by Alwyn Turner
Armed only with intelligence and enthusiasm, and adorned with the facial hair considered appropriate for the nineteenth century (Caleb has the edge on the others, sporting a pair of sideburns that would have been envied by early 1970s pop stars like Ray Dorset of Mungo Jerry and Trevor Bolder of the Spiders from Mars), the three heroes travel to the site of their investigations in Baldick’s private train, a luxuriously furnished affair known as the Tsar, since it was originally built for Nicholas I of Russia. Their only other companion is a pet owl named Cosmo.
All of this is attractive and appealing, suggesting one of the fifty-seven varieties of Edwardian detective that had recently been collected by Hugh Greene in book form as The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (1970), a volume which had subsequently inspired the Thames Television series of the same title. Among the characters featured there was William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghost-Finder, who investigated seemingly paranormal events, some of which had rational explanations while others turned out to be supernatural manifestations. Carnacki was the last in a line of psychic doctors dating back to Sheridan Le Fanu’s Dr Hesselius in the 1860s and reaching maturity in the Edwardian era with Algernon Blackwood’s Dr John Silence and others, before starting to look merely quaint and out-of-date in the aftermath of the First World War and the rise of Freudianism. Robert Baldick can be seen as sitting squarely in this now defunct tradition, while also sharing something with William Hartnell’s incarnation of the Doctor: another Edwardian figure intent on bringing his intellect and curiosity to bear on unknown situations.
The pilot episode, ‘Never Come Night’, is similarly promising, with an eclectic blend of Gothic, detective, fantasy and science fiction genres. It starts in Hammer Films style on a dark and stormy night with the death of a servant girl, savagely beaten to death in a ruined abbey. The local squire and the vicar call in Baldick, for this is not the first violent death in the vicinity of the abbey. ‘Local legend has it that the deaths go back into prehistory,’ explains the vicar. ‘There are written records covering the last two hundred years, and documented proof of at least forty-three deaths.’ As he excavates the site, Baldick argues that there is something in the place itself that stores up fear: ‘An accumulation of terror that has festered in men’s minds for all of time and has given this place a real power of evil.’ That power is unleashed on those who venture too near during hours of darkness, manifesting itself in the form of the victim’s personal phobia. The dead servant girl, for example, had a fear of being beaten, thanks to an abusive father, while Baldick himself, terrified of cobwebs since he was a child, finds himself alone at night in the abbey becoming enveloped in a web. (In the original proposal, the vicar also had a fear of snakes, and the squire of leeches.)
Summoning up all his reserves of will, Baldick is able to rationalise his fear and thus overcome it sufficiently that he can carry out his intention of burning the place down. He concludes that the evil here pre-dates humanity, and the suggestion is of a supernatural force, though the final scene opens up an alternative, rational explanation that could take us into the realms of science fiction. For Baldick has discovered, in the course of their digging, a strange object; made of an unknown metal, it comprises some kind of electrical circuit and a keyboard of mysterious design. ‘Something from the past,’ ponders Baldick. ‘Or the future?’
There are elements here reminiscent of Nigel Kneale’s 1958 television drama Quatermass and the Pit: the depiction of a localised evil pre-dating humanity and requiring excavation, the explanation of paranormal events as the product of alien technology, even the deconstruction of place-names. The abbey is set in Duvel Woods, which were originally known as Uvel, the Middle English for evil, just as Hobbs Lane in Quatermass and the Pit was originally Hob’s Lane, Hob being an old name for the Devil. There is too, in this tale of ‘a physical manifestation of a mental condition’, a memory of the house of horrors created by Nation in the Doctor Who story ‘The Chase’, a place that ‘exists in the dark recesses of the human mind’. And, of course, Nation’s recurrent interest in phobias is central to the plot. The fear of cobwebs and spiders expressed by Baldick had been a key part of the original script for ‘The Chase’, with the Doctor explaining to Ian that such phobias derive from early memories: ‘All your life, you have believed that a spider running across your hand is an unpleasant experience. As an intelligent adult, you know it can’t hurt you. Despite that, your earliest childhood memories dominate. You have an unfounded – pre-conditioned – fear of spiders.’ This was dropped from the screened version of ‘The Chase’, but Nation was reluctant to lose anything, and the idea resurfaces in Robert Baldick.
But perhaps the most obvious association in the mind of a modern viewer is with Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape, a similar blend of science and the supernatural, in which the walls of an old mansion record the violence that has happened there. Any such resemblance, however, was entirely coincidental. Kneale’s play (directed by Peter Sasdy, who had earlier made ‘The Caves of Steel’ and ‘A Kiss Before Dying’) was not broadcast until Christmas 1972 on BBC2, and had not even been commissioned when Nation delivered his script.
Despite all the potential of the character, the pilot episode didn’t entirely convince. For the most part it was a stylish, well-produced piece. A crane shot of the drive to Baldick Park was impressive enough to have come from an ITC production, while Baldick’s private train – courtesy of the Severn Valley Railway – was shown in all its finery, steaming through the English countryside, almost as though it were a period parody of the luxury cars we had seen in those action hero series. (‘Should add the railway nuts to the horoscope consulters and swell the ratings even further,’ wrote critic Clive James in the Observer.) But there was a strange lack of drama at both beginning and end that fatally undermined the piece. The title sequence was so casual that it had no theme tune and used captions that looked like an amateur slideshow, while what should have been the climactic burning of the abbey was low key to the point of being perfunctory. Nor was the final reveal of the unearthed object from the future given the weight that it deserved, hurried over as though time had got the better of the director.
A more serious difficulty, since those problems could be addressed in later episodes, was the casting of Robert Hardy as Baldick. A respected, highly competent actor, Hardy was solid and believable, but was simply too smooth a presence for a character who needed a fair degree of eccentricity if he was ever going to become an audience favourite. There was insufficient intensity, an absence of quirk, in the depiction. The ghost-finder Carnacki in Thames’s The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes the previous year had been portrayed by Donald Pleasance, and Baldick similarly needed someone rather less emollient than Hardy. Nor did the two sidekicks add sufficient colour to the proceedings, either in the writing or in the acting.
Even so, there was confidence in the project at the BBC, an expectation that a series would result. And in many ways it seemed appropriate for a time when nostalgia was very much in the air. The huge success of The Forsyte Saga, a series made by the BBC in 1967 from the novels by John Galsworthy, had been followed by several other period dramas at the beginning of the new decade, including Upstairs Downstairs and The Onedin Line. It wasn’t just on television, for some of the most iconic 1960s brand names were also reaching back into Britain’s past for inspiration: the Biba fashion label, which had done so much to popularise the mini-skirt, was now finding inspiration in Victoriana and art deco, while the quirky products of Portmeirion Pottery were being replaced by images culled from nineteenth-century illustrations to create the Botanic Garden range, one of the great export successes of the time. Laura Ashley was making a name for herself with romantically rustic clothing designs, and the day was not far off when Edith Holden’s The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady would become a publishing and marketing phenomenon. The slow death of 1960s idealism was matched by a rise of revivalism in every corner of popular culture, and there was no obvious reason why Baldick should not be
nefit in the retreat from the present.
Nation spent some time negotiating what his position would be in the event that the show took off. Having learnt from his experience with the Daleks where the real money was to be made in television, he was determined to maximise his earnings should opportunity come knocking again. His contract for the show licensed the format and characters to the BBC in return for a fee of £85 for each episode on which he wasn’t the writer, rising to £100 per episode after the first twenty-six had been made. He reserved the film, publishing and merchandising rights (though the BBC would receive a small cut of these), and he insisted on being appointed series consultant, explaining: ‘This position would simply allow me to have the authority to comment on, make suggestions, to be consulted and generally assist in the development of any series that might result from the pilots. This, I assure you, is no lust for power. It is merely to allow me to have a voice in the progress of the series. After all, no one will care more deeply about the shows than I.’ (This was to become a familiar comment.) It was further determined that the words ‘Series created by Terry Nation’ – a credit to which he had aspired for years – would appear as a single caption in the titles, and would be included in the Radio Times listing. He even signed a separate book deal with the publishers Weidenfeld & Nicolson, though the failure to secure a series meant that the proposed volume never appeared.
The BBC’s decision not to exercise its option was a major setback for Nation. After a decade of writing for other people’s series, it looked in the first months of 1972 as though he had finally broken through with his own project. He had aspired to that credit — ‘Series created by Terry Nation’ – for years and briefly it had seemed to be within his grasp, before again slipping through his fingers. Uncle Selwyn had originally been intended as a pilot, but never got past the single drama stage, The Daleks hadn’t even got that far, and now The Amazing Robert Baldick had similarly failed. The following year, he received yet another commission that never materialised. He was paid by the BBC to write two episodes of a series to be entitled No Place Like Home, set in Ireland with two retired couples, one English and one American. This was talked about as a series of twelve episodes, and the first two scripts – ‘The Accident’ and ‘Everything in the Garden Is Lovely’ – were delivered, sent for rewrites and accepted, before that project too was abandoned.
By then, however, Nation was less concerned, for he was greeted on his return to the BBC fold, nearly seven years on from ‘The Daleks’ Master Plan’, by offers of new work. In April 1972 he was commissioned to produce a Doctor Who storyline, which would become ‘Planet of the Daleks’, and the following month the Beyond Omega proposal was revived under another title; he was offered £750 to write a pilot script for a potential series to be called The Survivors.
That latter commission proved to be the last contract he signed under the auspices of Associated London Scripts. In early 1968 ALS had merged itself with the Robert Stigwood Organisation, though two of the founders, Spike Milligan and Eric Sykes, remained behind and kept the offices at Orme Court. Thereafter it began to drift away from the single business of being an agency. Beryl Vertue, who had represented Nation for so long, was becoming involved in production, working on the 1966 film The Spy with the Cold Nose, written by Alan Galton and Ray Simpson, and then serving as executive producer on Eric Sykes’s The Plank (1967) and the movie version of Till Death Us Do Part (1969), all of which were made by a new sister company, Associated London Films. ‘I stopped being an agent, because I wanted to be a producer,’ she explained. ‘Then in the end we decided we wouldn’t have an agency at all.’ At the start of the 1970s, as Vertue’s interests moved elsewhere, it increasingly fell to Pam Gillis to negotiate on behalf of Nation, but in 1972 he left ALS altogether and became instead the client of Roger Hancock, younger brother of Tony, who had by now formed his own agency; he was to remain here for the rest of his life.
‘Roger was a legend,’ remembered the comedy writer Barry Cryer, who had been represented by Hancock since the mid 1960s. ‘He was very tough – his clients were everything. But he had so many friends. I never heard a bad word about him on a personal level.’ It was an opinion shared by others. ‘Off work, he was very charming, very amusing,’ noted Alan Simpson, while Doctor Who producer Barry Letts, who encountered Hancock from the other side of the negotiating table, recalled him and Nation as a double-act: ‘They played good guy, bad guy. Roger Hancock was a very fierce agent and made sure he got the best, best deal for Terry.’ And Terrance Dicks, who described Hancock as ‘a Rottweiler’, saw the success of the partnership in this meeting of opposites: ‘I think Terry knew he was so easy-going that he had his agent to protect him.’ As Cryer made clear, Hancock’s relationship with his clients was based on absolute trust; Cryer himself never signed a contract, merely shaking hands on a deal that was based on a simple premise. ‘He said: If you get pissed off with me, you walk away. If I get pissed off with you, I walk away.’ That arrangement lasted until Hancock’s retirement.
The benefits to Nation were soon to be manifest in better contracts with the BBC, but the connection with ALS was not entirely at an end. In 1973 Associated London Films produced a new film, a horror comedy titled The House in Nightmare Park, starring Frankie Howerd and co-written by Nation and Clive Exton, the latter also from the ALS stable.
Again, just as the idea for The Team had revisited The Thin Man, so this new venture was rooted in the Hollywood of Nation’s youth, for it came fairly directly from The Cat and the Canary, originally a stage play written by John Willard, but best known as a 1939 film, starring Bob Hope as a wise-cracking, cowardly actor. He and a motley and eccentric collection of family members gather in an old, dark house to hear the reading at midnight of a dead man’s will, and to chase after an inheritance that centres on a fortune in diamonds, hidden on the estate. Over the course of the ensuing night, we discover that there’s a vein of hereditary madness in the family, which might explain why the characters are being killed off one by one. The story had been reworked in 1961 by Robert S. Baker and Monty Berman as What A Carve Up!, with Kenneth Connor and Sid James; the source material here was credited as being Frank King’s novel The Ghoul, which accounted for the setting of the Yorkshire Moors, but the influence of The Cat and the Canary was unmistakable.
So too was it in The House in Nightmare Park, which again featured a rambling, eccentric family gathered in a remote mansion in pursuit of a cache of diamonds hidden somewhere on the estate, as they are successively murdered. Into this situation comes Frankie Howerd as a dreadful Edwardian actor, hired – so he believes – to provide entertainment based on his dramatic readings from Dickens, though it transpires that he too is a member of the family and unwittingly holds the key to the location of the diamonds. Despite its creaky and derivative plot, much of the film is very successful, with some classic Howerd lines. ‘Do I play the piano?’ he says indignantly. ‘Does Paganini play the trumpet?’ Asked how he takes his whisky, he requests ‘just a threat’ of soda. And when he finally discovers the truth about the diamonds, he bends over to explore a secret cavity in the floor and is horrified to see a snake rearing up between his legs: ‘Please make it a crusher not a biter,’ he murmurs. Delivered in Howerd’s most fervent voice, it’s a line that works beautifully at the time, even if it defies rational analysis.
The best moment though comes with the revelation that when the family was stationed in India, they used to have a variety act, Henderson’s Human Marionettes, in which the sibling children dressed as, and behaved like, dolls. Now middle-aged adults, they dress up again for a rendition of their party piece, which is genuinely disturbing. At the end of it one of the brothers, Ernest (Kenneth Griffith), is found dead, stabbed in the back while portraying a golliwog. It’s a sequence that could have come straight from The Avengers, and indeed the film’s director, Peter Sykes, had worked on a couple of episodes for that series, including Nation’s ‘Noon Doomsday’. As well as Griffith, who had
n’t acted in a Nation script since Hancock, the cast included Hugh Burden, Rosalie Crutchley and Ray Milland, who had once been a pupil at the same Cardiff school as Nation. But it was Howerd who dominated the proceedings. It was very much written with Frankie in mind,’ according to Verity Lambert, again the executive producer, while Nation and Exton were credited as the producers. (They even formed a company for the occasion, Extonation, though it did no further business.)
‘I was grateful the film received the first unanimously good press I’d had for a picture in a long, long time,’ remembered Howerd. ‘You expect, naturally, some divergence of opinion, but as I recall it, not one critic panned The House in Nightmare Park.’ He was right; the movie got tremendous reviews. ‘As good an attempt as anyone has made to employ the elusive gifts of Frankie Howerd,’ said David Robinson in The Times; ‘his funniest film role’, agreed the Daily Mirror; while ‘for much of the time’ it had Ian Christie of the Daily Express ‘quite helpless with laughter’. Derek Malcolm in the Guardian thought that the creators had ‘obviously tried for more than routine comedy and have, at least in part, succeeded’, and in the Observer George Melly declared that it was ‘as British as nailing a kipper to the underside of an unsympathetic seaside landlady’s dining-room table’.
