The Man Who Invented the Daleks

by Alwyn Turner

  Notwithstanding the outbreak of Dalekmania the previous Christmas, 1965 was the great year of the Daleks: they appeared in a record fourteen episodes of Doctor Who that year, as well as in the cinema, on stage, in comics and in two books. And emerging from all that work was a pattern that was clearly related to Nation’s comments in August about the possibility of an American television series of the Daleks. The intention to break away from Doctor Who was self-evident.

  It was not, however, until the late spring of 1966 that any firm steps were taken to make this a reality. Beryl Vertue had attempted to persuade American television that a stand-alone series could be viable. ‘I had a go at that,’ she remembered. ‘I tried to talk about science fiction, and how well Doctor Who had gone in the UK.’ But the initiative only really got off the ground through her contact with a toy manufacturer, Fred Alper, who was intrigued by the merchandising opportunities if the creatures could be launched in the States. Nation formed a new company, Lynsted Film Productions Ltd, and he and Alper met with BBC Enterprises to pitch the idea of producing a pilot for American television, with the hope that the corporation would come in as joint partners. There was sufficient interest for Nation to develop a storyline, which he then worked up into a full script for a half-hour pilot episode, ‘The Destroyers’, featuring an SSS team that centred on Sara Kingdom, Captain Jason Corey (evidently drawn from the same source as Marc Cory in ‘Mission to the Unknown’) and an android named Mark Seven.

  The concept for The Daleks, as the series was to be called, was fairly novel, pitching a team of security agents against a single race of alien monsters, with a female lead character, but it was not immediately clear how this could be sustained over an entire series. Certainly the pilot gave little indication of breaking new ground, relying instead on characteristic Nation elements: jungles, caves, killer vegetation. Considerably more problematic, from the point of view of the BBC, was that when Nation submitted his script in October 1966, it came with an estimated budget of £42,000, appropriate for an American production but wildly excessive by the corporation’s standards. Even then there were doubts that it could be brought in on budget. There was concern too that the peak of the craze had already passed (‘I have very serious reservations as to the audience pull of the Daleks in the UK at this late stage,’ noted a senior figure in BBC Enterprises), leaving the financial success of the project entirely dependent on the unknown American market.

  Aware of the pressures of time – it was proposed to film the pilot in December, ready for the buying season in American television the following March – Fred Alper had a contract drawn up that would split the investment costs for the pilot and a subsequent series between the BBC on the one side and himself and Lynsted Park on the other. But the BBC, panicked by how fast the commitment was escalating into a series, got cold feet and backed out of the project altogether. By the end of 1966 it was clear that they no longer had an interest, save in the merchandising rights that might result, and over the first few months of 1967 discussions took place about what the level of these would be. Still talking about raising the finance elsewhere, Nation visited America in search of potential partners. ‘I went to the United States,’ he remembered. ‘I went there to hustle and got very close to doing it.’ But by now the impetus had been lost, and the entire proposal slowly withered away during the course of the year. It had, however, come remarkably close to realisation. There had been talk of interest from the American network ABC and, in a mistaken belief that the BBC were more committed than they actually were, Nation had even booked time for the shoot in Twickenham Studios, where construction work had begun on the sets.

  Meanwhile, there were new Dalek serials on Doctor Who: ‘The Power of the Daleks’ (1966) and ‘The Evil of the Daleks’ (1967). Nation had been given the first option of writing the stories, in line with his agreement with the BBC, but was unable to commit himself to the project and agreed instead that they should be written by David Whitaker. Nation was later to express his disapproval of the serials (‘I didn’t like them and I responded very badly to them’), and his attitude was not much ameliorated by the fact that he received little more than a nominal sum for the use of his creation: he was paid £15 for each broadcast that featured the creatures in a script written by someone else, which even the Head of Business at Television Enterprises was later to acknowledge was ‘a ludicrously small fee’.

  These were intended to be the last ever Dalek stories in Doctor Who, leaving the field clear for Nation’s proposed series, but the continuing importance of the monsters to the show was demonstrated when William Hartnell left the programme in 1966 and the concept of regeneration was hurriedly invented to allow for a transition to another actor. Just as the Daleks had been used to smooth the departures of Susan, and then of Ian and Barbara, so they were employed in ‘The Power of the Daleks’ to make the transformation from Hartnell to Patrick Troughton easier for viewers to absorb. Even so, viewing figures, which had been falling in the later Hartnell stories, did not regain the peaks to which they had been pushed a couple of years earlier by ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’.

  With their apparent farewell from Doctor Who and the abandonment of the solo series, it seemed by the end of 1967 that the era of the Daleks had drawn to its close. There were no more annuals forthcoming from Souvenir Press, the idea of a third movie had fallen through, and the comic strip had also come to an end – having moved from TV Century 21 to TV Comic at the beginning of 1967, with a different writer and artist, it had lasted only a few months. In December that year, Nation did agree in principle to the idea of a new story for the 1968 season, but refused the BBC’s suggestion of pitching his creations against the new monsters on the block, the Cybermen, and nothing came of the proposal. At their height, the Daleks had ensured the survival and then the success of Doctor Who, and had at times completely eclipsed the programme itself, but now they were finished, and the series was continuing.

  They had had a good run, and it’s unarguable that Nation had reaped enormous rewards from their glory years, but the failure to secure an American series was a bitter personal blow. ‘Terry was really ambitious,’ said Beryl Vertue. ‘He wanted to be international.’ By that he meant, as did all his British contemporaries, that he wanted to make it in America, where the real money and prestige was to be found. From 1966 onwards, as BBC Enterprises began serious efforts to sell Doctor Who around the world, he received a steady stream of income from sales to dozens of countries, from Australia to Zambia, but that wasn’t the same thing as breaking the States. And it wasn’t his show. He was also receiving only the standard BBC royalties due to a writer, an arrangement that made no allowance for the significance or merit of the work; ‘The Daleks’ earned a little more when it was sold to Jamaica than did ‘The Keys of Marinus’ in the same territory, but only because it comprised seven episodes rather than six.

  None of this was a substitute for the real thing. In a career as long as Nation’s there were bound to be any number of missed opportunities, projects that never materialised, but the failure of The Daleks was perhaps the biggest and most significant of all. Yet it’s not easy to imagine it being much of a hit, even if the series had been commissioned by a US network. The verdict of the BBC hierarchy on the pilot script was encouraging enough but was hardly a ringing acclamation of a major new piece of work: ‘representative children’s science fiction’, thought Shaun Sutton, the head of drama serials; ‘a typical – and therefore excellent – Doctor Who-type story’, was the verdict of David Attenborough, then the controller of BBC2, as he turned down the idea of taking the proposed series for his channel. These were experienced broadcasters who knew how big the Daleks had become, and still their enthusiasm was strictly limited.

  Even if the show had made it on to American television, it seems unlikely that it would have lasted for more than one series, if only because the variations that could be wrung out of the situation were so limited. The formats of British shows that had translated succ
essfully to America, such as The Avengers and The Saint, had a flexibility that made them capable of almost endless permutations; the Daleks, a purely evil creation with no shades of grey, were a much more restricted proposition. To take a slightly unfair example from a different field, the Daleks had for a moment at Christmas 1964 rivalled the popularity even of the Beatles, but in terms of creativity they had been left a long way behind. The Beatles had then been singing ‘I Feel Fine’; by the time Nation was looking for investors in The Daleks, they had moved on to ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. The Daleks were capable of no such development.

  For they were ultimately handicapped by their voices and their lack of visual response. There was a very definite limit to how long a viewer could take a conversation between Daleks, as Nation seemed to have recognised in his scripts for Doctor Who. Unusually for that series, the Daleks were seldom the sole alien life-form on display, their lack of variety being compensated for by the presence of the Thals, or the Aridians and the Mechanoids, or the Vargas and the Visians, while in ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’ the Robomen had fulfilled the same function. In purely technical terms, there were related problems; as Richard Martin pointed out, the director had to work hard at camera angles just ‘to give them a sort of dynamic that they themselves did not possess’. Had the special effects available at the time been capable of reproducing the full Dalek empire depicted in TV Century 21, it might have been different, but they weren’t, and however big the budget seemed from a British perspective, it was always going to look a bit cheap compared to American shows.

  And a failure in America would surely have finished the Daleks off for good. It would have been extremely difficult for the BBC to countenance them traipsing back, metaphorical tail between metaphorical legs, to Doctor Who. Paradoxically, the collapse of The Daleks probably ensured the ultimate survival of the monsters. Untainted by their likely malfunction elsewhere, they remained in the storage lockers of the TARDIS, ready for exhumation at a later date. The truth was that, without their original and greatest foe, they were never going to be as much fun on their own. ‘The Daleks have no value outside Doctor Who,’ was Terrance Dicks’s conclusion. ‘Terry made several attempts to launch the Daleks by themselves, and none of them were really successful. They’re Doctor Who’s main monster, and they’re inviolable in that position, but that’s the only position they’ve got.’

  Chapter Nine

  Avenging and Persuading

  Although The Daleks was never to materialise, the amount of time and energy that Terry Nation put into the project can be gauged by the fact that between April 1967 and October 1968 – the best part of eighteen months – not a single new script for any series on British television bore his name. It was his longest absence from the broadcast media since It’s a Fair Cop had aired back in 1961, though he did appear in person at the beginning of 1968 on the documentary programme Whicker’s World, in which he was interviewed by Alan Whicker at Lynsted Park; surrounded by Dalek props from the Amicus movies, he looked as though he were reaffirming his status as a major television writer, even if there was presently no new material on screen.

  Those eighteen months, as he put aside the dashed hopes of an American show and returned to the world of British television, saw a major shift in the cultural mood. The rise of liberal and radical politics had been one of the defining features of the decade thus far, reaching a peak in the spring of 1968 as the movement against the Vietnam War hit critical levels in America amid a spate of riots, as a general strike paralysed France and as the reformist government of Alexander Dubcek in Czechoslovakia seemed to offer state socialism a way forward from totalitarianism. Immediately thereafter, however, came a powerful reaction. Richard M. Nixon was elected US President, the party of Charles de Gaulle won a landslide election victory in France, and Soviet tanks rolled into Prague to crush dissent, while the Conservative MP Enoch Powell made race relations the most controversial issue in British politics with his ‘rivers of blood’ speech. As if to emphasise the victory of conservatism, two great liberal heroes, Martin Luther King Jr and Robert F. Kennedy, were assassinated.

  The same year also saw the suicide of Tony Hancock. The comedian had never recovered his position after that ATV series and, alone in Australia, with his second marriage having ended as catastrophically as his first, he took an overdose of pills, washed down with vodka.

  The days of Swinging London were receding fast and Nation, who had benefited from that era but whose work had never sat entirely comfortably in it, was ultimately to find fertile ground for his darker visions. For now, however, the only opportunities that presented themselves were essentially more of the same, returning him to the position he had been in before the Daleks project: successful, wealthy and writing scripts for ITC.

  A new season of The Saint was in preparation – the second to be filmed in colour and the last of the Roger Moore incarnation – and Nation contributed four episodes. This time they were original stories, since the back catalogue of Leslie Charteris’s tales had by now been heavily depleted. ‘Television is a monster, like a great big garbage disposal,’ noted Charteris, ‘and it can eat up a lifetime’s output in a matter of seasons.’ It was a lesson that the music hall comedians had learned a long time back, but the stockpile was not entirely used up, and there is a suspicion that the switch to newly commissioned stories was also made in the hope of ending Charteris’s complaints about the liberties he saw being taken with his work. He was supposed to have a degree of script approval, but it didn’t always work out in the way he wished, and he tended to make his displeasure known. ‘I always saw the scripts and made my comments and criticisms, but they were not always necessarily followed,’ he recalled later. ‘I had no veto and I can’t say I was always pleased with what I saw on the screen.’

  Unfortunately he was to be no happier with the new material. And perhaps he was right not to be, for there was little discernible change between the adaptations and the new stories; after more than seventy episodes, the production line was running with such efficiency that the format and the style continued smoothly through the transition. Nation’s scripts were not among his best work, though there were some good moments. In the episode ‘The Desperate Diplomat’ a British representative, Jason Douglas (John Robinson), is stationed in a newly independent country and keen to expose the abuse of international aid to Africa: ‘When independence came, I went to work for the new regime. The new leader started with good intentions. Then corruption set in. Aid from America, from Britain was used to furnish palaces, buy cars, jewels. Government officials lived in luxury while the people starved.’

  Even before this, Nation had already written a couple of episodes for a new ITC series, The Champions, filmed in 1967 and bought by NBC in America soon thereafter, though it was not screened in Britain until the autumn of 1968. Developed by Dennis Spooner and produced by Monty Berman, The Champions focused on three agents working for an international organisation called Nemesis, based in Geneva; in the first episode, their plane crashes in Tibet, they are rescued by mysterious monk-like figures and, as part of their recovery, are imbued with superhuman powers of telepathy, enhanced senses and phenomenal strength. This shameless borrowing from James Hilton’s Lost Horizon (1933) was, somewhat perversely, intended to bring a sense of believability back to the ITC genre. ‘Action dramas have reached the stage when the principal characters are achieving the impossible in their exploits, fights, cunning and unbelievable physical stamina,’ argued Spooner. ‘No one can believe that any mortal could achieve what the present day heroes manage to do and survive. But The Champions makes it all logical because the three characters have these out-of-the-ordinary powers.’ It was a neat, counter-intuitive defence of the show’s premise, but it didn’t make any more comfortable the marriage of the two traditions of secret agent and superhero. More importantly, the casting was far from impressive; the three stars were less than charismatic, and none of them made much impression on the audience.

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bsp; For Nation, the heroes’ super-powers didn’t particularly suit his preferred theme: the ability of ordinary people to rise above difficult situations by exercising ingenuity and creative improvisation. But his scripts worked well enough. In ‘The Body Snatchers’ the villain has seized control of a research laboratory in North Wales that has developed cryogenic freezing; having stolen the body of a recently deceased American general, he’s hoping to bring the man back to life and thus acquire crucial defence secrets. (The Welsh setting allows for a rare sighting on 1960s television of a character speaking Welsh, as well as a brief, uncredited appearance by Talfryn Thomas, formerly of Uncle Selwyn and later to return to Nation’s work.)

  Stronger than that was ‘The Fanatics’, in which several prominent politicians have been assassinated in a spate of suicide terrorist attacks. One of our heroes, Richard Barrett (William Gaunt), infiltrates the organisation responsible for the attacks, posing as a disaffected British soldier who has been selling secrets to an enemy state on the grounds that: ‘No country has a moral right to exclusive knowledge on weapons of mass destruction.’ The episode is lifted by a guest appearance from Gerald Harper as Croft, the evil mastermind behind the plan: ‘The meek will inherit the earth? Oh no, it’s the strong who’ll survive, the men of courage and ideas. The mass elects a leader, yes, but the mass is a mindless organism. It destroys true progress.’ ‘Well, that’s been the platform of every dictator,’ shrugs Barrett, under-cutting one of the most hallowed traditions of the action hero, that his enemy must always deliver a bragging speech about power. The interruption doesn’t stop Croft, of course: ‘When you’ve been with me a little longer, you’ll know the feeling of power, real power, life and death. It’s like a drug, you taste it and you want more, and you’ll kill for it. You’ll even die for it.’ It’s all good crazed stuff, though it doesn’t get us any closer to an explanation of the suicide element of the operation; it’s clear what Croft wants, but not what his self-sacrificing minions get out of the deal. Possibly there was a brainwashing story that got lost in the final cut, but it does leave on a slightly confused note.