The Man Who Invented the Daleks

by Alwyn Turner

  It was a lesson he had learnt from the popular writers whose work he so eagerly devoured in his early years. The novelist Edgar Wallace, the most successful of those authors (his dominance of the market was such that in the early 1930s it was estimated that one in every four books read in Britain was written by him), was forthright in his deep dislike of literary fiction, which he saw as being concerned with internal, personal experience; in his own work, he insisted, he sought to remove all elements of subjectivity, concentrating solely on action, on objective events. Such an approach was summed up by the critic Richard Usborne, writing about John Buchan, another of the great adventure writers of the period: ‘The stories kept the heroes constantly on the move. But the rolling stones gathered no atmospheric moss of character.’ Or, as Britain’s most revered film critic, Dilys Powell, pointed out, ‘in a thriller too much character clutters up the plot’. The same attitude was easily extended into science fiction, where, Kingsley Amis observed in 1960, there was an ‘exaltation of idea or plot over characterisation’.

  The novels of Wallace, Buchan and others were part of the staple diet of an imaginative schoolboy like Nation in the 1930s and 1940s, consumed for the same reasons that Dickson McCunn, one of Buchan’s heroes, had embraced the work of Sir Walter Scott in his own (fictional) childhood: ‘he had read the novels not for their insight into human character or for their historical pageantry, but because they gave him material wherewith to construct fantastic journeys.’ And on those fantastic journeys, the reader – and, later, the viewer – was not over-concerned with notions of originality or consistency. H.C. McNeile, who wrote the hugely popular Bulldog Drummond books under the pseudonym of Sapper, borrowed freely from the stories of other writers and never troubled himself with building a coherent narrative across the novels. Even his use of names was inconsistent and he wasn’t always sure if a character were alive or dead: Drummond’s housekeeper dies in one book, but returns without a scratch, or indeed an explanation, in the next.

  The same traits were to be found in Nation’s work. The subtleties of characterisation were of little interest, influences were seldom hard to identify, and continuity could always be sacrificed if it got in the way of the tale. He was fortunate to find a sympathetic ally in Huw Wheldon, the controller of BBC1 in the 1960s, who was a big fan of the Daleks; Wheldon was convinced that television is ‘overwhelmingly a story-telling medium’, and argued that Doctor Who was about something archetypal: ‘the path into the unknown forest’. That was perhaps further than Nation himself would have gone, but there is in his best writing an element of the myth, or perhaps the fairy tale, that has helped it to endure. And, as in all the best fairy tales, the figures are painted with a very broad brush. Heroes fight seemingly impossible odds and (normally) win, but are frequently eclipsed in the popular imagination by the monstrosity of the villains, whether in the form of the evil scientist Davros in Doctor Who or of Servalan, the ruthless dominatrix figure who represented the forces of oppression in Blake’s 7.

  Above all, there are the Daleks, the single most enduring creations to come out of British television in the twentieth century. All the other iconic British screen presences, whether on television or film, were in the first instance literary creations, from Winnie the Pooh and Hercule Poirot through The Lord of the Rings and the Narnia stories to James Bond and Harry Potter. The Daleks are the only great popular myth, endlessly reinvented and reinterpreted by other writers, to have been created specifically for television. Their 2005 return came in the midst of a phase of revivals, ranging from the film of The Avengers (1998) to the BBC’s Reggie Perrin (2009), but while the others merely emphasised how frozen in time was the appeal of the originals, the Daleks alone satisfied the demand for nostalgia while also building a huge new constituency. Like any great myth, they have outlived and outgrown their creator, entering the popular consciousness to become instantly recognisable by name alone, even to those who have never knowingly watched Doctor Who. Perhaps their only rival is the Doctor himself, and it is arguable that he would scarcely be remembered as anything but a footnote in television history had the Daleks not been such an instantly huge success.

  And they were extraordinarily successful. The Dalekmania craze that swept Britain at the end of 1964 saw over a hundred thousand copies of a single toy sold that Christmas; although the fever inevitably abated, a decade later there were still over a hundred Dalek products on the market. The copyright in the creatures was owned jointly by Terry Nation and by the BBC, and it was the royalties from the sales of these products, rather than his writing, that made him a rich man. The scale of the merchandising also inspired the creation of the lucrative BBC Enterprises (now BBC Worldwide), an organisation whose profits rose from a modest £1 million in 1968 to become a major contributor to the corporation’s revenues. Beyond that, the Daleks are the most famous aliens and the ultimate baddies in British popular culture, resolutely evil with no pretence whatsoever of redeeming features.

  None of which bore much resemblance to the man himself. ‘He was the nicest guy you could ever wish to meet,’ noted Terrance Dicks, who was for a while his script editor on Doctor Who. ‘I’ve never really met anybody who didn’t like Terry.’ Almost everyone Nation came into contact with had much the same feeling. He made and kept friends, he was a generous host and he was deeply loyal, both to those he knew and to fans of his work. ‘He was an intelligent, funny, warm and very friendly man,’ commented Roger Moore, who worked with him on The Persuaders!. ‘He was a joy to have around.’ Perhaps the most eloquent testimony was that of a Doctor Who director, Richard Martin: ‘He had this lovely, rich, pastoral voice. And it sounded good and it sounded wonderful, and it was full of courage and personality. When people say “Terry Nation”, I hear his voice.’ The identification of the accent was perhaps misplaced – Nation’s voice revealed his upbringing in Cardiff, a city that was far from pastoral – but the sentiment is clear.

  ‘Tall, handsome, relaxed,’ observed the Guardian at the height of his fame in 1966, ‘Mr Nation looks like a Welsh James Bond.’ Coming from a lower-middle-class background in South Wales, his success enabled him to acquire a taste for good living, and he did so with great gusto, developing a fondness for fine wines, indulging his love of clothes and delighting in his purchase of a mansion in the country. In the early 1970s, remembered Terrance Dicks, he and Nation had come out of a meeting and were walking down Piccadilly when Nation remarked there were a couple of things he needed to talk about further and that there was no time like the present: ‘“Look, we’re just about to pass the Ritz, let’s go and have a champagne cocktail and discuss it.” And I said, “I like working with you, Terry. You’ve got style.” And he just beamed. He really enjoyed himself. He enjoyed his success, and rightly so.’

  ‘Terry was larger than life,’ recalled Deb Boultwood, whose father, Dave Freeman, had been one of Nation’s first co-writers back in 1956. ‘He walked into a room and you knew Terry was there.’ Again there are traces of the celebrity authors of the 1920s and 1930s. Breathless newspaper reports of the day revelled in the eccentricities of Edgar Wallace, who was so lazy he would always take a taxi rather than walk, no matter how short the journey, and who wrote inside a large glass box, constructed in his study to keep out draughts, while wearing a silk dressing-gown and chain-smoking through an absurdly long cigarette-holder.

  Nation’s own writing methods were less flamboyant, but shared the same devil-may-care nonchalance, the same casual professionalism, that has always been cherished by lovers of popular fiction. He may not have been able to match Wallace’s boast of having once written an 80,000 word novel in a weekend, or thriller writer John Creasey’s claim to have written two novels in a week (‘and on the Saturday afternoon, I played cricket’), but he prided himself on – and was valued by others for – the rapidity with which he could produce a script. It was a facility that came partly from his reluctance to redraft or rewrite. ‘I work directly on to the typewriter,’ Nation explained
in 1989, ‘and because I’m a bad typist I would seldom go back. It really bothered me to have to rewrite things. So if I’d written myself into a corner, I’d write myself out rather than go back and redo it.’ For some of those with whom he worked, this was undoubtedly an asset. ‘Terry’s first drafts often ended up as his final drafts,’ noted Philip Hinchcliffe, a Doctor Who producer, with approval. ‘He was a very professional writer. The construction of his stories and the fast-paced movement of the action – it all added up, and you got a thoroughly professional set of scripts when they landed on your desk.’

  It was not, however, an attitude that won universal approval from his fellow writers. ‘I’ve known him to write a script in five days,’ remembered Chris Boucher, script editor of Blake’s 7. ‘He simply roared through it, and I have to say when you write that fast, it does from time to time show.’ Terrance Dicks agreed: ‘He had a habit of falling into patterns. There were a lot of recurrent themes: people planting bombs, and being chased and spraining an ankle. In Terry’s scripts, people were always spraining their ankles at moments of crisis.’ There were times, he suggested, when Nation didn’t seem to put in as much effort as he should: ‘Given his successful career, he was obviously a very good writer, but he needed the occasional bit of prodding.’ Brian Clemens, who worked with Nation on series like The Avengers and The Persuaders!, and who co-wrote And Soon the Darkness with him, was more forthright: ‘Terry had talent, a lot of talent. If he’d concentrated more, he’d have more of a track record. He was a lovely guy and a fine writer, but he was bloody lazy.’

  The charge of laziness, of not trying hard enough, was made in reference to Nation’s occasional lack of creative engagement with a script, rather than to his work rate, which was undeniably impressive. ‘Terry was very ambitious really, but in a nice way,’ reflected his long-time agent, Beryl Vertue. ‘He really wanted to get on and he liked nice things. He wanted to achieve.’ Even at the height of the Daleks’ success – when his creations were rivalled only by the Beatles in terms of media coverage and merchandising revenue – he continued to write at an intense pace, driven both by a work ethic that reflected his South Wales upbringing and by a feeling of frustration that he hadn’t yet realised his visions. ‘I have never ever sat and watched something I’ve written without a sense of embarrassment and a sense of failed achievements,’ he said in 1972. ‘It happens to be up there on the screen, but it was never the way I intended it, it was never as successful as I hoped it would be.’

  The prodigious scale of the output that resulted was not unique. Nation was part of a tight little group of writers that shaped much British television of the 1960s and 1970s, a group that also included the likes of Brian Clemens, Philip Broadley, Dennis Spooner, Harry W. Junkin, Clive Exton and Donald James. Here too there were echoes of an earlier time, when the thriller-writing boom of the 1930s was dominated by a handful of authors – John Creasey, Sydney Horler, Edwy Searles Brooks and others – all capable of turning out a dozen or more novels a year, often using pseudonyms to cover their tracks for different publishers. ‘Between the mid-sixties and the early seventies all the episodic film series in this country were being written by about eight writers,’ said Clemens. ‘We tended to lean on each other.’

  It was a reasonable expectation that if a viewer tuned into a popular British drama of the time, one or other of these names would appear in the credits, in the capacity either of writer or of script editor (the latter function also known as story editor, or sometimes story consultant). And the two roles were closely interlinked. As script editors on various series, they would commission each other because, as Nation remembered: ‘We all faced the same problem, a daily problem, that there weren’t many people who could do scripts. We would tend to rewrite and write for each other. Clemens had done a couple for me, and I had done some things for him.’ And, reciprocating the (mostly) friendly rivalry that existed between them, he added: ‘Clemens was the fastest writer I had ever come across. He was a little facile, but by God he could turn them out!’

  Many of these men came from similar backgrounds. They were not so much a generation, as a tiny slither of a generation. Nation, Exton, Clemens, James and Spooner were born within twenty-eight months of each other; all of them were formed in childhood by the early days of radio and by the glory years of Hollywood; all were slightly too young to have served in the Second World War; and all embarked on their careers just as British television began to take off. Typically they came from unprivileged backgrounds and were not university-educated. ‘We all shared the same social experiences and listened to the same radio programmes and so on,’ reflected Clemens.

  Within a couple of years either side of Nation were also to be found the likes of Leon Griffiths, Tony Barwick, Richard Harris and Troy Kennedy Martin, who worked on the same series that provided him with regular work, whether it were Out of the Unknown, The Saint or The Persuaders!. Between them, these writers were responsible for bringing to the small screen everything from Z-Cars, Captain Scarlet and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) to Poirot, Minder, The Professionals and Shoestring, as well as Nation’s own contributions. Without them, British television would have looked very different indeed. And – in slightly different fields – there were comedy writers including John Junkin and the team of Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, as well as programme-makers like Gerry Anderson and Verity Lambert, all born in the same few years and all of whose paths were to intersect with Nation’s career.

  For his story is, to some extent, shared by these others, rooted in the same experiences that moulded the country in the decades that followed the war, as it made its uncertain transition from Austerity Britain to Swinging London and beyond into the uncertainties of the 1970s and 1980s.

  Chapter One

  A Boy’s Own Story

  Terry Nation moved to London in January 1955 at the age of twenty-four, intending, in his words, ‘to be an actor or comedian or something – I wasn’t very sure what’. The city that he found was just emerging, somewhat to its own surprise, into the dawn of an extraordinary period in British cultural history. The previous July had seen the celebration of Derationing Day, when bacon and meat finally came off the ration, marking an end to all wartime restrictions on food and other goods. Although the city was still pockmarked with bombsites left over from the Blitz, even in such affluent areas as Oxford Street, there was a sense of having left behind the long, wearying struggle of the Second World War and the ensuing period of Austerity.

  In their place came the first stirrings of a new consumer-based society. The year of Nation’s arrival was to see key events that would transform the country’s identity: the launch of independent television, providing a second channel to break the BBC’s previous monopoly; the opening of Mary Quant’s Bazaar, the first of the London boutiques that would become world famous over the next decade; and the arrival from America of rock and roll in the shape of the hit single ‘Rock Around the Clock’ by Bill Haley and his Comets, together with the British response, Lonnie Donegan’s ‘Rock Island Line’, the record that launched the skiffle craze. The following year built on these foundations, with the emergence of Elvis Presley and the coming of the Angry Young Men, the latter announcing themselves in the shape of John Osborne’s play Look Back in Anger and Colin Wilson’s book The Outsider. There was also the first sighting of pop art in the exhibition This Is Tomorrow, featuring Richard Hamilton’s collage ‘Just what is it that makes today’s homes so different, so appealing?’, a celebration of the American dream as revealed through advertising.

  Meanwhile the world of comedy, in which Nation hoped to make his mark, was in the grip of the revolutionary radio series The Goon Show, though a newly launched radio sitcom, Hancock’s Half Hour, was fast emerging as an even more influential and popular rival.

  But if it were bliss to be alive in those days, no one had told the establishment, which remained largely unaware of this groundswell of innovation, these early manifestations of a youth culture that wou
ld soon sweep the country and then much of the rest of the world. The radicalism of the late 1940s had faded from British political life, and when Nation arrived in London, the prime minister was still 80-year-old Winston Churchill, kept in power more by sentiment than sense. Although he was soon to be replaced by the comparatively youthful Anthony Eden (born as recently as 1897), the opposition leaders in the 1955 General Election – Clement Attlee of Labour and Clement Davies of the Liberals – were both in their seventies.

  Even these staid circles, however, were soon to be disrupted, first by the humiliation of the Suez Crisis, when it became apparent that British foreign policy could no longer be determined without reference to the USA, and then by the noisy arrival of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, bringing a sense that a younger generation wanted to have a say in building a new country. In the meantime, hopeful young men and women flocked to London from the provinces, determined – like Nation – to make their mark, to embrace the new cultural opportunities that were opening up.

  Terence Joseph Nation was born in Llandaff, Cardiff in 1930, the only child of Bert and Sue, as Gilbert Joseph Nation and Susan Nation (née Norris) were generally known. It was not an auspicious time or place. Cardiff was the largest city in Wales, with a population of just over a quarter of a million, but it was already in serious decline, the splendour of its civic buildings looking back to past glories in the late nineteenth century, with little sense of hope for the future. In its heyday it had provided the focal point for the South Wales collieries in the valleys that stretched northwards and westwards from the city; its docks shipped coal to all corners of the world, and attracted labour from similarly far-flung places. Continuing expansion had seemed inevitable and inexorable in the years up to the First World War, but in the 1920s demand for coal began to fall. Shipping turned increasingly to oil for its primary fuel, the international markets struggled to recover from the post-war slump, and production costs rose, the more accessible seams having been worked out. Further losses were sustained as British industry went into recession at the end of the decade; coal production fell to half its level at the turn of the century and, in the words of one contemporary account, ‘unemployment descended on the valleys like a deadly and malignant disease’. More than a third of miners in the South Wales coalfields were out of work by the early 1930s and Cardiff, so dependent on that industry, was registering unemployment levels of over twenty per cent.