The Man Who Invented the Daleks Read online

  By the early 1950s, however, the Khardomah set that Nation had been part of was starting to break up. In recent years, South Wales had been able to boast a number of famous sons, pursuing a wide range of cultural occupations, from the novelist Howard Spring and the poet Dylan Thomas, through Ray Milland, winner of the 1946 Best Actor Oscar for his role in The Lost Weekend, to the boxer Tommy Farr, who came desperately close to taking the world heavyweight title off Joe Louis in 1937. But all had had to leave home to achieve their success. The truth was that South Wales was still a place of origin rather than a land of opportunity. For those who were troubled by ambition, curiosity or simple impatience, it was primarily somewhere to look back upon from what was then called the refreshment car of the London train.

  So it was to prove again. Among Nation’s friends and acquaintances, Harry Greene joined Joan Littlewood’s travelling theatre company as an actor, set designer and general handyman, ending up at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East before embarking on a television career, while John Summers worked his passage around the world, with spells in Canada and Australia, before making his way to Fleet Street. Nation himself was a little way behind them, but in January 1955 he bought a one-way ticket to London, and he too took his leave of Cardiff.

  Chapter Two

  Goings On

  In later life, Terry Nation was often to tell the tale of his early months in London, the doomed struggle to make it as either a comedian or an actor. ‘I auditioned as a stand-up comic, and I failed time and time again. Somebody told me, “The jokes are very good; it’s you who’s not funny.” That was hurtful, but then I figured I had to make a living.’ So he concentrated on writing, and was still getting nowhere when his fairy godmother appeared in the improbable guise of a Goon, as detailed by the Guardian in a 1966 interview: ‘His first break was an interview with Spike Milligan. He arrived so worn and woebegone that Milligan said, “You look terrible!” wrote out a cheque for £10, and told him to go away and try to write a script for The Goon Show. He did. Some of it, at least, was used on the air, and Milligan took him on as a writer.’

  Although there is no evidence of Nation’s work ever being used in a broadcast edition of The Goon Show, much of the rest of this was true, insofar as it went. Harry Greene remembered him turning up backstage at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, in January 1955 during a famous production of Richard II with Harry H. Corbett in the title role (Greene was playing Bushey): ‘He told me he was writing comedy scripts and trying to work as an actor and comedian, but wasn’t having much luck.’ But Greene also remembered earlier forays to London, reconnaissance trips that Nation made in 1954, but which didn’t form part of his personal mythology. Also missing from most of Nation’s versions of those early days was the fact that it was the BBC who sent him to see Spike Milligan in the first place.

  Milligan and Eric Sykes, both established comedy writers but neither with full-time representation, had decided to form their own agency in the summer of 1954, bringing in the younger team of Ray Galton and Alan Simpson to create Associated London Scripts (ALS). Sykes and Milligan already shared an office above a greengrocer’s shop in Shepherd’s Bush, West London, and this was to become the home of ALS, one of the most influential institutions in the cultural life of post-war Britain. ‘The intention was to encourage new writers,’ explained Beryl Vertue, then the secretary at ALS, though later to become a successful television producer in her own right. ‘And this was a bit of a godsend for the BBC, because when they found comedy writers, they’d often say: Why don’t you go down and see those people in Shepherd’s Bush. And so Terry would have arrived as part of that.’

  Nation had indeed already been to the BBC, having had a meeting with the script editor and producer Gale Pedrick in March 1955, and it was from there that he was sent to see Milligan at ALS. But an even more significant oversight in Nation’s later accounts was the failure to mention his partner, Dick Barry, who accompanied him to that meeting. The earliest press coverage Nation ever received came in a South Wales Echo article in May 1955, which saluted ‘the tenacity, initiative and guts’ of ‘two young men from Cardiff’, and made it clear that those early months of struggle were not endured alone: ‘Terry Nation was a furniture salesman and Dick Barry an accounts clerk until early this year. They had started to write scripts for their own amusement some months before, but in January they threw up their steady jobs. Off they went to London like Dick Whittington to seek some fortune.’ The two men went together to see Pedrick, and the meeting appears to have been cordial enough, for Nation wrote to thank him for his ‘encouragement and advice’ and promised to ‘submit some [scripts] to you as soon as possible’. In the event, however, they had no further dealings with him, seemingly finding no need once they had been referred to Shepherd’s Bush and found themselves taken under Milligan’s wing.

  Their timing was impeccable. They were not the first recruits to the agency, for a handful of others (notably Johnny Speight, later to create Alf Garnett) had already become part of ALS, but these were still early days in a venture that was to transform the role of writers on radio and television. Indeed they were still relatively early days for the concept of comedy scriptwriters at all.

  In the days when comedians had been solely concerned with live performance, it had always been assumed by audiences that they wrote their own material. ‘Obviously there had always been many a humorist scripting patter and sketches for comedians,’ remarked Eric Sykes, ‘but the names of these backroom stalwarts were a closely guarded secret. They were in a backroom under a forty-watt bulb.’ As The Times later put it, with a wistful touch of nostalgia: ‘We never heard the names of scriptwriters when Little Tich or Harry Tate were around.’ When comedians did start being broadcast by the radio, they were still able to rely on their existing material, since their appearances were for the most part short, sporadic and unheralded items in the midst of a variety show (often with a voice-over to cover the more visual gags).

  It was not until 1938, with the arrival of Band Waggon, starring ‘Big Hearted’ Arthur Askey and Richard Stinker’ Murdoch, that a regular comedy series made its debut on the BBC and things began to change. ‘An idea, novel in every respect to broadcasting in this country was approved by the BBC Programme Board today,’ the Daily Mail informed its readers, and the fact that it had to explain how this was going to work indicated just how new it all was: ‘The programmes will be in serial form to the extent that the same artists and characters will be retained, but each episode will be complete in itself.’ Band Waggon was also one of the first entertainment shows to be broadcast each week at a fixed time on the same day; the idea of regular schedules did not become standard until the paper shortages of the Second World War meant that listeners could not be guaranteed to receive their copy of the listing magazine Radio Times and therefore needed some certainty of what to expect.

  The sheer quantity of material required for a weekly show was of a different order to anything anyone had experienced while touring the music hall circuit. Ted Kavanagh, who wrote the wartime hit series ITMA, calculated that ‘every half-hour show contained eighteen and a half minutes of dialogue, in which there were supposed to be one hundred gags or one every eleven seconds’. Such a discipline meant an abandonment of the established practice whereby a comedian could retain the same act for years on end, perhaps for an entire career. Even Tommy Handley, who, as the linchpin of ITMA, was probably the biggest radio star Britain has ever known, came out of this tradition; he played his sketch ‘The Disorderly Room’ around the music halls for twenty years, right up until 1941, when he finally switched his entire attention to broadcasting. Now, it seemed, the voracious demand for new material meant that a policy of hiring writers specifically for radio work would have to be adopted. But there was no rush to publicise this development. Vernon Harris was responsible for much of Band Waggon, but his contribution was unacknowledged: ‘I never got a credit it was the policy of the BBC that they wanted the public to believe tha
t Arthur and Dickie made it up on the spot! It was as ingenuous as that, so they would not give me a credit.’

  It was Kavanagh who was most responsible for remedying this lack of public recognition. The unprecedented success of ITMA during the war years eventually pushed his name forward and, when Tommy Handley died suddenly in 1949, thus forcing a premature end to the series, he was big enough that Radio Luxembourg (back on the air after the war) signed him up for The Ted Kavanagh Show, the first time on British radio that a writer had stepped into the spotlight. He had by then formed his own agency to promote the role of writers, and had struck gold when he signed up a new team in the shape of Frank Muir and Denis Norden, who were always keen to pay tribute to their mentor. ‘Pre-Ted Kavanagh and ITMA,’ wrote Muir, ‘scriptwriters simply did not exist in the public mind.’

  Muir and Norden were the first to benefit from the new acceptance of celebrity writers. In 1948 their most influential show, Take It From Here, was shown in the Guardian’s radio listings with their names but with no indication at all that it starred Jimmy Edwards and Dick Bentley. By the early 1950s they were famous enough to be appearing on the panel games that proliferated in the early days of television, shows like What’s Your Story and The Name’s the Same. They became the yardstick of success, so that the South Wales Echo article in 1955 said of Nation and Barry that ‘their ambition is to follow in the steps of Frank Muir and Denis Norden as top script writers for BBC variety shows’.

  It was into this new world that Associated London Scripts was launched by Milligan, Sykes, Galton and Simpson. Their timing was fortuitous, for the imminent launch of ITV meant that opportunities were about to increase dramatically. ‘When Ray and I started,’ said Alan Simpson, ‘there were just enough writers to service the BBC. But when ITV started, immediately you had double the requirement, so more writers came in to supply the demand. Which coincided with when the agency started.’ As Sykes put it: ‘With the advent of television comedy, writers were emerging like weeds through a crack in the pavement.’

  The material that flowed from the founders of the agency, let alone from their subsequent recruits, represented an impressive diversity, from the anarchic alternative world of Spike Milligan, through the extended comic stories of Eric Sykes, to the pinpoint observations of human nature and behaviour perfected by Galton and Simpson. To some extent, this was the result of their very different lives thus far – their ages at the start of ALS ranged from twenty-four (Galton) to thirty-six (Milligan), and there was a division between those who had served in the war and those who had not – but they also had key characteristics in common.

  None, for example, had a university education; unlike the satire boom that was to occupy so many column inches in a few years’ time, the comedy revolutions that came from ALS were not shaped by student revue. It was a trait characteristic of the era, for the leading writers among the Angry Young Men – John Osborne, Colin Wilson, Alan Sillitoe, John Braine – were similarly from working-class and lower-middle-class backgrounds and had received no formal education after leaving school. Those authors, however, were trying to break into established and reputable fields of work, whereas the members of ALS were embarked on a career path that had yet to be fully explored; they were writing comedy at a time when such a profession was practised by very few people indeed, which forged a certain sense of unity. Perhaps, too, there was the fact that they were all working in a very British tradition, largely unaffected by the American comedians on the American Forces Network. This was particularly true of Milligan, the one of the four for whom Nation had the greatest respect and admiration; his work showed no point of contact with American comedy, and his countervailing Englishness had a strong influence on the young writer.

  ALS was described by Alan Simpson as ‘a mutual protection society’. Though this perhaps glossed over the business side of the company – it was still an agency that charged its clients the usual agency commission ‘often per cent’ and rented them office space – there was an enormous benefit to be derived from working in an office adjacent to those occupied by some of the country’s leading writers. ‘If you got stuck with an idea, you could walk down and knock on Eric’s door,’ recalled John Junkin, who joined the agency in 1955. ‘And he’d help. They were all like that. Eric, Galton and Simpson, Spike – they were always very, very helpful, and not in the least bit condescending to the new chaps.’ Beryl Vertue too noted the assistance offered by the founding partners: ‘In an altruistic manner, they were very helpful to the boys and when they had series, they would often encourage them to come and work on them. It was a tremendous opportunity for the new ones.’ The other significant advantage to being on the books of ALS was the access it gave to the BBC, as Junkin explained: ‘This was obviously the great value of the agency: they had the contacts.’

  This was to be of considerable benefit to Terry Nation and Dick Barry. Just two months after that meeting with Gale Pedrick at the BBC, they were commissioned to write a 13-week radio series for Kitty Bluett, an Australian comedienne who was already a familiar voice on the highly popular show Ray’s a Laugh, playing the assertive wife of comedian Ted Ray. On the strength of that performance, which had been running since 1949, the decision was made in 1955 to spin off a new series based on her, to be called All My Eye and Kitty Bluett. Even with a strong supporting cast that included Stanley Baxter, Terry Scott and Patricia Hayes, however, and with musical interludes provided by the cabaret star Leslie ‘Hutch’ Hutchinson, the show was not a success; it failed to receive a recommission, and Bluett rejoined Ray’s a Laugh for the following series in 1956 after her year’s absence. Nation was later to describe it as ‘a rotten show, a terrible show’. He also admitted that it was a huge step to have taken, from writing the occasional short sketch to being jointly responsible for thirteen half-hour shows, and he talked about coming through a real ordeal by fire, getting something out there every week, getting it prepared, ‘whether it was funny or not’.

  Despite the challenges of writing All My Eye, and despite its failure to win the affection of the audience, Nation and Barry hadn’t blotted their copybook entirely with the show’s producer Alastair Scott Johnston, for he was to employ them later in 1955 as contributors to The Frankie Howerd Show. (‘Everybody wrote for Frankie Howerd,’ noted Alan Simpson.) In fact the amenable Johnston was to emerge as one of Nation’s chief supporters at the BBC in the early days, seeing something in the young writer that was worth nurturing. ‘He was supportive of people,’ remembered Beryl Vertue of Johnston. ‘He was very double-barrelled all the way down the line. He always wore a blazer. Very BBC, very nice, not pushy. He was good at his job, but he was not what you would imagine a typical producer to be.’ Ray Galton had similarly fond memories, though shaded with a significant qualification: ‘He was a lovely man, a man you could trust, a man you’d go into the jungle with. But not a man you’d want to produce your programmes.’ Others evidently came to the same conclusion, for although Johnston went on the BBC course to become a television producer, he never did make that leap, as so many of his colleagues did; instead he had to content himself with bringing to the radio its longest-running comedy series, The Navy Lark, which debuted in 1959 and lasted for over eighteen years, helping to establish the reputation of its stars Leslie Phillips and Jon Pertwee.

  The partnership of Nation and Barry was not destined to last long. They were, by all accounts, an oddly assorted team. Ray Galton remembered them arriving at ALS ‘all hairy tweeds and walking sticks’, but the image appears to have been determined more by Nation than by Barry. ‘Terry tried to be extremely well dressed,’ recalled Alan Simpson, and the same memory struck Beryl Vertue: ‘He was always well dressed, liked nice things.’ A slightly more sardonic take was offered by Ray Galton: ‘He came down here with a cane. He was looking like an upper-class guy with a stately home somewhere, and he was acting a part of being amongst the peasants. He did try to look like a country gentleman. We all used to take the piss out of him.’ Thou
gh, as Simpson pointed out: ‘He must have got away with it with people who didn’t know him.’ Dick Barry, on the other hand, was remembered primarily for being self-effacing, in stark contrast to his more extrovert colleague. ‘He was a nice bloke, you knew straight away he was a nice guy,’ commented Galton, while Vertue added: ‘He was a very quiet person in the place, very quietly spoken.’ Simpson concluded: ‘Dick was much more diffident. He was very quiet. They were as different as chalk and cheese, apart from their accent.’

  Perhaps the differences proved too much, or perhaps it was the need to break from their background and reinvent themselves, but by the end of 1955 the partnership had split. Barry teamed up instead with Johnny Speight, and made immediate progress. Over the next eighteen months or so, they wrote BBC television shows for both Frankie Howerd and Norman Evans, as well as providing the independent channel with That’s Life, Says Max Wall and The Dickie Valentine Show, in which Britain’s first true pop star was joined somewhat incongruously by Peter Sellers. Their biggest hit was the ATV variety show Get Happy, which made a household name of the comedian Arthur Haynes, though when he got his own long-running series, The Arthur Haynes Show, it was written by Speight alone, fast emerging as the most plausible rival in ALS to the four founding fathers. Soon afterwards, Barry was to emigrate to Australia, where he continued to find work writing for television.