The Man Who Invented the Daleks

by Alwyn Turner

  The Champions is fondly remembered in some quarters, but at the time it failed to win over the critics. ‘The enormous advantage that Sir Lew Grade has over his rivals among the network,’ wrote Peter Black in the Daily Mail, ‘is not that he knows better than they do what the public wants. It is that he doesn’t mind.’ He added, in reference to one of Spooner’s scripts: ‘I felt that a dog could have written it if he had wanted dollars more than dog biscuits. There wasn’t a moment to stimulate even the simplest of minds. And this is peak-time television in one of the greatest cities in the world.’ The audience, at least in America, appeared to agree and, like The Baron, the series was dropped from its network slot during the screening of the one season that was made. Its success or otherwise in Britain was more difficult to judge, since it was shown at different times in different regions. This was often the case with the ITC series, but was particularly exaggerated with The Champions; Peter Black’s review was written in November 1969, when the show finally arrived in London, more than a year after it had first been screened elsewhere on the ITV network, an indication that Grade was not throwing his whole weight behind it.

  Presumably, however, it was not a complete commercial failure, for Spooner and Berman immediately bounced back with two new series that were produced in tandem in order to save money: Department S and Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased). Nation wrote two of the first three episodes to be filmed of the former and was scheduled to write more before other opportunities presented themselves.

  If The Champions suffered from a lack of magnetism among its stars, Department S perhaps veered too far in the other direction. Two of the characters, Stewart Sullivan (Joel Fabiani) and Annabelle Hurst (Rosemary Nicols), were solid, unexceptional figures who could have come from any thriller series of the era, but they were entirely overshadowed by the third member of the trio, Jason King, as played by Peter Wyngarde. The original idea was that the team would be completed by a retired Oxford don named Robert Cullingford, who was also a writer of detective stories and would thus view the cases from unexpected angles. Kenneth More’s name was touted for the role, but instead Berman choose Wyngarde, and the nature of the series changed entirely.

  One of the great television actors of the period, Wyngarde had already appeared in various series to which Nation had contributed – including The Baron, The Saint and The Champions – though never in one of his scripts. Wyngarde rejected the proposed character of Cullingford, keeping only the concept of being a writer, though now it was of paperback thrillers centring on an agent named Mark Caine. The character himself was renamed Jason King, and Wyngarde created an enduring image of the 1960s playboy bachelor taken to a superbly self-parodying extreme. His camp excesses, complete with elegantly drooping moustache, coiffured hair and exquisite velvet suits and kaftans, were balanced by a Lothario image that made him an irresistible, unattainable fantasy figure for millions of female viewers. He couldn’t pass a mirror without admiring his own vulpine good looks, his catchphrase was a drawled ‘Fancy!’ and his voice sounded like it had been aged in a cask of Amontillado. So self-assured was Wyngarde’s performance that, most unusually for an action hero, he seldom won a fight – and it didn’t matter.

  In the scripts that Nation wrote for Department S, he approached the character by explicitly evoking the shade of Oscar Wilde. ‘Do you have anything to declare, Mr King?’ asks Stewart, and Jason replies, ‘Nothing, except my genius.’ On another occasion, Annabelle says, ‘We still have to find the actual room,’ and Jason murmurs, ‘We will, Oscar, we will.’ Nation’s own witticisms kept up the same faux-decadent atmosphere. As Jason comes round from being knocked unconscious yet again by a villain, and complains of a headache, Annabelle suggests he take a couple of aspirin. He shudders: ‘I couldn’t bear the noise I’d make swallowing them.’ And, inspired by King’s habit of drawing the cuffs of his frilly shirts back over his jacket sleeves, Nation couldn’t resist revisiting a gag from The Saint; Jason explains that the hero of his thrillers carries a knife up his sleeve, but that’s just for fiction: ‘I never carry a weapon, let alone a knife. It would fray my cuffs.’ Other details are equally irresistible; of all the attempts to parody the girls in the James Bond films, none have bettered the heroine of the Mark Caine novel Epilogue to Hong Kong, the perfectly named Hussy Abundant. The only jarring note comes in a scene in ‘A Cellar Full of Silence’, which sees King, dressed entirely in black leather, dismounting from a motorbike and saying, ‘I haven’t been on a bike since I was a teenage rocker.’ The idea that Jason King might have been a rocker rather than a mod is hard to take, though his subsequent reference to ‘leather queens’ may shed further light on the question.

  The plots of the two episodes that Nation wrote are less relevant than details such as these, but then that was true of the entire programme; the whole of Department S was a magnificent triumph of style over content. The concept for the show was inspired by the mystery that had been solved by Nation in ‘The Chase’, on which Spooner had been script editor. ‘If the Marie Celeste were to happen today, no one knows who would investigate it,’ Spooner reasoned. ‘Department S always started like that. The “hook” was always the Marie Celeste sort of situation – a totally, absolutely inexplicable mystery.’ Unfortunately, thanks to the structure, the ensuing fifty minutes tended to be something of a let-down, a rational solution to an intriguing conundrum, and viewers, quite understandably, found themselves less interested in the narrative than in the figure of Jason King. He was so obviously in a different league to his colleagues that a second season of the show never materialised; it was replaced by a new programme, Jason King, in which Wyngarde took centre stage. And what had been a superb role in the context of a team proved to be a bit too baroque and flowery to carry an entire show. By that stage, however, Nation had already flown the ITC nest, having been recruited to the staff of the biggest of all the secret agent series.

  The Avengers, initiated by Sydney Newman back when he was responsible for drama at ABC, had grown out of an earlier Newman commission, Police Surgeon (1960) starring Ian Hendry. When that failed to get the ratings figures for which he’d hoped, Newman suggested a new series for Hendry to be titled The Avengers, ‘an action adventure-thriller with a sense of humour’, though, according to Brian Clemens, beyond the title he had few ideas of what the show might be: ‘He came in and said, “I want to do a series called The Avengers. I don’t know what it means, but it’s a hell of a good title.” ’ The star was teamed with Patrick Macnee, playing a character named John Steed, but it was not until Hendry himself departed, to be replaced by a young female companion for the cheerful but crusty-looking Steed, that the series began to acquire its distinctive identity. First with Cathy Gale (Honor Blackman, 1962–4) and then with Emma Peel (Diana Rigg, 1965–8), The Avengers became not merely a national but an international institution, purveying an increasingly kitsch concept of England in which all the conventions of the spy thriller were gleefully ridiculed, and in which elements from science fiction and comic book traditions were equally welcome. Roger Moore could undercut a plotline in The Saint with a single sardonically raised eyebrow, but The Avengers at its peak – which for most critics meant the Diana Rigg seasons – was so fixated on fun that the whole show seemed determined to subvert genre expectations. There was plenty of action but it was the stuff of pure fantasy.

  The prime shapers of the show by this stage were Albert Fennell and Brian Clemens, but when Rigg decided to leave the series in 1967, the company decided to make a clean break in the hope of returning to a style that at least approached reality. Fennell and Clemens were fired, and replaced by John Bryce, who had been script editor and then producer in the earlier years. He recruited a Canadian actress, Linda Thorson, to be Steed’s new partner, Tara King, and began to film the next season. After just three episodes, however, the results were deemed to be unacceptable and a call went out to Fennell and Clemens, the latter of whom was on holiday, touring England and Wales: ‘Every time I got t
o another hotel there was a message saying: Could you phone? And eventually, after about two-and-a-halfweeks, I did phone, and they said: Could you come back?’ The two men returned to find that of the three shows already filmed, only one met with their approval, ‘Invasion of the Earthmen’. And since that was written by Terry Nation, he was given the job as script editor. He was expecting at the time to be writing further episodes of Department S, but the chance of joining the production team on a show that had been a regular fixture in the television top ten for seven years was clearly too good a chance to miss.

  ‘It got wilder,’ was Nation’s memory of that final season of The Avengers. ‘It probably got too wild by the time we finished. There was no other market for that sort of thing. The acid test for our show was: what is the story? Now turn it on its head! Instead of seeing somebody shot, we would see the chalked outline of the body. Then somebody would walk in, get shot and fall into the chalked outline. Always turn it on its head, always make it more and more ridiculous – but then justify it.’

  Despite his background in writing comedy, this kind of spoof was not the kind of thing for which Nation was primarily known, though there had been moments to suggest it could easily become part of his repertoire. ‘The episode Epitaph for a Hero’ in The Baron, for example, had opened in a cemetery after a funeral, as a woman arrives, spits in the open grave and leaves. She is followed by two men, one of whom – another of Nation’s loquacious Welshmen, played here by Artro Morris – delivers an effusive eulogy: ‘In this black hour of fond remembrance, when the great sorrow, dark as a raven’s wing, swoops into the memory and clouds the eyes with tears as cold as the angel of death himself, we call back in gentle memories the man who was so dear. Kind, decent, honest and true friend that he was, a man of infinite goodness, his forgiveness for those he loved was endless.’ During the latter part of this speech, the barely suppressed giggles of the two men have built into uncontrollable laughter, and they depart in a state of near-hysteria, as the title sequence brings a moment of pause. The story that follows is a routine bank heist, but there remains an element of strangeness. Much of the action takes place in a fairground House of Horrors that’s closed for renovation, and one scene is set in a steam bath, where Mannering encounters a man complaining that it’s not hot enough: ‘We must have more heat, so we can get used to the flames of eternal damnation. It should be hotter, much hotter.’ None of which would have been out of place in an episode of The Avengers.

  In his scripts for the show, Nation clearly enjoyed the freedom to laugh. ‘Legacy of Death’ bounced ideas off John Huston’s 1941 film The Maltese Falcon, with Stratford Johns giving a magnificent performance in the Sydney Greenstreet role (his character is named Sidney Street, in case we didn’t spot the reference) as a man on the trail of ‘a pearl of great price, a monstrous pearl, black as night and spawned up by some gigantic mollusc before time began, the largest, the most priceless pearl on earth’. (This is the pearl that ends up being dissolved in wine, in contravention of the words of Leslie Charteris.) The over-writing is entirely characteristic of a script in which Nation displays a glorious lack of restraint. ‘We’re near it now,’ Sidney pants as his delirious, fevered dreams appear to be reaching fruition. ‘I feel it, I smell it, all around like the perfume from some rare and exotic blossom comes the sweet smell of success. Victory is near, we have but to reach out and grasp, to take that delicate blossom in our hands and crush its petals to inhale the perfume of triumph.’ Not even Steed is immune; when Tara, who is driving the two of them, asks where they’re going, he replies: ‘Where indeed? Philosophers have asked that question for a thousand years. Quo vadis? Whither goest thou? Man’s eternal search for his destiny. You may well ask where are we going.’ So she asks again: ‘Where are we going?’ And he answers: ‘Turn left, next lights.’

  In ‘Take Me to Your Leader’ – a shaggy dog tale in which Steed and Tara follow a talking attaché case around London – they encounter a precocious schoolgirl (played by Elisabeth Robillard) who possesses the secret key that they’re pursuing, and who happily declares herself open to bribery. ‘Twenty-five pounds invested in blue chip equities will show a high yield by the time I’m twenty-one,’ she explains. Steed is unimpressed and reminds her that money isn’t everything, to which she replies in wide-eyed innocence: ‘Oh Mr Steed, don’t shatter a little girl’s illusions.’ The episode ‘Thingumajig’ was less successful, concerning a mad scientist who has developed metal boxes that feed off electricity, move around of their own free will and emit a high-voltage charge that kills. The concept was fine – and Iain Cuthbertson as the scientist gave it his best shot – but the story foundered on the fact that small featureless boxes are neither frightening nor entertaining as a visual image. There was, however, room for a restatement of an argument from The Caves of Steel as Steed explains how vulnerable modern life is in the face of a threat to the electricity supply: ‘Take a city. London, for instance. Its appetite for electricity is insatiable. It gulps up millions of kilowatts and converts them into heat and power and light.’ It was a theme to which Nation was to return.

  Other favourite concerns turn up in ‘Invasion of the Earthmen’, where Steed and Tara investigate an institution called the Alpha Academy, run on strict military lines – one might almost say as a hive – by Brigadier Brett (William Lucas), who is busily recruiting a private army of youthful soldiers. When their training is complete, he freezes them in cryogenic suspension, so that when Earth begins to explore and settle on other planets, he will have his troops ready to conquer the space colonies. It’s a ludicrous proposition, of course, but Nation doesn’t simply stay with the caricature of science fiction, instead expanding into a parody of his own action tales. The Academy is surrounded by a protective zone full of snares and booby-traps, snakes and scorpions, and when Tara successfully lasts for an hour outside, the Brigadier is impressed. ‘I congratulate you on your powers of survival,’ he tells her, and she shrugs: ‘They’re instinctive.’ There is also a tunnel beneath the Academy, whose function is explained by one of the cadets: ‘The Brigadier says everybody’s got a secret fear. In that tunnel you come face-to-face with that fear.’ Inevitably Tara and Steed end up in this fully equipped Room 101, where they find rats, spiders and a concrete tube designed to engender claustrophobia, as well as snares, acid pools and other hazards.

  How much influence Nation had over the last season of The Avengers, beyond the six scripts with which he is credited, is uncertain. The show had become very much Clemens’s baby and, although he was now officially the producer, he appears to have retained many of the script editor’s responsibilities. He commissioned Nation to write ‘Noon Doomsday’, a spoof of the movie High Noon, but was disappointed by the result: ‘He turned in a script that was really inferior. I totally rewrote it. Although Terry’s got the sole credit, there’s not really a word of his in any of that episode. He hadn’t been rewritten like that in a long time, and it was a shock to his system. And I must say that thereafter he wrote several Avengers episodes and I never had to rewrite them. I forced him to get off his arse really, and do it.’ No one questioned Nation’s ability to write well when he tried, but even he seemed to have doubts about whether he was capable of stepping into a more supervisory role. ‘I am not a good script editor,’ he admitted, many years later. ‘If somebody sends me a script, it could be absolutely perfect, but it wouldn’t be my way of doing it, and I would tend to rewrite until it reflected my way of thinking, which is not a good thing to do.’ Clemens’s take was more direct: ‘He wasn’t suited to what I call executive decisions.’

  In any event, this final season of the show was, and remains, much less celebrated than its immediate predecessors. The troubled start to the series had left Fennell and Clemens with Linda Thorson already cast as the replacement for Diana Rigg, a decision on which Clemens was lukewarm at best: ‘I wouldn’t have cast her. She developed into a good actress, but she was too young and she was Canadian. And Canadians notorious
ly don’t have a British sense of humour.’ In an attempt to find another companion figure (because ‘Steed’s got to strike sparks off someone’), he revealed for the first time their superior. Known only as Mother and played by Patrick Newell, he was a wheelchair-bound man who swung around his room by means of straps hanging from the ceiling, an image Clemens borrowed from Michael Powell’s 1961 film The Queen’s Guard. The British critics were divided both by Tara King and by Mother, though mostly the goodwill towards the show carried it through. ‘The programme – arguably the best series produced by British television – is as good as ever,’ was the verdict of the once and future Conservative MP, Julian Critchley, in a review in The Times. Dennis Spooner remembered that the imminent end of the show liberated the writers: ‘We went really weird, because we knew there wasn’t going to be any more.’ And Clemens himself thought that the scripts for the final season were ‘the best of all. Much more variety, ingenuity, originality.’ It was a view shared in retrospect by Patrick Macnee, though he hadn’t been enthusiastic at the time: ‘They rate as some of the very best episodes that were ever made.’

  In America, however, where the show had been a big hit, and had even been nominated for an Emmy in the last two seasons, the ratings fell off sharply – partly, it is argued, because it was scheduled up against Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, then at the peak of its popularity. When The Avengers was cancelled by the American ABC network in 1969, it was clear that the show wasn’t going to be recommissioned, and the last episode, ‘Bizarre’, ended with Steed and Tara being blasted into space, as Mother turned to the camera to reassure us: ‘They’ll be back, you can depend on it.’