d say whatever you’ve put into this country, you’ve taken out again, with considerable interest.’ He succeeds in scuppering their plans and, by repositioning the lights on a jungle landing-strip, he causes a plane, full of supplies for the counter-revolutionaries, to crash. When he’s congratulated on the success of his brilliant plan, he shrugs off the compliment: ‘I’m afraid the brilliance is not mine really. I read about it in an adventure story years ago.’

  That last little joke was characteristic of Nation’s scripts for The Saint, which frequently included such knowing comments. ‘If you’re smart, you’ll pull the trigger on me right now,’ a crook tells Templar in one episode. ‘Because if I stay alive, I swear they’re going to be picking up little pieces of you all over this crummy town.’ The Saint is amused by his turn of phrase: ‘Haven’t changed much, have you, Jack? You still talk like a hoodlum in a second-rate gangster movie.’ This trick of letting the audience know that they were in on the joke of fiction, making them aware that they were suspending their disbelief, derived from Charteris himself. In a 1931 collection of short stories, as the Saint falls into the hands of yet another villain determined to put an end to his career, Templar points out that he is immune to all danger: ‘I’ve got such a lot to do before the end of the volume, and it would wreck the whole show if I went and got bumped off in the first story.’ As he puts it in a Nation-scripted episode from 1968: ‘I know the rules. I’ve been to the movies.’

  Indeed there were, if not rules exactly, then certainly conventions to which a writer was expected to adhere in the action adventure series of the 1960s, many of them derived – as with that stricture on the carrying of knives – from the literary heritage, and many passed on to future generations. It was axiomatic, for example, that a hero can take any number of blows to his face and still get up to fight back, but will be rendered instantly unconscious by a single strike to the back of the head, and that, even after a night or two of informal imprisonment, he will still look crisp and clean-shave
n in a suit and tie. Similarly a man who is shot will suffer either a minor flesh wound or death; there is no other possibility between these extremes, though death will sometimes be sufficiently delayed for one last message to be gasped out, or for the victim to fire one final shot from his own gun. Heroines, on the other hand, tend to be kidnapped rather than shot, though curiously – given that much of the show promotes their sexual attractiveness – they are never raped or sexually molested. (There is an exception in the Doctor Who story ‘The Keys of Marinus’, in which Barbara is clearly being threatened with sexual assault, but mostly Nation’s scripts for that series obey much the same conventions.)

  Even the physical accoutrements were reasonably predictable. This is a tradition awash with miniature cameras and radio transmitters, with Swiss bank accounts and wall-safes, with knockout gas and secret weapons. It’s a world in which hotel bedrooms can invariably be accessed from the room next door via a narrow, high ledge, and in which any room entered at night will probably contain uninvited guests, to be revealed when the light is switched on. Equally dangerous are big houses in the country, the rooms of which can usually be locked from the outside. Brainwashing is a constant danger, and plastic surgery can give a man an entirely new face (the same is presumably true of women, but no one has ever tried). Perhaps, given the restrictions, it is not entirely surprising that there was some repetition of plot.

  To these conventions, ITC added a few of its own, most significantly the insistence that language should be made appropriate for export sales to America: cars ran on gas, pedestrians were to be found on sidewalks and references to money tended to be in dollars. This was not a practice shared by The Avengers, produced by the rival television company ABC. ‘We always called a lift a lift, and not an elevator,’ noted associate producer Brian Clemens. ‘What we did was give them a picture of England that they all imagine it’s like. England is all people in bowler hats, or it’s all covered in fog. We never bent down to make it easier for them to understand.’ He did, though, point out a number of other limitations in the series: ‘There are a number of things we can’t do. We don’t kill women, though we may brutalise them. We do kill men, but we don’t have any blood effects, so that it must be quite apparent that when the scene is over the actor just gets up and walks away.’

  Despite making such concessions, however, the early series of Danger Man and The Saint initially proved less successful with the American market than had the 1950s swashbucklers. In the pre-Beatles era, Britain was still expected to provide historical rather than contemporary television. Danger Man ran for a season on CBS to little effect and Lew Grade failed to sell The Saint to a US network, instead having to rely on syndicating the show, piecing together a patchwork of deals with local stations. That was to change, but first there was a split in the creative team behind the series.

  In 1965, remembered Roger Moore, Lew Grade approached him about the possibility of a fifth season of The Saint, this time to be made in colour so that it would be more acceptable to American television. Moore replied, ‘I’d happily work with Bob, but not Monty.’ Grade went along with the idea, suggesting that The Saint be left in the hands of the emollient Robert S. Baker while the more abrasive Monty Berman was given his own show. The Baron, featuring an adaptation of John Creasey’s character, was also to be filmed in colour. Of the two partners, Berman was generally perceived to be the hard man of the partnership. ‘I remember Monty Berman being the one that everybody feared a little bit,’ remembered Sue Lloyd, who starred in The Baron, while some of the production crew were known to refer to him as Martin Bormann, in reference to the missing Nazi leader whose remains had not then been discovered. It was, however, Berman who provided Nation with a step up the career ladder, from freelance writer to salaried script editor on The Baron.

  Nation in turn brought in Dennis Spooner to assist him. His new partner was just a couple of years his junior, and the two men had pursued similar careers: like Nation stage-struck since childhood, Spooner had spent some years struggling to make it as a stand-up comedian before drifting into writing (though he was also briefly a professional footballer with Leyton Orient), and the two had credits on several shows in common, including Hancock and No Hiding Place as well as, more recently, Doctor Who. It was the first time since the break with John Junkin that Nation had worked so closely with a co-writer and, after several years of working from home, he was now writing again in an office (in the Elstree studios where The Baron was filmed). In these changed circumstances, the need to form a new partnership – albeit more loosely than before – evidently reflected the transition from writer to script editor.

  The role of script editor had emerged on ITV and been taken to the BBC by Sydney Newman. It was intended to form a bridge between producer and writer, though not all directors approved of the arrangement. ‘I wasn’t allowed near the authors,’ complained Richard Martin of his experiences on Doctor Who. ‘There was always a script editor in the way. You were never encouraged to talk to an author. By and large, that was a bad barrier between two creative people.’ From the point of view of the script editor himself, however, it was still a creative process and one that gave him considerable influence over the direction and nature of a series. ‘I’d have the writer in and sometimes I’d have the germ of an idea, or they would come in with an idea,’ explained Brian Clemens. ‘I’d sit at the typewriter, and we’d kick it backwards and forwards and we’d block it A to Z, like little telegrams to ourselves. And sometimes if a line of dialogue suggested itself, I would type that in too. And then at the end of that session, which might take all day, I’d give the writer four or five typewritten pages with every step of the story there and send him on his way. And the idea was that if he stepped outside the studios and got run over by a bus, I could write it.’

  Having established the concept of the piece, the script editor’s function was to make such changes, or recommendations for changes, as were deemed necessary to ensure continuity within the series and to allow the translation to film. ‘It’s an odd sort of balance,’ reflected Terrance Dicks, the most influential of the Doctor Who script editors in the 1970s. ‘You want a writer with clear ideas, who defends them, but you don’t want a writer who says this is holy writ and you mustn’t change a word. There’s a middle ground in between, in which the writer accepts that in the end it’s going to be done the way the script editor and the producer want it.’ From his perspective, he concluded, ‘Terry was, perhaps, if anything, a little too easy-going.’ Beyond this link with the writer, there were further responsibilities. ‘As story editor,’ noted Spooner, ‘you’ve got to liaise with make-up, costume and all the other departments. You’ve got to look after your producer. You’ve got to take the director in hand.’

  The role of the script editor at ITC was less central than at Doctor Who but it was still a new experience for Nation. As a writer, he had been almost entirely removed from the production process and was seldom seen on set. He did go to one rehearsal of ‘The Daleks’, but as far as the director, Christopher Barry, was concerned, that was all: ‘I only met Nation once. He seemed to have as little time for me – or the programme – as I came to have for him.’ John Gorrie, who directed ‘The Keys of Marinus’, had even less contact: ‘He was never around. I never saw him.’ Actors had the same tale of absence to tell; whether it were Tony Tanner, star of Uncle Selwyn, Peter Purves, who appeared in two of his Daleks stories, or David Gooderson, who portrayed Davros, they never met Nation. He admitted himself that this was his reputation: ‘They say: Nation never appeared. Nobody ever saw him, and he didn’t do anything.’ In this context, the value to him of Spooner, who had just spent a year as the script editor of Doctor Who and who had considerably more experience of television production, was obvious.

  Even so, when filming began in July 1965, it became clear that this was a different world to that of the Doctor. To start with, an increased scale of resources was available at ITC: an episode of The Saint had a budget of £30,000
, ten times larger than an episode of Doctor Who (though, of course, they were twice as long, running at around fifty minutes). But there was also a different philosophy of programme-making, rooted in the social differences between the two channels – the Oxbridge BBC and the working-class ITV – and manifest in a division between the stage and the movies. The BBC, despite the changes made by Sydney Newman, still essentially saw television drama as an offshoot of the theatre, and recruited accordingly, so that many of the key figures in the early Daleks stories came from a theatrical background: director Richard Martin, designer Raymond P. Cusick, costume designer Daphne Dare among others. So too did most of the actors, and there was some nervousness about whether appearing on television was a wise career move. ‘As a theatre actor,’ reflected William Russell, ‘you thought: I wonder if I should?’

  Over on ITV, on the other hand, the perception was that television drama was most closely related not to theatre but to cinema. Baker and Berman had both come from the movies, as had many of the other senior production crew. Charles Crichton had directed Ealing classics like The Lavender Hill Mob (1951) and The Titfield Thunderbolt (1953) before moving on to episodes of Danger Man and The Avengers; Jeremy Summers directed Tony Hancock’s The Punch and Judy Man and then The Saint; while Roy Ward Baker – who worked on The Avengers and The Baron – had learnt his trade as Alfred Hitchcock’s assistant in the 1930s. Gil Taylor was the cinematographer on Ice Cold in Alex (1958), and received a BAFTA nomination for his work on Roman Polanski’s Repulsion (1965) during the course of filming The Baron. And Brian Clemens’s colleague Albert Fennell, who produced The Avengers, had earlier been associate producer on Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960). As Clemens said: ‘All the credits are great filmmakers.’