The Man Who Invented the Daleks

by Alwyn Turner

  For the remainder of his life, Nation was to be asked about the act of creation that brought the Daleks into being, and he was never able to provide an answer that satisfied his inquisitors. ‘I suppose they were born in a flash of inspiration,’ he commented once, ‘except that makes it sound altogether too poetic. I was sitting at a typewriter, doing a job of work for money, and I needed a monster. And that’s when they were born.’ Similarly the name, notwithstanding his story about the encyclopaedias, had no obvious spur: ‘Basically I wanted a two-syllable word that had a mechanical sound about it,’ he recalled, though its rhythm clearly echoes that of ‘robot’, a term introduced in Karel Capek’s 1920 play R.U.R. – Rossum’s Universal Robots and derived from the Czech word for ‘serf labour’. Dalek too proved to be a real word, meaning ‘remote’ or even ‘alien’ in Croatian, though this was no more than a happy accident, and came as a surprise to Nation when he subsequently learned of it; as he pointed out: ‘I don’t have many friends who speak Serbo-Croat.’ He was, despite his misgivings, sufficiently excited by his inspiration that he enthusiastically broke the news to his wife, Kate. ‘I’ve had this brilliant idea for some baddies. I’m going to call them Daleks,’ he enthused. To which she replied, ‘Drink your tea while it’s hot.’

  He submitted a storyline, titled ‘The Survivors’. A fully developed and impressive piece of work, it was considerably more detailed than expected (twenty-two pages rather than the recommended three or four), and contained virtually all the elements that would turn up in the final version. By the time it was accepted, however, and he was commissioned to produce a full script on 31 July 1963, he had received a far more attractive offer to write material for Eric Sykes, who was signed up to host a variety show, Wish You Were Here, in a joint production by the BBC and a Swedish television channel. Although the Doctor Who script was not due for delivery until 30 September, the Sykes programme was scheduled for 7 September and required Nation’s earlier presence for rehearsals. Short of time, and seeing the Doctor Who story as the lesser of the two commitments, he finished the script within a week (writing an episode a day, for each of which he was paid £262), delivered it to Lambert and Whitaker and left for Sweden.

  The serial went through various titles, including ‘Beyond the Sun’, before ending up as ‘The Mutants’, though in retrospect it has come to be known simply as ‘The Daleks’, in tribute to its central villains. Set on the fictional planet Skaro, the story features two races, the Daleks and the Thals, who long ago fought a devastating centuries-long war, ending with the detonation of a neutron bomb that has left the planet scarred by radiation. The surviving Daleks have retreated into an underground network beneath their chief city and taken refuge inside individual protective shells, while a handful of Thals keep themselves alive on the surface of Skaro with anti-radiation drugs. There has been no contact since between the two races, who are each unaware of the other’s continued existence, but this is to change with the arrival of the TARDIS, bringing the Doctor (as Doctor Who had now become known) and his companions: his granddaughter, Susan, and her teachers, Ian and Barbara. Landing in the midst of a petrified forest, the travellers discover in the distance the Dalek city, and the Doctor tricks the others into exploring the place by pretending that he’s in search of mercury to refill the fluid link (a vital component in the workings of the TARDIS). They are captured by the Daleks, from whom they learn something of Skaro’s past, but manage to escape and join up with the Thals. Together they stage an attack on the city to regain possession of the fluid link, and the story ends with the defeat and death of the Daleks and the departure of the TARDIS crew, leaving the planet in the hands of the Thals.

  It was a simple story that drew rather more deeply on Nation’s childhood reading than on the modern science fiction he had adapted for Out of this World. In particular there is a clear debt to H.G. Wells, whose 1895 novel The Time Machine had foreseen an Earth inhabited by the subterranean Morlocks and the surface-dwelling Eloi, twin races not far removed from the hideous, violent Daleks living underground and the beautiful, peaceful Thals. Wells’s later book The War of the Worlds (1898) had centred on a race of aliens who could only operate on Earth if they were inside machines of their own construction, and this combination of an organic life-form within a robotic casing is evoked in the nature of the Dalek: a ‘frog-like animal’, according to Nation’s original storyline, who lives inside a metallic travelling machine. ‘They are invulnerable, they are pitiless,’ a character remarks of the Martians in Wells’s novel. Then there are traces of Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth (1864) as Ian, Barbara and a group of Thals travel through swamps full of mutated creatures and caves fraught with danger to attack the city from the rear. One might even see, in the depiction of the Doctor and Ian as the man of science and the adventure hero (for it is Ian who tends to lead the action elements of the story), something resembling the relationship between Professor Challenger and Lord John Roxton in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World and its sequels.

  None of this, it should be noted, was out of kilter with the original conception of the series. Sydney Newman had talked about the concept of the TARDIS being based ‘on the style of an H.G. Wells time-space machine’, while the first adventure, Anthony Coburn’s ‘100,000 BC’, had carried echoes of another Wells tale, ‘A Story of the Stone Age’, published in 1897.

  But if the literary references were more than half a century old, they were heavily reworked to address entirely contemporary themes. Whereas Wells had seen the Morlocks and Eloi evolving from current humanity, the extreme products of a split between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, Nation was interested less in class war than in nuclear war. The development of the neutron bomb, which was to cause such contamination on Skaro, had been widely covered in the media of the early 1960s (a fact noted by Ian in the original script, though his comments were deleted from the final version), and a bomb had in fact been constructed and tested by America in 1963, though that was not publicised at the time. What was very much in the news, as Nation sat down to write, was the signing on 5 August 1963 of the Test Ban Treaty by America, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom, the three countries that then possessed nuclear weapons; for the first time an international agreement had been negotiated that attempted to regulate the development of such armaments. In retrospect it became clear that this triggered a collapse of support in Britain for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (it was to return in the 1980s), but for the moment CND remained the great cause of the left, included in whose ranks were many of those with whom Nation mixed socially and professionally.

  A large part of the central section of ‘The Daleks’ deals explicitly with a debate over pacifism, as represented by the Thals, who have abandoned their past incarnation as warriors and instead become farmers. ‘Fear breeds hatred and war,’ declares Temmosus (Alan Wheatley), the leader of the Thals, as he prepares to encounter the Daleks. ‘I shall speak to them peacefully. They’ll see that I’m unarmed. There’s no better argument against war than that.’ He is promptly killed by the Daleks with their death rays. ‘Can pacifism become a human instinct?’ wonders Barbara, and Ian dismisses such beliefs as pure idealism: ‘Pacifism only works when everybody feels the same.’ He later proves his point by seizing a Thal woman named Dyoni (Virginia Wetherell) and threatening to hand her over to the Daleks, thereby provoking Alydon (John Lee), the new Thal leader, into hitting him. Meanwhile the Doctor, ethically a more complex figure than he was later to become, is proving even more bellicose. ‘We have a ready-made army here,’ he declares, and when it’s pointed out that the Thals don’t believe in violence, he waves away such petty objections: ‘This is no time for morals.’ After further agonising – in which a key role is played by Dyoni, telling Alydon that she’s glad he stood up for her (‘If you hadn’t fought him, I think I would have hated you’) – the Thals decide to abandon centuries of non-violence and join the TARDIS crew in attacking the Dalek city.

  The
provocation of Alydon is a little glib, derived perhaps from the question so often put to conscientious objectors in the First World War: What would you do if you saw a German trying to rape your sister? (To which the homosexual writer Lytton Strachey famously replied: ‘I would try to interpose my body.’) But in the context of a children’s television drama, the simplicity is effective enough, and it was certainly an issue that caused Nation some soul-searching. ‘I had a bad time with the first episodes of Doctor Who,’ he commented in 1966. ‘The Doctor had to say to the Thals: “If you are worth keeping, if you have anything to contribute, it is worth fighting for, it is worth laying down your life for.” It was against all my beliefs, but I made him say it.’ He added, with the tone of a man more preoccupied with the Second World War than with a possible third: ‘It is a problem we all have to face. I don’t have the answer.’

  There had been in Nation’s first storyline, ‘The Survivors’, one further echo of the times. The original concept had been that both the Thals and the Daleks blamed the other side for having started the war on Skaro. It is only at the end – when the Thals have beaten but not (in this version) killed the Daleks – that the Doctor pieces together the historical records of the two races and deduces that ‘both hemispheres were destroyed simultaneously, and there is evidence that before the attack the radar had recorded something in space’. The idea of two power blocs being provoked into war, and thus destroyed, by a third party chimed with contemporary fears about the rise of China, which was then widely seen as a potentially destabilising influence on the fine balance between the USA and the Soviet Union, particularly after the Sino-Soviet split became public in 1960. (An early script for the subsequent story, ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’, included a reference to China being at war with both the USA and the USSR.) Unusually for Nation, however, the storyline ends on an entirely upbeat note: rockets arrive on Skaro carrying representatives of this third power, who explain that ‘they have realised the enormity of the crime committed by their forefathers. They have waited for the radiation level to fall, and now they come to make reparations and assist in rebuilding the planet.’

  Fortunately this entire plot development was jettisoned, to be replaced by the destruction of the Daleks, thus avoiding the terrible possibility of viewers being left with an image of Thals and Daleks living together happily ever after. Such a denouement would have sat uncomfortably with the imagery of the preceding episodes, dominated as they were by overt Nazi references to the extermination of opponents. The very word ‘exterminate’ was firmly associated in the public mind with the Holocaust, a connection reinforced recently by its repeated use during the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann for his part in the Final Solution. And a happy ending would have gone utterly against the grain of the scene in which the Daleks rank up alongside each other, raise their right arms in a stiff salute and announce: ‘Tomorrow we will be the masters of the planet.’

  Despite these allusions to serious and current issues, however, there remained the unavoidable fact that the Daleks were dangerously ‘close to the cheap-jack bug-eyed monsters’ that Sydney Newman insisted should play no part in Doctor Who. ‘David Whitaker and I both thought it was a terrific story and very exciting,’ remembered Verity Lambert, but Donald Wilson, the head of serials, to whom they were directly answerable, was less impressed. ‘This is absolutely terrible,’ he told them. ‘I don’t want you to make it. What else have you got?’ The answer was that they had nothing else. ‘The Daleks’ had originally been intended as the fifth story in the series, but the scripts for the projected second story had been rejected, and with production due to start shortly, there was an urgent need for a replacement. The speed with which Nation had delivered his scripts meant that his piece was the only option available. ‘Had we had anything else,’ said Lambert, ‘I don’t think the Daleks would ever have hit the screen. We had to make it.’

  Nation’s description of the Daleks captured their essence, without going into great detail about their appearance: ‘Hideous machine-like creatures, they are legless, moving on a round base. They have no human features. A lens on a flexible shaft acts as an eye. Arms with mechanical grips for hands.’ The responsibility for turning this description into usable props fell to the nascent visual effects department at the BBC, the design being the responsibility of Raymond P. Cusick, with the realisation of that design falling to his colleagues Jack Kine and Bernard Wilkie. The first decision was that the machines would have to be operated by humans inside the props. ‘If you had anything mechanical, ten-to-one it would go wrong on the take,’ explained Cusick. Having further established that the initial idea of having the operators standing up would be far too tiring, ‘I drew a seat, ergonomic height, eighteen inches, got the operator down, and then drew round him; that’s how the basic shape appeared.’ Other limitations came from the budget. Cusick wanted the lower half to be a curved skirt made from fibreglass, but was told the material was too expensive. Instead he designed it using plywood panels, only to find out that Shawcraft Models – the firm who manufactured the props – had used fibreglass anyway.

  The final version stood four foot six inches off the ground, ran on castors (concealed by a thick rubber skirt at the base) and had just enough room for an operator, whose task it was to move the object with his feet, while controlling the two arms, the eye-stalk and the lights on the top that flashed to indicate which Dalek was speaking. This latter requirement also meant that the operator had to learn the script, even though he did not himself provide the voice. It was a set of skills not dissimilar to those demanded of a one-man band, with the added problem of restricted vision through the mesh section at the top.

  The finished props were not, as objects, immediately inspiring to the crew. ‘The first time I saw them, I laughed,’ reflected William Russell, one of the original stars. ‘It seemed ridiculous.’ And he was not alone. ‘I remember looking at it and thinking, “This’ll never take off”,’ commented Jack Kine. ‘But once the actors got inside, the things took on a life of their own.’

  The one point that Nation had made from the outset was that the Daleks were to be as non-human as possible. ‘I had been a cinema-goer all my life and loved going to what were rated in those days as horror movies. But whatever the creature was, somewhere in your heart of hearts, you knew it was a man dressed up. So my first requirement was to take the legs off. Take away the humanoid form and we were off and running.’ He was insistent that there should be no visible means of propulsion, citing as his inspiration the Georgian State Dance Company, who had recently been seen on British television performing a dance in which the women wore floor-length skirts, concealing the movement of their feet, so that they appeared to glide across the stage. They were not, however, the only act exploring this concept. Earlier in 1963 the comedian Hattie Jacques, whom Nation knew from her work with Eric Sykes and Tony Hancock, had appeared at the Players’ Theatre in London in a routine described by Joan Le Mesurier: ‘I saw Hattie, dressed as a little girl, sing “I Don’t Want to Play in Your Yard”. She moved as if she had wheels concealed under her dress.’

  This non-human appearance was a significant departure from established images of robots. The Daleks are actually cyborgs, rather than robots, combining the organic with the mechanical (‘inside each of these shells is a living, bubbling lump of hate’, as the Doctor explains in a later story), but the outer casings are clearly in the robotic tradition; Nation described them as being ‘simply the vehicles’, a similar formulation to Kingsley Amis’s definition of a robot as ‘a mere peripatetic machine’. And the tendency of robots within the science fiction of the time was very clearly humanoid, as seen in films such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and Forbidden Planet (1956), and as elucidated by Isaac Asimov. ‘The human form is the most successful generalised form in all nature,’ argues a character in The Caves of Steel. ‘If you want a design capable of doing a great many widely various things, all fairly well, you could do no better than to imitate the human
form.’ In that novel, and in Philip K. Dick’s ‘Imposter’, the ultimate aim of creating robots was to make them as indistinguishable from humanity as possible. The Daleks, both in intention and in final design, swam firmly against that current. As Terrance Dicks, who was to bring them back to the screen in the 1970s, said: ‘They were original in their time; there hadn’t been anything even remotely like them.’

  Cusick’s work in bringing the concept to life met with Nation’s approval. ‘He made a tremendous contribution,’ he was to acknowledge. ‘He took rough notes of my ideas for the Dalek’s behaviour, the electronic eye, mechanical hands and so on, and although I didn’t have a clear visual image in my mind, when I saw his finished Dalek design it seemed very familiar.’ Perhaps Cusick’s only mistake was that, while having lunch with Bill Roberts of Shawcraft Models, he demonstrated the gliding movement he was trying to realise by picking up a pepper pot and moving it around the table, and then told the story to the press, thereby providing the media with a ready-made cliché: ‘Ever since then, people say I was inspired by a pepper pot. But it could have been the salt pot I picked up …’

  The other major addition to the creatures was the Dalek voice designed by Brian Hodgson of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, feeding a human voice through a ring modulator, set at a frequency that turned the signal on and off thirty times a second, and then passing it through a graphic equaliser. The voices themselves were provided, in a flat monotone that at times of stress rose to an hysterical scream, by David Graham and Peter Hawkins, the latter having last been heard in a Nation-scripted broadcast playing a stray dog in Floggit’s.