The Man Who Invented the Daleks

by Alwyn Turner

  Meanwhile, the success of the serial had changed the nature of the programme itself, shifting the balance from educational evocations of the past to futuristic tales set on alien planets. In January 1964 the idea of ‘The Red Fort’, Nation’s story set during the Indian Mutiny, was abandoned, and he was asked instead to produce – at very short notice – a new science fiction piece, to be screened in April. It took just four weeks from commission to approval of the six scripts.

  In consultation with David Whitaker, Nation developed ‘The Keys of Marinus’ as an episodic serial, effectively an anthology of four tales, loosely linked through a framing story. It was a format that Nation was to perfect later in his career, particularly in Blake’s 7 (and there are elements of ‘Marinus’ that he explored more fully in that series), but the tight writing schedule perhaps militated against him on this occasion; although ‘The Daleks’ had also been written quickly, that had been his choice, not a deadline forced upon him. In any event, the resulting story is seldom cited as one of the classic Doctor Who serials. Indeed even he was to struggle to recall it in any detail later in life. ‘Were the Keys of Marinus four pieces that come together?’ he wondered. ‘Just that, I think. We did one in the jungle, we did one on ice, and I can’t remember the others.’ Nonetheless, there were plenty of good ideas in ‘The Keys of Marinus’, and some strong indications that, when he wished to, Nation could turn his hand to more subtle science fiction concepts, including the illusory pleasures of consumption, the acceleration of plant metabolism and the depiction of an alternative judicial system.

  The story is set on the planet Marinus, where a machine, known as the Conscience of Marinus, was long ago set up to act as a ‘judge and jury that was never wrong’. Subsequent improvements enabled it to control the minds of the planet’s inhabitants, instilling virtues of justice and nonviolence, until a race called the Voords found a way around its influence, to the detriment of everyone else. ‘Our people could not resist because violence is alien to them,’ explains a priest of the machine. Thus far, the whole thing looked like a poor man’s version of ‘The Daleks’, and the Voords were even talked up in the press as potential rivals to their predecessors. ‘They are a willowy six feet tall,’ shuddered the Daily Express. ‘Their torso resembles a man’s. But they have the heads of enormous beetles and on top of their noses antennae sprout. All in all pretty horrible. Now it remains to be seen whether they will be as popular with children as the Daleks.’ They were nowhere near as popular, partly because they hardly appear in the story, but mostly because they look precisely like the men in monster suits that Nation so disparaged.

  Thereafter, the serial improved markedly. The inset stories see the TARDIS crew transported about the planet, using travel bracelets, on a quest to locate the four microcircuit keys that will modify the Conscience of Marinus, and thereby bring the Voords back in line. As Nation correctly remembered, one tale was set in a jungle, featuring a scientist who has discovered a way of speeding up the tempo of nature; he is under threat from rampant vegetation, as the encroachment of the undergrowth, which should take years, happens before our eyes; a second was set in the frozen wastes of the planet, with a key sealed in a block of ice and surrounded by four warriors, who are themselves set in ice – any attempt to defrost the key also brings the guards to life. There is also a courtroom drama, with Ian accused of murder under a system where the defendant is presumed guilty until proven innocent; the Doctor acts as his defence counsel and doubles up as a detective uncovering the real killer. ‘Oh, elementary, elementary,’ he exclaims in approved Sherlockian manner, as he solves a locked room mystery. The episode allowed William Hartnell to deliver one of his most entertaining performances as the Doctor, though its lack of action seems to have lost the attention of some of the younger viewers, causing a drop in audience figures. It also pitched him against ‘a vicious, dangerous woman’ named Kala (Fiona Walker), who dresses entirely in white and whose heartless scheming surely makes her a precursor of Servalan in Blake’s 7.

  Most interesting is ‘The Velvet Web’, the first story of the serial, in which the travellers find themselves in a ‘decadent and sensuous’ city named Morphoton, a sequence reminiscent of the Lotus-Eaters in Homer’s Odyssey. They fall prey to the apparently lavish lifestyle they find there, with the exception of Barbara who has escaped the power of suggestion and can see that the luxury is an illusion. Through her agency, the truth is uncovered, that the whole city is a fantasy created by four beings whose ‘brains outgrew our bodies’. These creatures live on in glass jars, enormous brains with eyes growing out on stalks, controlling the actions of their human accomplices through hypnosis. They need external agents, they explain, because ‘the human body is the most flexible instrument in the world. No single mechanical device could reproduce its mobility and dexterity.’ The Daleks had come to different conclusions, but since creating them, Nation had read Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel with its similar endorsement of human adaptability. The image of the brains in jars might also suggest that he had read the cheerfully misanthropic story ‘William and Mary’, written in 1954 by Roald Dahl (another writer who grew up in Llandaff) but only published in 1960; there were other versions of disembodied brains, including those in Curt Siodmak’s 1942 novel Donovan’s Brain and ‘Hypnotic Sphere’, a 1963 episode of the puppet science fiction series Fireball XL5, but Dahl’s had the added detail of the attached eyeball.

  All this, however, was little more than a holding operation, keeping the pot bubbling until the return of the Daleks. In March 1964, Nation was commissioned to write ‘The Return of the Daleks’, which became ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’, and in May that year he signed a contract, through a writer and editor named Jack Fishman, with Souvenir Press for a book to be titled The Daleks Book, for which he received a £300 advance.

  The fact that he was able to do such a deal, without the involvement of the BBC, reflected an anomalous arrangement that was to prove highly beneficial. The corporation had for many years relied on an internal script department which employed writers directly, so that, for example, Nigel Kneale was a salaried employee of the BBC at the time he wrote the original Quatermass stories; consequently he didn’t benefit as he might have done when they were remade by Hammer Films, since the copyright didn’t reside with him. But part of Sydney Newman’s reforms included the closing down of the script department in June 1963, with writers henceforth contracted on a self-employed basis. The early script commissions for Doctor Who were among the first under this new system, and the rules were not yet set in stone, as Beryl Vertue at Associated London Scripts was to discover. ‘I was a new agent,’ she remembered, ‘I was learning. All these contracts had a copyright clause, and I used to think, well, they’ll never sell this, so it was a clause I used to run a pen through. And I must have done it on Terry’s contract as well.’ The consequence, unintended by the BBC and unexpected by ALS, was that the copyright position of the Daleks was left entirely unresolved.

  At the time of the first serial, this seemed of little relevance to anyone; during the run, the BBC even turned down an approach for licensing from an entrepreneur named Walter Tuckwell, on the grounds that the creatures were due to be killed off at the end of the story. But as the Dalek craze took off, and as more and more companies began to turn up on the corporation’s doorstep looking for merchandising rights, it rapidly became clear that some agreement had to be reached. In March 1965 R.J. Marshall, assistant solicitor at the BBC, wrote to BerylVertue stating: ‘My instructions are that the Corporation recognises ALS Management Limited (on behalf of Mr Terry Nation) as having interest in the merchandising proceeds on the grounds not of joint copyright but of goodwill.’ His draft for this letter had specifically referred to ALS having a ‘fifty per cent share in all merchandising proceeds’ and, although this didn’t appear in the version that was sent, it became the basis on which all future deals were made; the Daleks became the de facto joint property of the BBC and of Nation. As Nation wa
s later to point out: ‘we were breaking new ground in many ways.’

  The Dalek Book was the first indication of what was to come. Co-credited to David Whitaker and Terry Nation, it was compiled under the guidance of Jack Fishman, with suggestions from the latter’s young son, Paul, who was paid ten shillings for each idea. It comprised prose stories and comic strips, mostly illustrated by Richard Jennings, familiar to many potential purchasers from his work on the Eagle comic, together with the kind of factual, educational material common to annuals of the era, though notably with no humorous items or jokes. There were also the first stirrings of the desire to create a Dalek mythology, including an anatomy of one of the monsters, and a Dalek Dictionary. It was an unexpectedly huge success. The screening of the second Dalek story had been postponed when it was learned that Doctor Who had secured a recommission, and instead of appearing at the end of the first season, it was held over to the second, running for six episodes in November and December 1964. Even before it was aired, however, the book was being reported in the trade press as ‘one of the fastest selling children’s titles of 1964’, with the prediction that ‘sales are likely to reach stratospheric figures’.

  When the series was finally broadcast, it signalled the outbreak of what was swiftly dubbed Dalekmania, in tribute to the Beatlemania that had gripped the nation since the middle of 1963. Indeed so big an event was the start of a new Dalek story that the Beatles themselves were pressed into service by ITV as part of the resistance; they starred in a special edition of the music show Thank Your Lucky Stars, screened against Doctor Who in an attempt to steal the BBC’s thunder, though the result of the clash only proved how big Nation’s creatures had become. ‘I remember with great pride,’ he said, ‘that the commercial channel was running the Beatles when they were really at their peak, at the same time as a Doctor Who episode with the Daleks, and Doctor Who got the ratings. I was pretty pleased with that.’

  For a few months, the Daleks were the biggest consumer story in the country, and that Christmas the creatures were to be seen everywhere. They appeared on Blue Peter and other supportive BBC shows, and were the hit of the Schoolboys and Girls Exhibition at Olympia in London, but they also turned up in a bewildering variety of unexpected guises all over the country: in a Christmas grotto in Belfast, in an amateur pantomime at Springfield Lane Junior School in Ipswich (a production of Snow White), at the circus (Bertram Mills’s Christmas show in London), as part of a road safety campaign in Cwmbran, and in a specially staged Dalek race at a charity fund-raising event in Croydon, with authentic props borrowed from Dr Barnardo’s Homes (to whom a couple of Daleks had been donated by the BBC after the filming of the first story). They could even be seen in church, as the Reverend G. Mountain, rector of St Paul’s Church, York, took a toy Dalek into the pulpit with him for his Christmas Day sermon, in order, he explained, ‘to highlight the contrast between fiction and the real invasion from outer space when Jesus came not to destroy the world, but to save mankind’.

  There were a handful of unaccountable exceptions to the craze. The Aberdeen Evening Express reported that no toy shops in the city were stocking any Dalek products, apparently due to lack of interest: ‘We would stock them if there was any demand,’ shrugged a spokesperson for one shop. Even here though, a Dalek was appearing in pantomime, and the fact that the newspaper was prepared to report customer indifference was itself a tribute to how big the story had become.

  Every report, every sighting, merely stoked the fires of the craze further, and helped boost what became the toy phenomenon of the season. The range of products available that first Christmas was fairly limited by later standards, but it was already possible to buy jigsaws, badges, birthday cards and sweets, as well as a single, ‘I’m Gonna Spend My Christmas with a Dalek’, by the Go-Go’s (written by Johnny Worth, who had earlier contributed the theme song to What a Whopper), which seemed to miss some of the menace of the monsters:

  I’m gonna spend my Christmas with a Dalek,

  And hang him under the mistletoe,

  And if he’s very nice,

  I’ll feed him sugar spice

  And hang a Christmas stocking from his big left toe.

  The record quite rightly failed to trouble the charts, but the toys attracted massive attention. Most desirable were the five-foot-high Dalek suits, retailing at £8 15s 6d. ‘Within days of the start of a new Dalek story in the Doctor Who serial three weeks ago, our whole stock was sold,’ commented the head buyer at Hamleys, the biggest toy store in London. ‘Some parents were buying two at a time, and if I had hundreds more they would still sell.’ It was reported that frustrated parents, desperate to keep their children happy at Christmas, were trying to buy them off customers lucky enough to have secured one, offering up to twice the retail price. Meanwhile six-inch-high mini-Dalek toys, costing 15s 11d, were also doing extraordinary business. ‘Sales have been fantastic,’ said the spokesman for Cowan, de Groot Ltd, the company manufacturing them. ‘By only showing a photograph we sold out our first batch of Daleks before they had even arrived in this country. A new shipload has just arrived and we are working flat out to distribute them. People have gone Dalek mad.’ A hundred thousand units were sold.

  The press threw its weight behind the craze. The Daily Express obtained fifty of the full-size suits, and used its front page to offer them as prizes in a ‘Name the Dalek’ competition (winning entries included Bleatnik, Bleatle, King Klonk, Frankintin and – appropriately for what was ultimately a Welsh creation – Dai Leek). Celebrities too saw an opportunity for some easy publicity. The comedian Norman Vaughan, then the host of Sunday Night at the London Palladium, managed to get two separate articles in the Daily Mail with the same story of buying a Dalek suit and ostentatiously donating it to Oxfam. ‘I was going to give this Dalek to my son for Christmas, but other children obviously need the money that this Dalek will raise,’ he pontificated. ‘I think we should all give to save.’

  Cartoonists also joined in, with contributions from Franklin in the Daily Mirror and Giles in the Daily Express among dozens of others. Leslie Illingworth of the Daily Mail depicted a meeting of NATO leaders, busily discussing a proposal for an Atlantic nuclear force and being interrupted by the Degaullek, a monster topped with the familiar nose of French president Charles de Gaulle. Politicians themselves, who were then less keen to jump on passing bandwagons than they later became, took slightly longer to get off the mark, but at the 1966 Conservative Party conference, the future MP Hugh Dykes made up for lost ground by calling the defence secretary, Denis Healey, ‘the Dalek of defence, pointing a metal finger at the armed forces and saying “We will eliminate you”.’ He got the catchphrase wrong, but it was nonetheless an indication of how readily the creatures had passed into the language. A survey earlier that year of slang terms used in the mining industry found that the term Dalek was being used in that context to refer to ‘Rescue men wearing oxygen apparatus.’ In the new high-security wing of Durham prison, meanwhile, it was the warders operating the modern electronic security system who were nicknamed Daleks by the inmates.

  The story even reached America, where Doctor Who had not yet been seen. Under the headline Heck with the Beatles – here come the daleks!, the press reported on the British sales frenzy of Christmas 1964, and quoted one sales director as promising that ‘Next year it’s inflatable, floating Daleks for the beach’. In fact 1965 – with the copyright question now resolved – saw a tidal wave of products, from soap to slippers, candles to kites, Easter eggs to wallpaper, crockery to sweet cigarettes. Licences were issued for almost anything that could be branded with the logo of a Dalek, and the Harrogate toy fair that year saw some twenty-five companies exhibiting products, including – for those who wished to resist the onslaught – anti-Dalek guns. The craze (‘the startling “I-am-a-Dalek” boom’, as the Guardian called it in October 1965) continued until the following Christmas; though it tailed off a little thereafter, new products still continued to appear, with a full-sized Dal
ek for amusement arcades making its debut in 1967.

  The concept of marketing on this scale was entirely new to the BBC, and there was initially no structure in place to deal with the situation. ‘We started the merchandising,’ remembered Beryl Vertue. ‘There wasn’t a department at the BBC or anything.’ Terry Nation’s own memory was similarly of the corporation’s unpreparedness: ‘The BBC, not being the great commercial operator, wasn’t ready. It had taken us all by surprise, so there was no merchandising, there were no plastic Daleks, there were no buttons, there were no anythings. My God, was that to change! Within the year, there were Dalek everythings.’ Previously some of the corporation’s more successful radio and television shows had spawned the occasional book or record, and some even turned up in comic-strip form in the magazine Radio Fun, but there had been nothing to hint at this level and diversity of sales, and it opened the BBC’s eyes to the possibilities of subsidiary income from popular programmes. By the autumn of 1966 the press were reporting the successes of BBC Enterprises, ‘formed lately to deal with broadcasting’s commercially viable byproducts, in film, print and on records’; the new body was inspired directly by Dalekmania.

  The phenomenon made Terry Nation a wealthy man, collecting half of the licensing fees; since these averaged ten per cent, he was thus entitled to five per cent of the sales, less his agency fees. He was still being paid for writing the show, though only at the standard BBC rates of 275 guineas per episode of Doctor Who, and by now additional work was coming in. But when the Daily Mirror estimated in March 1965 that he had earned £300,000 from the Daleks, it was clear that – even if that figure (almost £4.4 million at 2010 prices) was almost certainly overstating the case – his primary source of income was no longer the scripts he turned out. ‘It was the first outbreak of merchandising,’ noted Terrance Dicks, ‘and Terry got rich off it. I always used to say that he was the only man to get rich off Doctor Who.’ More than that, in one bound he leapt past his colleagues at Associated London Scripts, including the founding members. ‘He was the first one of the group to get a manor house,’ said Vertue, ‘which was lovely.’