by Alwyn Turner
Chapter Ten
Darkness Descends
Lew Grade was not too badly damaged by the decline of the adventure series, and still had his biggest television hits yet to come: the star-studded biopic of Jesus of Nazareth (1977) and the even more star-studded comedy of The Muppet Show (1976). Both were huge hits in America, increasing ATV’s exports still further, and Grade was promoted from the knighthood to the peerage – becoming Lord Grade of Elstree – in the resignation honours list when Harold Wilson stepped down as prime minister in 1976. By then the action shows were a fading memory, tailing off with The Protectors before one final flourish with the short-lived 1974 series The Zoo Gang.
The Protectors was made by Gerry Anderson (though with human actors rather than puppets), ran for two seasons in 1972–4, and was clearly cast from the same mould as the earlier series, with three agents engaging in the usual adventures around the better known parts of Europe. Its stars were of a higher order than those of, say, The Champions, even if they didn’t reach the same level as The Persuaders!: the American Robert Vaughn, formerly of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Nyree Dawn Porter, best known from The Forsyte Saga as well as having been Sydney Newman’s original choice for the female lead in The Avengers, and the relative newcomer Tony Anholt. But despite the cast, and despite a great theme song – the storming ‘Avenues and Alleyways’, written by Mitch Murray and Peter Callander and sung by Tony Christie – the show suffered from one crucial flaw: it reverted to the half-hour format of the 1950s swashbucklers (minus commercial breaks), leaving no room for any of the guest characters to establish themselves or for any proper plot development. Consequently it looked very much like the poor relation in the ITC family, dreaming of a glamorous lifestyle but having to get by in reduced circumstances. There was no style, no swagger, no humour, just a pale imitation of past glories, the leftovers from the 1960s served up lukewarm to a hung-over nation.
It was, in other words, perfectly suited to the impoverished era in which it appeared. For these were dark days. Many commentators in the early and mid 1970s were agreed that Britain was at best in terminal economic decline and at worst sliding into anarchy, with the trade unions the most commonly cited cause of the country’s problems. In 1972, when The Protectors debuted, a total of 24 million working days were lost in industrial action, double the level of the previous year, and easily the worst tally since 1926, the year of the general strike. The same year unemployment exceeded the million mark, then considered a shockingly high level, and politicians and pop stars alike, from Richard Crossman to David Bowie, busied themselves evoking the imagery of Weimar Germany. And things got worse. During the second season of The Protectors, an international oil crisis combined with an overtime ban, which became a strike, by the National Union of Mineworkers to plunge the country into a fuel crisis, leading the government to declare a state of emergency (the fifth in four years).
Through the winter of 1973–4 new restrictions on everyday activities were introduced on what seemed like an almost daily basis; street lighting was cut, electric heating banned in workplaces and a 50 m.p.h. speed limit introduced on the motorways. At its silliest, the emergency prompted the energy minister, Patrick Jenkin, to suggest that if everyone brushed their teeth in the dark, that might save a bit of fuel; at its most serious, British industry was restricted to a three-day week. Television too was affected, with the government ordering that broadcasting end by 10.30 p.m., though that was often an academic issue for would-be viewers already blacked out by power cuts. But in this quarter at least there was some relief to come; when the prime minister, Edward Heath, called a general election for February 1974 – intended to decide once and for all who was going to govern Britain, Parliament or the trade unions – special dispensation was granted for normal broadcasting to be resumed, so that politicians might breathe the oxygen of publicity. The outcome of that election was a humiliating defeat for Heath and the return to Downing Street of Harold Wilson, a quieter, more sober figure than he had been in his 1960s heyday.
Terry Nation gently lampooned this change in government in a short story, ‘Daleks: The Secret Invasion’, published in 1974 in London’s Evening News. A group of children encounter Daleks at large in London and are ushered into the corridors of power to give their accounts. One of the children recognises and points out the prime minister, leaving her brother perplexed: ‘That’s not Mr Heath.’ She has to correct him. ‘Of course it’s not,’ she says. ‘It’s Mr Wilson’s turn this month.’ As Nation notes drily: ‘Emilie knew about politics.’ She also correctly identifies a man with ‘spectacles and a worried expression’ as the home secretary, Roy Jenkins, though regrettably neither Wilson nor Jenkins is called upon to negotiate with the Daleks. (An encounter between the urbane Jenkins and the profoundly uncivilised Daleks would have been worth seeing.)
The heady days of the 1960s were clearly long since gone, and the country was sufficiently demoralised that it even settled for the low-level thrills of The Protectors, sending the show into the top twenty. Terry Nation wrote four episodes of that second season, and they were far from memorable, though ‘Bagman’ did feature a guest appearance by Lalla Ward prior to her incarnation as Romana in Doctor Who. The best of the episodes, ‘A Pocketful of Posies’, featured Eartha Kitt as a veteran singer on the verge of a big comeback concert, being drugged with mildly hallucinogenic stimulants by her husband and his mistress, who plan to kill her and make it look like the suicide of a madwoman. In moments that hint at the glory days of The Avengers, she starts experiencing hallucinations: a glass of wine disappears, a clock runs backwards, a record player starts playing the nursery rhyme ‘Ring a Ring o’ Roses’, even though there’s no record on the turntable and the machine isn’t plugged in. It could all have been splendidly creepy, but here, given just twenty-five minutes, there was insufficient time to build any real sense of tension or terror.
If The Protectors was little more than a pale echo of the 1960s, Nation had already contributed to a largely unheralded but nonetheless effective elegy to the passing of that decade. As filming on The Avengers came to an end, he and Brian Clemens began planning a screenplay for a movie to be titled And Soon the Darkness. The credits showed the two men as co-writers though, according to Clemens, that didn’t fairly represent the division of labour: ‘We sat down and did this kicking around thing, blocking it out. We finished it on the Friday and I got home and I was so excited that I sat down and wrote the whole damn thing over that weekend.’ The film was directed by Robert Fuest – who had directed Nation’s best episode of The Avengers, ‘Take Me to Your Leader’ – and released in 1970 by Associated British Production Company, the first product of a much trumpeted programme of British releases under the aegis of the established British director Bryan Forbes.
The story takes place in a single afternoon and shows two young nurses from London – Jane (Pamela Franklin) and Cathy (Michele Dotrice) – on a cycling holiday in rural northern France. Early on, the pair discuss the death the previous week of a one-day-old baby in the hospital where they work, and the image of the death of innocence hangs heavy over the rest of the film. Neither girl speaks any French, which is something of a disadvantage since most of the people they encounter speak very little else, and the failure to communicate gradually builds an atmosphere of menace as they cycle on through small, almost deserted hamlets under big, open skies that look increasingly oppressive. ‘Cette route,’ warns a woman at a roadside café: ‘mauvaise réputation, très mauvaise réputation.’ And eventually, now split up after an argument, they discover that a young Dutch tourist was murdered here three years ago. ‘She was young and pretty,’ an unhelpful English woman explains. ‘They always are, I suppose. Loathsome business. It was more than murder, if you know what I mean. Still, she was asking for trouble – alone on the road.’ At one stage they pass through a village named Landron, and Cathy greets it sarcastically: ‘Hey, swinging Landron!’ And the disjunction implied by the comment seems entirely appropriate. T
wo young women on bicycles wearing skimpy clothing – it looks like a perfect Swinging Sixties image, except that it ends in violence and murder.
In retrospect the location of horror in an idyllic rural setting, the gleeful knocking down of the idea that the countryside might be a refuge from the sins of the city, makes And Soon the Darkness look like a precursor to a theme that was to become very common, with films like Straw Dogs (1971), Deliverance (1972) and The Wicker Man (1973), as well as novels like Thomas Tryon’s Harvest Home (1973). That wasn’t how it was seen at the time, however, and it received a critical mauling. ‘I shall be charitable, and say nothing,’ wrote Derek Malcolm in the Guardian, ‘except that Robert Fuest has made a thriller which has to be seen to be believed.’ John Russell Taylor in The Times was less generous – ‘a would-be thriller of almost unbelievable ineptitude’ – and James Thomas in the Daily Express didn’t even rate the twist in the tail: ‘it has all the surprise and fascination of a rent increase.’ Nor did the movie fare very well at the box office.
At the time of the film’s release, Nation was already engaged in the preproduction schedule for The Persuaders!, and the reviews were of little significance. But as that series ended, and it became clear that the days of the ITC adventurers were coming to a close, there was a renewed need to find work. With nothing obvious on the horizon, he returned to the idea of creating his own series, and began to tout around various proposals.
One of these was The Team, a proposed pilot for a series that would centre on a husband and wife detective partnership. It wasn’t an entirely original concept, for the idea of a married couple having a shared interest in investigating crime had been around since the early days of detective fiction. Irish QC and MP Matthias McDonnel Bodkin wrote books about two separate detectives, Paul Beck and Dora Myrl, before marrying them off in the 1909 novel The Capture of Paul Beck. There was also Busman’s Holiday (1937), the last of Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey books, in which the aristocratic sleuth is joined in his investigations by the former Harriet Vane, who has finally consented to marry him. More directly influential on Nation, one suspects, were Nick and Nora Charles, the heroes of Dashiell Hammett’s 1933 novel The Thin Man, a couple who interrupt their drinking only to engage in yet more witty banter and solve crimes. The story was filmed the following year with William Powell and Myrna Loy, who proved so successful in the central roles that five sequels appeared in the next twelve years. MGM, who made the movies, clearly liked the format and launched a new married couple, Joel and Garda Sloane, in Fast Company (1938), based on the novel of the same title by Harry Kurnitz.
There was, then, considerable precedent for Nation’s pilot for The Team, and there was no reason why it should not have worked. But despite approaches to several television companies, he made no progress. Perhaps the timing was wrong, coinciding too closely with the similar McMillan and Wife, starring Rock Hudson and Susan Saint James, which first aired in the USA in September 1971 and in the UK six months later. Nonetheless the idea did eventually bear fruit, when Brian Clemens returned to it as the basis for ‘K Is for Killing’, a 1974 episode in the second season of his excellent anthology series, Thriller (US title: ABC Mystery Movie.) Gayle Hunnicutt and Stephen Rea starred as Suzy and Arden Buckley and, like And Soon the Darkness, it was co-credited to Clemens and Nation – though Clemens insisted that he didn’t use Nation’s storyline, taking only the essential setup of the married couple.
More immediately productive was a meeting in December 1971, when Nation presented two proposals to Andrew Osborn, head of television drama serials at the BBC: one was a post-apocalyptic series to be titled Beyond Omega, the other an idea for the adventures of a Victorian investigator of the paranormal named Dr Robert Baldick. Both were received positively, and Nation was bursting with energy and eagerness when he wrote to Osborn the day after the meeting: ‘I promise you I’ll make both these series work, not only for myself, but to justify your confidence and enthusiasm.’ After some discussion concerning fees (Associated London Scripts were asking for £1,000 for a pilot script of each, but settled for £750 instead), both pilots were commissioned, Beyond Omega having a delivery date of 31 January 1972 and Robert Baldick of 7 February.
At this point, Nation’s fervour seems to have evaporated a little as he realised the scale of the undertaking to which he had committed himself. Previously he had written to a brief, following a structure already laid down, using central characters who already existed; even the pilot for The Daleks had been based on previous work. Now he was facing an entirely new proposition: the creation from scratch of a programme that was intended to be the foundation for an entire series, sustainable for potentially dozens of episodes. And he was committed to do it not once but twice, in the space of less than two months. Worrying too about how a series of his own creation would work out in practice (how many episodes, for example, would he write himself?), he told Osborn at the beginning of January that he didn’t think he could meet the delivery dates for the two programmes and that it would take till March to get them both finished. That, replied Osborn, ‘is leaving things so late as to almost constitute a crisis so far as we are concerned over production’. It was agreed therefore that the Beyond Omega project be withdrawn, and that Nation should concentrate solely on his script for Robert Baldick. Delivered almost on time, it was immediately accepted, and by June 1972 it was in production.
The title went through various permutations in its early stages, including The Incredible Dr Baldick and The Amazing Robert Baldick, before settling on its final form, The Incredible Robert Baldick. What didn’t change, though, was the name of the protagonist, for Nation had overcome the problem of finding new names for his characters – a familiar chore for all prolific television writers – by borrowing that of a friend. The real Dr Robert Baldick, an Oxford academic specialising in French literature, agreed to his name being used for Nation’s latest creation, apparently amused by the concept of being associated with a fictional character. Unfortunately, however, he died in April 1972, before the programme was broadcast, and although his widow was content for the agreement to be honoured, his son – also named Robert Baldick, and then studying for a PhD – was less happy about his name being used in this context. For several weeks in the summer of 1972, with filming already complete, the younger Baldick was in discussions with the BBC, seeking to have the show retitled and ultimately threatening to obtain a court injunction to achieve this end. While refusing to accept that there truly was a legal case here, Andrew Osborn eventually conceded that, although it was too late to change the pilot, the name would be amended – probably to Baldwick – were a series to develop. In the meantime, the uncertainty had been a major factor in the rescheduling of the programme: originally intended as the first of three shows in a short Drama Playhouse season, due to be shown on 23 August, it was instead placed at the end of the run on 6 September.
At the time, the rescheduling seemed of little significance. The Drama Playhouse strand, broadcast at 8.10 p.m. on Wednesday nights on BBC1, attracted strong audiences and had an excellent track record for launching new programmes. Four of the six pilots previously screened had spawned their own series – Codename, The Regiment, The Befrienders and The Onedin Line – and great hopes were held out for the new season, which included Sutherland’s Law and The Venturers in addition to The Incredible Robert Baldick, all of them produced by Anthony Coburn, who had written the first ever episodes of Doctor Who. And indeed the ratio of winners continued: Sutherland’s Law eventually ran to forty-six episodes spread over five seasons, while The Venturers managed a single season of ten episodes. The Incredible Robert Baldick was less fortunate; despite a repeat screening in February 1974, no follow-up to the pilot was ever commissioned.
The problems started with the programme’s new broadcast date. The Olympic Games, staged that year in Munich, were entering their final week when, just before dawn on 5 September 1972, nine members of the Palestinian terrorist group Black September in
filtrated the Olympic Village, shot dead two members of the Israeli team and took a further nine athletes hostage. An increasingly desperate siege lasted all day and finally ended just after midnight, when in a failed rescue attempt all nine hostages were killed together with a West German policeman, as well as five of the gunmen. It was one of the most spectacular terrorist actions the world had thus far witnessed, complete with live footage. For the first time in its history, the Olympic movement suspended competition, instead holding a memorial service to the dead athletes, before resuming in a subdued atmosphere.
British television responded, as it generally does in such situations, by rearranging its schedules in an attempt to show it was aware of the enormity of events. Among the programmes lost in the rush to demonstrate relevance was The Incredible Robert Baldick, its broadcast postponed to a 9.25 p.m. slot on Monday 2 October, where it was sandwiched between the Nine O’Clock News and International Show Jumping from the Empire Pool, Wembley. It was watched by a fair-sized audience of 6.6 million viewers, but it looked a little isolated in the schedules, and undoubtedly suffered from being up against the popular ITV agony-aunt series Kate, then in the midst of its third season, and the might of News at Ten. Whether it would have fared better in its original time slot – taken instead by Sutherland’s Law – is arguable, but the rescheduling certainly didn’t help its cause.
The fact that the show didn’t grow into a series was regrettable, for despite some flaws its premise was eminently sound. Dr Robert Baldick (played by Robert Hardy) is a mid-Victorian scientist of enormous private wealth – presumably inherited, since he’s a baronet living in a manor house in Baldick Park – who is also an independent investigator of mysteries. ‘He cannot resist the inexplicable,’ explains one of his assistants. ‘Almost any happening qualifies for his interest so long as it is out of the ordinary. He’s a man of insatiable curiosity.’ The man adds that his employer prefers to be known as Dr Baldick rather than Sir Robert: ‘After all, he does have the highest scientific qualifications in the country.’ (This is not, it has to be said, Nation’s best writing; even allowing for the necessity of setting the scene and establishing character in a pilot, there is a prosaic quality to it, quite apart from the silliness of those ‘highest scientific qualifications in the country’.) Baldick is accompanied by his valet, Thomas Wingham (Julian Holloway), who happens to be an expert researcher with a sound grasp of archaic languages, and by his gamekeeper, Caleb Selling (John Rhys-Davies), who can bring his knowledge of nature to bear on the case in hand. A thoroughly meritocratic type of Victorian, Baldick treats these two not as servants but as colleagues, albeit junior colleagues who are never quite up to speed, though this is largely because their master shares Sherlock Holmes’s habit of not revealing what he has deduced until after the denouement: ‘All in good time, Thomas, all in good time!’
