by Alwyn Turner
Praise for
The Man Who Invented the Daleks: The Strange Worlds of Terry Nation
‘Even if you can’t stand science fiction, the chances are that you’ve seen something either written or inspired by Terry Nation. The man who invented the Daleks was not just the brains behind one of the most enduring fictional monsters in television history, he was also one of the most popular storytellers of the last half-century. In this spectacular biography, Alwyn Turner shapes Nation’s extraordinary career into a wonderfully rich account of British popular culture since the war. Carefully researched and beautifully written, his book covers everything from the early days of Doctor Who to the madly overwrought pleasures of Blake’s 7, taking in such classics as The Avengers, The Persuaders! and Survivors on the way. From the aftermath of a devastating pandemic to a lost city on an alien world, from Nazis in space to Robin Hood in the far future, this is a splendidly entertaining journey into the stranger corners of the modern British imagination. I loved it’
Dominic Sandrook, author of State of Emergency – The Way We Were: Britain, 1970–1974
‘The Man Who Invented the Daleks is more than a biography of the writer Terry Nation. It’s a group portrait of a whole generation of TV writers who worked in the adventure serials and series of the Sixties and Seventies, and the importance and vitality of popular TV narrative in that era. Nation was one of several script writers zig-zagging their way through the hectic lives of the Saint, Doctor Who, Mrs Peel and Steed, creating new mythologies for late-Twentieth-Century Britain’
Paul Magrs, novelist and scriptwriter
Praise for
Rejoice! Rejoice!: Britain in the 1980s
‘Put[s] into cold perspective what at the time we were too befuddled with emotion to understand … Turner has produced a masterly mix of shrewd analysis, historical detail and telling quotes … The book is full of wry asides and amusing anecdotes … Indispensable’
James Delingpole, Mail on Sunday
‘One of the pleasures of Alwyn Turner’s breathless romp through the 1980s is that it overflows with unusual juxtapositions and surprising insights … The tone is that of a wildly enthusiastic guide leading us on a breakneck tour through politics, sport and culture, bursting with weird nuggets of knowledge gleaned everywhere from semi-forgotten John Mortimer novels to Wham! singles’
Dominic Sandbrook, The Sunday Times
‘This kaleidoscopic history … provides a vivid and enjoyable guide to these turbulent years. Ranging broadly across popular culture as well as high politics, and featuring Doctor Who and Ben Elton as prominently as Michael Foot and Michael Heseltine, Turner brings the period alive and offers insights into both sides of a polarised nation’
BBC History Magazine, Pick of the Month
‘Turner’s account of the 1980s is as wide ranging as that fractured, multi-faceted decade demands … deft at picking out devilish details and damning quotes from history that is less recent than you think’
Victoria Segal, MOJO
‘Turner does an excellent job in synthesising the culture and art of the day into the wider political discourse. The result is resolutely entertaining’
Metro
Praise for
Crisis? What Crisis?: Britain in the 1970s
‘Alwyn Turner has certainly hit upon a rich and fascinating subject, and his intertwining of political and cultural history is brilliantly done. His book makes me so relieved I wasn’t an adult at the time … This is a masterful work of social history and cultural commentary, told with much wit. It almost makes you feel as if you were there’
Roger Lewis, Mail on Sunday
‘Turner appears to have spent much of the decade watching television, and his knowledge of old soap operas, sitcoms and TV dramas is deployed to great effect throughout this vivid, brilliantly researched chronicle … Turner may be an anorak, but he is an acutely intelligent anorak’
Francis Wheen, New Statesman
‘An ambitious, entertaining alternative history of the 1970s which judges the decade not just by its political turbulence but by the leg-up it gave popular culture’
Time Out
‘Entertaining and splendidly researched … He has delved into episodes of soap operas and half-forgotten novels to produce an account that displays wit, colour and detail’
Brian Groom, Financial Times
‘Turner combines a fan’s sense of populism (weaving in references to a rapidly expanding popular culture) with a keen grasp of the political landscape, which gives his survey of an often overlooked decade its cutting edge’
Metro
‘Fascinating … an affectionate but unflinching portrait of the era’
Nicholas Foulkes, Independent on Sunday
Acknowledgements
Primarily I must thank those who were kind enough to share their memories of Terry Nation, to supply additional information, to put me in touch with others or simply to point me in the right direction when I might otherwise have got lost:
Alan Simpson, Anthony Brockway, Barry Cryer, Beryl Vertue, Brian Clemens, Carey Clifford, Charles Braham, Cy Town, David Gooderson, David Foster-Smith, David Howe, David Richardson, Deb Boultwood, Dudley Sutton, Gareth Owen, Harry Greene, Ian Dickerson, Jaz Wiseman, Jonathan Bignell, John Flaxman, Mat Irvine, Michelle Coomber, Paul Fishman, Peter Purves, Ray Galton, Sir Roger Moore, Roy Baines, Stan Stennett, Tanya Howarth, Terrance Dicks, Tessa Le Bars, Tony Tanner, Trevor Hoyle and Wyn Calvin.
I’m grateful to all of them and to those who wished not to be named (or whom I inadvertently forgot to mention).
In particular, my thanks to Alan Stevens, Mark Oliver, Steve Groves and Stuart Cooper, who allowed me advance access to material in order that I could meet my deadlines, and to Richard Cross for being helpful beyond the call of duty.
Lance Parkin and Paul Magrs were kind enough to read this in its unpolished first draft and make extremely helpful comments, suggestions and corrections.
Obviously none of the above should be considered to condone the contents of this book. Apologies too to everyone whose work and words I’ve quoted in such a cavalier fashion, probably missing all the important points.
As ever, there’s a whole heap of people at Aurum without whose contributions this book would never have made it to the shelves, including: Barbara Phelan, Bill McCreadie, Graham Coster, Graham Eames, Jodie Mullish, Liz Somers and Natalie Ridgway. Mark Swan designed the jacket and Steve Gove was a superb text editor.
I continue to be grateful for the support and advice of Thamasin Marsh, who lived with this project for its entire duration.
Finally, and especially, my thanks to my editor, Sam Harrison, whose suggestion this book was, and who has been hugely helpful throughout. It’s been a pleasure working with him, and any complaints about anything you have read should be addressed directly to him.
This book is dedicated to Harry Greene and John Summers, two men I’ve been privileged to know and who also happened to know Terry Nation.
Contents
Praise
Title Page
Acknowledgements
Intro: Vote Dalek!
1 A Boy’s Own Story
2 Goings On
3 The Lads Themselves
4 Into the Unknown
5 Life on a Dead Planet
6 Dalek Invasion
7 Action Men
8 Dalek Empire
9 Avenging and Persuading
10 Darkness Descends
11 Dalek Renaissance
12 Journal of a Plague Year
13 Surviving
14�
� Fighting the Federation
15 The Story Continues
16 To America and Beyond
Outro: Closing Credits
Appendix: The Works of Terry Nation
References
Bibliography
Further Reading
Index
Plates
Copyright
Intro
Vote Dalek!
The 2005 General Election was not one of the great moments in British political history. There was no doubt from the outset that the result would be a return of the incumbent Labour government, even though its prime minister, Tony Blair, had taken the country into a series of wars, the last two of which at least (the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq) were proving unpopular. The Conservative opposition was in such disarray that its senior MPs had recently staged a palace coup to remove their leader, Iain Duncan Smith, before he had a chance to lead the party to utter humiliation at the polls, but even his replacement, Michael Howard, was able to do little more than steady the ship, increasing the share of the vote by less than one percentage point. And although the Liberal Democrats did increase their number of MPs, they remained firmly in third place.
In the absence of any discernible interest in the outcome among the general public, the BBC’s weekly listings magazine, Radio Times, chose to ignore the workings of democracy and instead used its cover to herald a much more interesting event that was also happening that week: the return to television after sixteen and a half years of the Daleks, one of whom was to appear in that week’s episode of the newly resuscitated science fiction series Doctor Who. There was an acknowledgement of other concerns, with the creatures pictured in front of the Houses of Parliament, echoing a scene from ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’ (broadcast in 1964, a year when Labour’s election victory under Harold Wilson really did mark a change in political eras), but there was no doubt what the big story was. Just to be clear, the fold-out cover also promised a free Dalek poster for every reader, and bore the slogan: vote dalek!
It was a striking piece of artwork, good enough that when, in 2008, the Periodical Publishers Association organised a survey to find the best British magazine cover of all time, it came top of the poll, fighting off competition from Vogue’s memorial issue for Princess Diana, Tatler’s shot of Vivienne Westwood dressed as Margaret Thatcher and OK!’s exclusive coverage of the wedding of David and Victoria Beckham. As a tribute to Britain’s enduring fascination with the Daleks, it was hard to know which was the greater honour: dominating the Radio Times or triumphing over such iconic national figures. In any event it was a handsome compliment to the 42-year-old inventions of a television scriptwriter named Terry Nation, who had died in California eight years before the cover appeared.
It was not, however, the only indication of the durability of his work. Much of his television writing was already enjoying a new lease of life on DVD, while even the few surviving episodes of a neglected comedy series, Floggit’s, when rediscovered by BBC radio in 2009, were re-broadcast, more than half a century after they first aired. The appeal was not simply one of nostalgia, for his creations continued to inspire new interpretations. The Doctor Who episode that the Radio Times was promoting, ‘Dalek’, saw some significant additions to the mythology he had left, and it was followed in 2008 by a remake of his 1970s series Survivors. Meanwhile, 2010 saw an American reworking of And Soon the Darkness, a film he had co-written forty years earlier, and reports of a continuation – or possibly a revival – of another show from that decade, Blake’s 7, appeared in the press on a regular basis for many years. Indeed that series remained familiar enough to be lampooned in the cinema short Blake’s Junction 7 (2004), starring Martin Freeman, Mackenzie Crook and Johnny Vegas. Clearly this was a body of work whose resilience transcended its origins in what, at the time of its creation, was thought of as the transient, even disposable, world of the broadcast media.
Beyond his most celebrated work in Doctor Who, Survivors and Blake’s 7, Nation’s list of credits was equally impressive. He wrote dozens of episodes for action adventure shows such as The Avengers, The Saint, The Persuaders!, The Baron, Department S, The Champions, The Protectors and MacGyver. He adapted some key science fiction works for television, among them the first ever screen version of a Philip K. Dick story. And he wrote for many of Britain’s most celebrated comedians, including Tony Hancock, Peter Sellers, Frankie Howerd, Ronnie Barker and Eric Sykes. There was too a disparate collection of one-off pieces for cinema and television, some of which remain fondly remembered in certain circles, even if they didn’t command huge audiences (The Amazing Robert Baldick, The House in Nightmare Park, even What a Whopper), as well as a children’s novel, Rebecca’s World, that retains a devoted following. And on at least one occasion he claimed that a largely forgotten television play, Uncle Selwyn, had given him more pleasure than anything else he’d done.
The overwhelming majority of that writing came in the twenty-five years from 1955 to 1980, an era that has come to be regarded as the golden age of British television. Nation was present at the outset, as the dominance exerted over popular culture by the cinema and radio began to fade in the face of the new medium, and his contributions were to help define the period and establish the shape of the entertainment industry. If he is remembered chiefly as a writer of popular science fiction (‘I will always be Terry “Daleks” Nation,’ he acknowledged towards the end of his life), that does scant justice to the breadth and diversity of his writing.
Nor does it accurately reflect his own taste and interests, for despite his use of alien planets and future societies as settings for much of his best-known work, there is little to indicate any commitment to, or great involvement in, science fiction as it evolved during his adult life. His near-contemporary Gerry Anderson, who made shows like Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet, talked of television having a proselytising, pioneering role: ‘I have always been a great believer that science fiction entertainment makes a great contribution to the progress that we make in all sorts of spheres.’ But Nation never seemed to share that concern. Instead he used the trappings and accoutrements of science fiction simply because they were the conventions expected by the audience, in the same way that when he was writing about a special agent, there would always be a gun, a car and a gimmick. In both instances, the genre requirements were little more than window-dressing, providing a backdrop for his true interest: the telling of a tale of adventure.
Because he was above all else a storyteller, drawing heavily on the literature he had encountered in his childhood, and translating the traditions of adventure-writing from the first half of the twentieth century into a form appropriate for the television age. Certainly that was how he saw the first Daleks story at the time. ‘I set out to write a thundering great thriller,’ he said in 1964, ‘the sort of thing I lapped up when I was a boy.’ In a set of notes he submitted for the second season of Blake’s 7, he spelt out his approach to writing: ‘Stories must be strong, well plotted and contain a lot of action and movement. A great deal happens in our stories. Moral points and philosophical discussion must always be well cloaked in our action-adventure.’ It is possible to see his work as an extended love letter to the popular thrillers of his youth. ‘If he’d been writing novels, you’d have called him a page-turner,’ commented Barry Letts, producer of Doctor Who in the early 1970s. ‘You always wanted to know what would happen next.’ Verity Lambert, the founding producer of the series, shared the same opinion: ‘I thought he was a terribly good storyteller – that was absolutely his strength.’
Indeed so great was his love of telling tales that it often coloured the accounts he gave of his own life and work. He had a tendency to exaggeration and simplification, reluctant to allow mere facts to get in the way of a good story. When asked in the early days of the Daleks how he’d come up with the name of his creation, he explained that he had taken it ‘from
the spine of an encyclopaedia. I looked up on the shelf and saw one volume marked “dal to lek”.’ It was an inspired idea and it continued to circulate, despite his subsequent public retraction. ‘It’s absolute rubbish, it’s a load of lies,’ he admitted in 1973. ‘Persistent journalists wanted a romantic story about how the name came to be, and I didn’t have a romantic story. But then I’m a writer, so I made one up, and that was the story we put around for years.’ His instincts were right the first time. The prosaic truth – that the name simply popped into his head – was much less interesting than the version he’d concocted, and the fabricated story of the origin of the Daleks was repeated even in some newspaper notices of his death.
Similar distortions were to be found elsewhere in his interviews. ‘I suspect that I’ve written more TV scripts than anyone else in Britain,’ he once declared, going on to enumerate his contributions: ‘some thirty episodes of The Saint, most of The Baron, The Persuaders! and forty episodes of The Avengers’. Again, this was not strictly true; the real figures were thirteen episodes of The Saint, six of The Avengers, and seven out of twenty-four episodes of The Persuaders!. The claim to have penned most of The Baron was more justified, but only just: he had a writing credit on seventeen of the thirty episodes that were filmed, though four of those were co-written. Perhaps it merely felt like he had turned out that many shows; more likely it was a propensity to embroider whether it were necessary or not.
Nation’s love of story-telling and the durability of his work are not, of course, unrelated. No one went to his shows expecting to come away with a deeper understanding of the nature of the human condition, or to have looked through a window on to the tortured psyche of the author. There was, it is true, sometimes a commentary on politics and society to be found, though it is not always clear how conscious this was, but it was hardly the chief selling point. That was, and remains, Nation’s ability to tell a rattling good tale. He did make some major contributions to the evolution of popular television – he could, for example, claim credit for popularising the ideas of story arcs and season cliff-hangers in television fantasy shows, devices that became taken for granted – but at the heart of everything was pure escapism. ‘I believe that what people want on television is entertainment, and action stories are what I want to write,’ he explained. ‘There are plenty of other people to write sociological dramas.’
