The Man Who Invented the Daleks

by Alwyn Turner

  The whole sequence, the blurring of the lines of reality, was an intriguing concept, and was possibly suggested by Nation’s recent reading. The first two of his Leslie Charteris Saint adaptations to be broadcast (‘Lida’ and ‘Jeannine’) came from the 1949 book Saint Errant, which ends with a tale even stranger than ‘The Man Who Liked Ants’. In ‘Dawn’ Simon Templar finds himself, as a real person, apparently caught up in the dream of a bank clerk whom he has never met, but who is addicted to thrillers. A cast of other characters turn up, all of them clichéd figures from the thriller repertoire, leaving Templar to wonder whether this is reality or whether he truly is trapped in a second-hand dream world, and he reflects that the whole thing ‘sounds like one of those stories that fellow Charteris might write’. The climax is reached when a fat man – clearly based on Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon, and identified by Templar as such – shoots the Saint and kills him. When Templar wakes up alone twelve hours later, still alive and with no sign of any of the characters he has encountered, he concludes that it has all been his own dream. Until he checks out the address of the bank clerk and finds that, having been in a coma for three days, the man died last night, recovering consciousness just long enough to shout something about a saint’.

  Nation’s tale similarly played with notions of fiction becoming fact – ‘We’re in a world of dreams,’ exclaims the Doctor — and represented a major break with the programme’s founding concept. ‘While the premise,’ noted Kinematograph Weekly of Doctor Who in 1963, ‘is fantastic, the treatment of various places and periods will be treated realistically.’ It was a formulation that restated the founding document of the horror and fantasy tradition, Horace Walpole’s 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto; in the preface to that book, Walpole had explained his rationale for dealing with the supernatural: ‘Allow the possibility of the facts, and all the actors comport themselves as persons would do in their situation.’ The haunted house sequence in ‘The Chase’, however, turned its back on such an approach, instead allowing every possibility, and, coincidentally, came much closer to what would shortly become known as the new wave of science fiction. Then in its infancy – Michael Moorcock had only taken over the editorship of New Worlds magazine in 1964 – the new wave was to refocus attention from outer to inner space and much of it looked to the experimental work of William S. Burroughs for inspiration; Nation, by drawing on the far less celebrated experimentalism of Charteris, ended up in a not dissimilar place.

  It was all too much for Lambert. ‘I think that if we go into these realms of fiction we are opening a door on the Doctor Who series which may run us into considerable trouble in the future,’ she noted. ‘I do not feel that the Daleks should arrive in a place which is an Earth fictional place, and if they do not, it really means that the place does not exist at all, except in the minds of our four characters.’ Much of the more ambiguous dialogue was dropped and an ending added that showed, after the travellers had left the house, a ticket booth identifying the place as ‘Frankenstein’s House of Horrors’, an exhibit at the 1996 Festival of Ghana. All the monsters, we were now informed, were mechanical toys intended to divert tourists. ‘I think there’s a much simpler explanation,’ Ian had responded when the Doctor explained his theory of the ‘collective human mind’. Indeed there was, but it was nowhere near as interesting.

  Other elements in the serial included a clip of the Beatles on the Time-Space Visualiser performing ‘Ticket to Ride’ (it was hoped the group would film a special sequence showing them as old men playing a fiftieth anniversary show, but their manager, Brian Epstein, scotched that suggestion); the creation by the Daleks of a robot replica of the Doctor (an idea surely deriving from Philip K. Dick’s ‘Imposter’), who then duels with the real Doctor, using walking-sticks as swords; and carnivorous vegetation in the form of the thoroughly unconvincing Fungoids. There were also the Mechanoids, large, globe-shaped robots sent from Earth to prepare the planet Mechanus for colonisation – the anticipated ships full of human immigrants, however, never arrived and the robots had since created their own society. The climactic battle between the Daleks and the Mechanoids is one of the better realised elements of the serial, and clearly used up a substantial proportion of the budget.

  The Mechanoids, again designed by Raymond P. Cusick, also turned up in the TV Century 21 comic strips, and on an EP featuring this element of the story, which was released on Gerry Anderson’s Century 21 Records. They were designed by Nation to be a potential rival to his more famous creations. ‘You had your eye on the chance that anything could possibly catch on,’ he reflected. ‘The Mechanoids were manufactured as toys, but of course they didn’t take off.’ Part of the problem was that, being large and spherical with spindly little arms, they were both difficult and unattractive to imitate in the playgrounds, while for the production crew on Doctor Who, they were simply too big for the restricted studio sets that were then available. ‘The Mechanoids would have caught on if they’d been pushed a bit more,’ believed the serial’s script editor, Dennis Spooner. ‘But they weren’t pushed because no one could have stood the problems it would have caused if they had caught on. They were just physically impossible to get in and out of the studio. They were just designed wrong. Terry was very unhappy about it.’

  Although ‘The Chase’ had lost some of the imagination and ingenuity of Nation’s script through production decisions and shortage of funds (‘in TV inspiration costs money,’ as Spooner observed), it did still demonstrate that there were new angles to be taken with the Daleks, as long as the background kept changing to compensate for their lack of variety. Having been seen first at home on Skaro, and then visiting Earth, they were now rampant throughout the universe, with no apparent limit to their possibilities. Except, of course, for their inbuilt limitations. The protective shells were designed for use in the underground city on Skaro, a Dalek-friendly environment with no known enemies, to which they were perfectly adapted. Now that the creatures were seen aggressively venturing forth, it became clear that their lack of speed and mobility, as well as their inability to engage in hand-to-hand combat, made them slightly less terrifying than they were painted. They ran the risk of becoming victims of their own success: the design flaws were only revealed when they began to expand and talk about universal domination, but by then the public appetite demanded that the creatures remain essentially the same, while posing ever greater threats to all other life-forms. For the most part, however, the audience went happily along with this, even when attention was drawn to their drawbacks (in a line probably added by Dennis Spooner to ‘The Chase’, Ian suggests that the travellers hide upstairs, because ‘Daleks don’t like stairs’).

  The willing suspension of disbelief was shared by their fans in high places. Chief among these was Huw Wheldon, who had recently become controller of programmes for BBC1 and whose mother-in-law was much taken with the Daleks. Wheldon expressed his disappointment at the brevity of their appearance in the first episode of ‘The Chase’ (the final shot had been of a Dalek emerging from beneath the sands of the Aridian desert), and although he was assured that they would appear more substantially in the subsequent episodes, and that they were pencilled in for a fourth story later in the year, he was keen that there should be still more of the creatures, asking if the forthcoming series couldn’t perhaps be extended. Others in the BBC hierarchy agreed and, against the wishes of the production team, ‘The Daleks’ Master Plan’, intended as a six-part serial, was extended to twelve episodes.

  Now fully engaged in his work on The Baron, Nation simply didn’t have time to complete such a major project. David Whitaker was already handling much of the expansion of the Daleks mythology in TV Century 21, so Nation turned to his other colleague, Dennis Spooner, to share the burden of ‘Master Plan’. Nation was responsible for the basic storyline but wrote only six of the episodes; the remainder were contributed by Spooner, who had in the meantime handed over the duties of script editor on Doctor Who to Donald Tosh in order
that he too could work on The Baron. Other changes in the programme’s personnel had seen the departure of the characters Ian and Barbara at the end of ‘The Chase’, and shortly thereafter that of producer Verity Lambert, to be replaced by John Wiles, who inherited ‘Master Plan’ despite his distaste for its unwieldy length. Even Nation was far from convinced by the scale of the undertaking: ‘If I was a producer on a show like that,’ he reflected later, ‘I don’t think I would ever commit myself to a three-month Dalek story without a lot of other stuff in it as well.’

  To add to the burden, another single-episode Dalek story, ‘Mission to the Unknown’, had also been commissioned, intended to serve as a prelude to ‘The Daleks’ Master Plan’ and to feature none of the regular cast, since they were due to be on leave at the time of filming. In their place, Nation created a new organisation named the Space Security Service (SSS), an official agency tasked with defending the Earth and its colonies, whose agents – in overt tribute to James Bond – are ‘licensed to kill’. One of those agents is Marc Cory (Edward de Souza), who finds himself, in ‘Mission to the Unknown’, on the planet Kembel on the track of the Daleks. He knows they’re here because there are Varga plants on Kembel, and the Varga is ‘a thing part-animal, part-vegetable’ that was invented by the Daleks on Skaro; ‘they use their roots to drag themselves along’ and they attack people with their spikes, turning the victim into a Varga. In short, they are a cross between a triffid and a vampire.

  If Nation was not at his most original in concocting this blend of familiar elements, he was clearly preparing the ground for an attempt to extricate the Daleks from Doctor Who by giving them a new set of foes to combat. And he was breaking away from the English eccentricities of William Hartnell’s Doctor to create a character template that was intended to have far greater international appeal, even if it was less intriguing than anything yet seen in the TARDIS. For the SSS agents in ‘Master Plan’, Bret Vyon (Nicholas Courtney) and Sara Kingdom (Jean Marsh), were as derivative as Marc Cory had been; the former is described as ‘the 007 of space’ in Nation’s storyline, and the latter is not very far removed from Honor Blackman’s character, Cathy Gale, in The Avengers: glamorous but good with a gun and always up for some unarmed combat.

  Nonetheless, there’s a great deal of fun to be had in Nation’s first five episodes of the story. The Doctor and his companions travel rapidly around the universe, starting on Kembel before moving on to a penal colony planet, Desperus, then to Earth and thereafter to a distant planet named Mira, inhabited by invisible beings called Visians. But there is also some rather downbeat material. Marc Cory was killed at the end of ‘Mission to the Unknown’, and in ‘Master Plan’ his fellow agent, Bret Vyon, is killed by Sara Kingdom, who believes him to be a traitor; he wasn’t but it does turn out that he was her brother (returning to the fratricide seen in ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’). Sara too fails to survive the serial, while Katarina, a woman from ancient Troy brought along on the TARDIS from the previous story, ‘The Myth Makers’, dies in an act of heroic self-sacrifice.

  Counterpointing the Doctor’s adventures is the story of Mavic Chen (Kevin Stoney), the most powerful man on Earth and holder of the office Guardian of the Solar System. Despite his initially dignified bearing, he turns out to be a power-crazed despot who is secretly in alliance with the Daleks, providing them with the vital component, Taranium, needed to complete the Time Destructor, with which they intend to conquer the universe. In characteristically excessive fashion, Taranium is said to be ‘the rarest mineral in the universe’, and the Time Destructor ‘the most dangerous weapon ever devised’. If the Daleks are, as ever, derived from the Nazis, then Mavic Chen is clearly modelled on Stalin, his first appearance including a reference to a Non-Aggression Pact, which can hardly fail to bring to mind the Molotov—Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 (it was even signed in the year 3975).

  After these five episodes, Nation handed over to Spooner to complete the story, returning only for the seventh episode, ‘The Feast of Steven’, which was broadcast on Christmas Day 1965 and which therefore, in accordance with BBC practice at the time, abandoned the storyline for some fun. The TARDIS materialises in 1960s Liverpool, where the crew run into trouble with the local police (originally it was hoped to tie in with the cast of Z Cars, though this didn’t work out), then finds itself in Hollywood during the silent movie era, complete with a Keystone Kops-style slapstick chase sequence and a desert melodrama, the latter dominated by a glamorous hero who, Nation noted, should be ‘very superior and good looking in the tradition of Valentino’. It ended with the crew safely back on board and celebrating the festive season. ‘A happy Christmas to all of us,’ toasts the Doctor, before turning to the camera: ‘Incidentally a happy Christmas to all of you at home.’

  The Daleks, however, make no appearance in that interlude, and rather more chilling was Nation’s sign-off to episode five, the last of his Dalek tales to be screened for more than seven years. As the Doctor and his companions are discovered by the monsters, he goes further than ever before in admitting defeat: ‘I’m afraid, my friends, the Daleks have won.’ They hadn’t, of course, and nor had we seen the last of Sara Kingdom, although she crumbled to dust in the final episode, victim of the Time Destructor as it accelerated her ageing. She was back later in the year as the star of her own comic strip in the final spin-off book that Nation authorised for publication by Souvenir Press, The Dalek Outer Space Book (written by an ALS colleague, Brad Ashton), as well as featuring heavily in his plans for his next enterprise.

  Meanwhile, Spooner’s six scripts kept the story moving along at the same pace and with the same balance of fun and terror (the materialisation of the TARDIS on a cricket pitch during a Test match is especially pleasing in its incongruity). As script editor, Donald Tosh felt – as others were later to find – that Nation’s scripts for the Daleks needed some reworking, but it was a process with which Nation pronounced himself perfectly happy. ‘I’ve already told Donald that any changes he wants to make in the script will meet with my approval,’ he wrote to John Wiles in September 1965. ‘I’m sure we’re all aiming at the same thing.’ In the same letter he ruminated on the nature of names for fictional characters: ‘Our Victorian dramatists had a splendid system of immediate identification. For instance, a Roger could not be anything but a clean limbed, bright eyed, decent chap, whereas a Jasper had to be a moustache twirling, whip cracking hound.’ In this context, he approved of the name Bors being given to one of the characters on the penal planet: ‘Obviously any man called Bors started his day with a murder and by lunch time had worked up to really serious crimes. Splendid name.’

  That Christmas saw the production at Wyndham’s Theatre in London of The Curse of the Daleks, a play credited to Terry Nation and David Whitaker, though again it appears that the primary responsibility for the writing actually fell to Whitaker. Aimed squarely at a young audience, it concerned a spaceship with a human crew and passengers, including two prisoners, that lands on Skaro and encounters the Thals and the Daleks. ‘It’s all good clean fun,’ thought the Daily Express, while The Times complained that for a story set in the twenty-first century the dialogue was ‘strangely reminiscent of British war films, with upper lips being kept resolutely stiff’, but concluded that it was ‘an ultimately exciting adventure’. Significantly, in terms of the Daleks, it was another outing in the absence of the Doctor, while Whitaker’s programme notes introduced for the first time the concept of the Dalek Chronicles. These were supposedly a set of microfilms that Nation had found in his garden containing the history of the race, whence all the stories had come. The tag of the Dalek Chronicles was to be used in TV Century 21 and ensuing books.

  Nation’s relationship with Whitaker ended with that play and the two men did not work together again. Paul Fishman, who as a child had witnessed some of the writing sessions that produced the Souvenir books under the direction of his father, Jack, was only surprised that the partnership had lasted so long. He recalled Nation st
ruggling to deal with the starchier end of the BBC and, perhaps under the pressures of feeding the fire of Dalekmania, actually coming to blows with Whitaker: ‘There was a terrible fight. Terry took out David Whitaker. It was because he couldn’t handle this Oxbridge attitude. It was the first time I’d ever seen anybody hit somebody.’ It should be remembered, however, that Whitaker had been, alongside Verity Lambert, the first champion of the Daleks at a time when the BBC hierarchy was distinctly unimpressed. ‘The Daleks were a smashing invention,’ he said later. ‘I would say they’re worthy of Jules Verne.’ And he was adamant that, even if it might appear to focus on forbidden bug-eyed monsters, the first serial had fitted perfectly within the remit given to Doctor Who by Sydney Newman: ‘Actually, that Dalek story was educational in a subtle way it showed the dangers of war, pacifism and racial hatred. It contained many admirable and idealistic truths in it, and it was also a jolly good adventure story.’ It was the encouragement, rather than the altercation, that Nation tended to remember: ‘I got along well with David,’ he reflected in 1995. ‘He supported me very thoroughly.’