The Man Who Invented the Daleks Read online

  With the pressure of writing so many original stories himself while at the same time fulfilling his duties as script editor, Nation also dipped into his previous work for inspiration. Ingar Sorenson in ‘And Suddenly You’re Dead’ is not exactly the first fictional scientist to discover the ultimate secret weapon, but it was perhaps careless of Nation to give her a name quite so redolent of Professor Soren in ‘The Inescapable Word’ (one of his scripts for The Saint), who has developed an equally deadly weapon: ‘It destroys all life, but leaves no trace of radiation. The classic death ray.’ Soren too is killed by his own invention. Similarly, both ‘The Crime of the Century’ in The Saint and ‘Epitaph for a Hero’ in The Baron feature robberies that require the pumping of poison gas through a ventilation system to put armed guards out of action.

  But such minor borrowings were as nothing compared to the pure self-plagiarism of ‘Portrait of Louisa’ in The Baron, which not only lifted wholesale the plot of ‘Lida’ in The Saint, but also recycled large chunks of dialogue. Nation wrote both scripts, adapting ‘Lida’ from a Charteris story, and, although he added several layers of complication to the tale (and took the trouble to relocate it from the Miami of Charteris’s original to the Bahamas and then, in ‘Portrait of Louisa’, to England), he was perhaps fortunate that he didn’t run into trouble with the Saint’s creator. As so often in Nation’s career, there were precedents for this practice to be found among the writers of his youth. Edwy Searles Brooks, for example, one of the most prolific of those writers – he produced an estimated 36 million words in his career – was, like Nation, not averse to turning his hand to self-plagiarism: many of his 1940s novels about the character Norman Conquest were literal rewrites of his own earlier work, when the central figure had been Waldo the Wonder Man.

  On this occasion, however, Nation’s sleight of hand did not go unnoticed. In an ill-timed piece of scheduling, both ‘Lida’ and ‘Portrait of Louisa’ were shown on the same weekend in America, and the comparisons were hard to avoid. ‘It was an embarrassment for Terry,’ shrugged Johnny Goodman, the production supervisor on both shows, ‘but I suppose there are a limited number of stories in the world.’

  Chapter Eight

  Dalek Empire

  ‘I was, for that short time, the most famous writer on television.’ Terry Nation’s assessment of his position as 1965 dawned was perfectly accurate. He was being invited to appear on the prestigious BBC2 discussion show, Late Night Line-Up, he was the subject of admiring profiles in serious newspapers, his stories were appearing on an almost fortnightly basis on The Saint and he was still the ‘Dalek-man’, recipient of sacks full of fan mail. Dalekmania showed no sign of abating, and he formed a company, Dalek Productions (the other directors were Kate Nation and Beryl Vertue), to deal with the continuing expansion: this year the monsters were to be seen again on television and in books, and were to make their debut in comics, on record, on stage and in the movies. The conquest of Britain was virtually complete, but for someone of Nation’s generation, raised on fantasies of Hollywood and on comic books from GIs, there remained the ultimate allure of America.

  The image of America dominated British culture in the post-war years. That it was possible for British creativity to make it big in the States had been demonstrated by a handful of success stories, including those of Leslie Charteris, Alfred Hitchcock, David Niven and Dylan Thomas, but these had been isolated cases, and Tony Hancock was just one of many who had tried and failed. Meanwhile Britain’s evolving relationship with its former colony was captured by artists like Richard Hamilton, Peter Blake and Eduardo Paolozzi, the early practitioners of pop art: a fascination with the movies, magazines and mass culture that came across the Atlantic, a craving for jazz, both ancient and modern, an infatuation with the cult of stardom that worshipped ready-made icons in Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Popeye. There was sometimes a note of detached irony in pop art, but that was mostly overridden by an unmistakable sense of celebration, a revelling in the industrial production of entertainment. At a time when much of the left was loftily dismissing American imports as ‘culture poured out over a defenceless people by the millionaires’, pop artists as well as early British rock and roll stars were embracing precisely the same material. And crucial to all of it was that this was culture consumed at one remove from the real thing, for few had ever experienced America at first hand.

  At the turn of the 1960s this began to change, as the isolated successes began to mount up into something resembling a trend. A number of photographers (David Bailey, Terence Donovan, Brian Duffy) began to make names for themselves in the fashion industry. The new wave of British cinema was exporting successfully, with Oscar nominations for Laurence Harvey in Room at the Top (1959) and Laurence Olivier in The Entertainer (1960), while Peter Sellers made a successful move to Hollywood. In New York satirists from Beyond the Fringe and from Peter Cook’s Establishment Club both enjoyed successful theatre runs in 1962, as did Harold Pinter’s play The Caretaker and Anthony Newley’s musical Stop the World – I Want to Get Off, swiftly followed by Lionel Bart’s Oliver!. All were unmistakably British works, and critics began to talk about the ‘British domination of Broadway’. There was also James Bond; already a hit in America via the novels of Ian Fleming (Bond was said to be John F. Kennedy’s ‘favourite fictional hero’), he broke through to a mass audience when the film of Dr No was released in 1963, a year later than in Britain.

  And then came the Beatles. Having dominated the British music industry in 1963, the group released ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ in America in January 1964, visited the country the following month and, by the end of March, held all top five places in the US singles charts, accounting for 60 per cent of all record sales. In a society still reeling from the shock of President Kennedy’s assassination, their cheerful simplicity swept all before them. In their wake came a host of other bands, from Herman’s Hermits to the Rolling Stones, and where the previous year just one British record (‘Telstar’ by the Tornados) had made the American top ten, the figure rose to thirty-four in 1964. So big were the Beatles that when they made their record-breaking appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, attracting 74 million viewers, their slipstream was powerful enough to launch the Cardiff-born music hall star ‘Two Ton’ Tessie O’Shea on a successful American career, simply because she also appeared on the programme. And into the breach opened up by the Beatles came British television, both programmes – The Avengers, The Saint, The Baron – and individuals in the shape of David Frost and Jack Good. As John Mortimer was to put it in Paradise Postponed, his 1985 novel of post-war Britain, for a brief moment ‘life in England was thought to be interesting to the American public’. Ironically, one of the few failures of the era was a 1963 exhibition in New York of British pop art.

  Terry Nation experienced some of this excitement as a writer on the ITC series, but those were other people’s shows. What he really dreamt of was making it in his own right, and in August 1965 the Sun confidently reported that he was ‘negotiating with American TV companies for the rights of what they want to call The Dalek Show’.

  By now the Daleks were acquiring a life of their own, far beyond the confines of Doctor Who. The success of The Dalek Book, and particularly the comic strips illustrated by Richard Jennings, was extended in January 1965 when the same artist provided a strip for the first issue of the magazine TV Century 21, launched by Gerry Anderson to promote his Supermarionation puppet shows, Stingray and Fireball XL5. ‘I suppose the thing that attracted me to the Daleks,’ reflected Anderson, in explanation of why he included a rival show in his magazine, ‘was jealousy.’ The series ran for 104 instalments over two years, with Jennings’s Eagle-derived artwork replaced by the more contemporary style of Ron Turner halfway through. It focused entirely on the Daleks, with no sign at all of the Doctor, gradually building an entire alternative mythology, expanding substantially on the television stories. Officially credited to Nation, the writing was actually the responsibility of David Whi
taker, who had already written a novelisation of ‘The Daleks’ (as Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks, published in 1964), and who was fast becoming Nation’s understudy in all things related to the planet Skaro. The TV Century 21 strip attracted its own loyal following, but for Nation it was primarily of significance in establishing that stories about the Daleks could potentially work even when removed from their original context: it could be seen as something between a storyboard and a calling card.

  The same was not quite true of the 1965 film Dr Who and the Daleks, since it was based on the scripts for the first television serial, but it was notable that the monsters got equal billing in the title and completely dominated the posters. Directed by Gordon Flemyng, the movie featured Peter Cushing in the lead role, in the hope of attracting attention in America, where he was already well known as an actor. For the benefit of an American audience who were new to the concept, the nature of the central figure was also fundamentally changed; the Doctor was here known as Dr Who and, no longer an alien time traveller, was an amiably eccentric human inventor of apparently Edwardian vintage. Ian too was unrecognisable; played by Roy Castle, his function was to provide comic relief rather than to lead the action.

  As a consequence, the film has not always been warmly embraced by many followers of Doctor Who, but viewed in its own right, it works perfectly well as a quirky little fantasy movie for kids. With a reported budget of £180,000 – a long way removed from the average of around £2,500 per episode for the first season of the television version – and with the benefit of being in colour rather than black-and-white, it has a sense of scale that was lacking in ‘The Daleks’. It may still look tied to its sets, but those sets are much more impressive and, on occasion, it displays a grandeur that television simply couldn’t match, particularly in the advance on the Dalek city. As Barbara, Ian and the Thals make their way across a deadly swamp, over mountains and through rocky tunnels, accompanied by an heroic orchestral score from Malcolm Lockyer, the sequence acquires something of the majesty of an H. Rider Haggard adventure. And there are some nice details, starting with the opening shot, a slow pan around a living room that reveals first Susan reading Eric M. Rogers’s Physics for the Inquiring Mind, then Barbara reading a book titled The Science of Science, and finally Dr Who himself, absorbed in a copy of The Eagle with Dan Dare on the cover. There was also a telling addition to the script, with the Thal leader Alydon (here played by Barrie Ingham) explaining that ‘There were many mutations after the final war. Most of them perished. But this form – two hands, two eyes – has always been best for survival.’

  In terms of the Daleks themselves, the biggest change came simply from them being in colour, which enabled distinctions to be made between those with different functions and ranks. ‘I was trying to make them into a full-grown culture with levels,’ reflected Nation. His own involvement in the film, however, was minimal. The screenplay adaptation of his scripts was the work of Milton Subotsky, the creative talent behind Amicus, the film company responsible. Subotsky once claimed that his love of horror movies stemmed from the fact that ‘it was the only kind of cinema where you could avoid sex and violence’, and the reviews of Dr Who and the Daleks largely agreed that he’d lived up to his ambitions. ‘One of the few modern films to have a nubile heroine who never so much as touches her boyfriend,’ noted the Guardian, concluding that it was ‘not likely to do more harm to childish minds than many other modern weapons of the communications industry’. ‘Shoddy,’ was the verdict of the Observer, ‘but the children might like it.’

  Despite the criticisms, the film was as successful as everything featuring the Daleks that year and it reached the box office top ten. ‘The money came in so fast,’ claimed Nation, ‘they were in profit within the year, and they actually had to pay me, which was wonderful.’ Even before its release, a sequel was planned, which emerged in 1966 as Daleks – Invasion Earth 2150 A.D., an adaptation of the second television story that removed the Doctor entirely from the title. The central characters were much the same – though Bernard Cribbins replaced Roy Castle as the comic relief and Barbara was dropped in favour of Dr Who’s niece, Louise – and there were again some improvements on the original version, thanks to the shorter running time; the Slyther, thankfully, was absent altogether, though an even more risible scene was added of Cribbins and the Robomen engaging in a choreographed comedy routine. By now, however, Dalekmania was on the wane, and the film not only got the expected poor reviews (‘Grown-ups may enjoy it,’ sniffed The Times, ‘but most children have more sense’), but also failed to emulate the takings of the first venture. Plans for a third movie, based on the third Dalek serial, ‘The Chase’ (screened on television in 1965), were quietly shelved, and some of the Daleks used in the films were given to Nation, who kept them in the house at Lynsted Park.

  The absence of a film of ‘The Chase’ was something of a missed opportunity, since the television scripts – the last that Nation would write alone for seven years – were full of excellent ideas that were either rejected or toned down, while those that did make it to the screen suffered heavily from the show’s low budget. The director was again Richard Martin, who was unconvinced by the idea of returning to the monsters, but was talked into it by Verity Lambert: ‘We’re in a stick, the rest of the scripts for the next series aren’t ready. I’ve talked with Terry Nation and he thinks we can do one more thing with the Daleks.’ Returning to the anthology format of ‘The Keys of Marinus’, Nation had the Daleks in their own time machine, pursuing the TARDIS through space and time, and he crammed into the six episodes a total of five alien life-forms, three planets, three separate stories set on Earth in the past, present and future, two Doctors and two time machines, as well as finding room for appearances by Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, the Beatles, William Shakespeare and Abraham Lincoln. As one of contributors to the BBC’s audience research report pointed out, ‘All we need now is Yogi Bear and we’ve had the lot.’

  It also provided a solution to the mystery of the ghost ship the Mary Celeste, discovered in 1872 floating in the Atlantic, its crew having vanished with no indication of what had happened to them. Eighty years after Arthur Conan Doyle had written a fictionalised explanation of the crew’s disappearance (renaming the vessel the Marie Celeste), Nation finally revealed the truth: the Daleks materialised on the ship and the crew threw themselves overboard in fear.

  A sense of playful imagination runs through much of the serial, but not as much as there was in the original script. In the first episode, the crew of the TARDIS enjoy themselves with a Time-Space ‘Visualiser,’ a sort of time television’ that enables them to view moments from history. Barbara chooses to see William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon and Queen Elizabeth I, though the encounter is a not very inspired account of a royal command to write The Merry Wives of Windsor. As originally intended, however, the scene ended with the two writers bemoaning the dwindling numbers attending the theatre, and saw Bacon giving Shakespeare a manuscript for a new play titled Hamlet. Back on the TARDIS, the Doctor was then to have revealed that Shakespeare had told him this was simply a publicity stunt: expecting to be overheard, the two men hoped to whip up controversy about the authorship of the play with the aim of boosting the box office. In what remained of this idea, Bacon merely suggests to Shakespeare that the story of Hamlet would make a fine subject for a play; if anything, this played into the hands of those who subscribed to the Baconian authorship of the works, rather than mocking the claim.

  It was not simply the wit that got lost. The first tale in the serial was set on the planet Aridius, once covered by a vast ocean beneath which lay the city of the Aridians. (There were shades here of H.G. Wells’s 1896 story ‘In the Abyss’, which also told of humanoid life-forms at the bottom of the ocean.) But then the seas dried up, killing all life save two species, the Aridians and the Mire Beasts, each of which – as is clear from the original script – sees the other as its primary food source, so that both are simultane
ously predator and prey. It’s a lovely, teasing detail, but it disappeared from the final version, while Nation’s visualisation of the Aridians was also jettisoned. ‘These are tiny men with vast humped backs,’ he had written. ‘They are incredibly ugly facially, their mouths distorted and a secondary set of eyes on their foreheads. Thick black hair hangs lankly, framing their faces. Their hands have only four fingers each. They are perhaps twice as long as human fingers. Arms appear to trail the ground, whilst the legs seem foreshortened.’ To which Verity Lambert objected strongly: ‘I think Terry has gone too far in making the Aridians unpleasant looking,’ she wrote to Richard Martin. ‘It seems to me that this is just presenting unpleasantness for the sake of it.’ The resulting creatures looked instead like a cross between the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz and a merman with cauliflower ears, and not even an early appearance by the actor Hywel Bennett could save them from ridicule.

  Most severely affected was the brief sequence set in a haunted house, familiar from the Universal horror films of the 1930s and their imitators, complete with bats, skeletons, ghosts and suits of armour. According to Nation’s original conception, it represented a manifestation of the fears of millions, preconditioned by horror stories to imagine that this was what nightmares looked like. (The Doctor was to cite the work of Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe and W.W. Jacobs as examples.) The house exists, argues the Doctor, ‘in the dark recesses of the human mind. Millions of minds secretly believing that this place really exists. The immense power of those minds, combined together, have made this place a reality. It’s a classic house of horrors.’ The Doctor challenges Ian to predict what will happen next, and event follows description, as Ian says a door will creak open and a man will appear saying … And Baron Frankenstein, who has indeed appeared, duly speaks. This playing with narrative was not far removed from some of the ideas in the fourth series of The Avengers, broadcast later in the same year, and prefigured the strand of post-modernist horror films that started with Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994) and Scream (1996). It also, somewhat cheekily, elevated the Daleks, busily charging round the haunted house, to the level of classic horror figures like Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster.