by Alwyn Turner
There was perhaps an element of nostalgia in this reception. Howerd had first become a star more than a quarter of a century earlier, with Variety Bandbox, and his persona had changed very little in the intervening years, so that he was now a reassuring presence at a time when familiar comforts were much in demand. For Nation, about to embark on some much darker work, it was an unexpected footnote to his career as a comedy writer, his first piece of overt comedy for a decade. It also proved to be his last, but it did earn him some of the best notices of his career.
Chapter Eleven
Dalek Renaissance
In 1971, as producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks planned the ninth season of Doctor Who for the following year, they came to the conclusion that the proposed opening wasn’t quite strong enough. ‘We had a story from Louis Marks about guerrillas from the future, which was good, but we felt didn’t have the “wow” factor that you want for your first show,’ remembered Dicks. ‘And suddenly one of us – I think probably me – had the brilliant idea: let’s put the Daleks in, let’s make the villains behind the villains be the Daleks. Which was fairly easy to do. But incredibly, I forgot that the Daleks were Terry Nation’s copyright.’
In fact it wasn’t the copyright as such that had been forgotten. Letts sent a memo to the copyright department in April 1971 asking them to clear the use of the Daleks in what became ‘Day of the Daleks’, and Nation later signed a contract authorising their appearance (his fee had gone up to £25 per episode by now). To mark the broadcast, Nation also contributed an unfinished story for a Radio Times competition; readers were invited to submit an ending as well as illustrations, with the prize being a model Dalek. But Dicks and Letts had perhaps forgotten the arrangement whereby Nation was to be given the first option of writing any story featuring his creations, and they went to Pinewood Studios – where he was working on The Persuaders! – to apologise. Over lunch it was agreed that Nation would write a Dalek story for the following season, smoothing over any hurt feelings and resolving the situation to everyone’s satisfaction. ‘He said, “Let’s have a bottle of champagne.” And we thought he was celebrating because the Daleks were coming back,’ remembered Letts. ‘Until he actually came to the studio and we realised he always drank champagne, because the Daleks had made him so rich.’
The Daleks had never quite gone away, of course, even though the last new serial had been in 1967. There was still the occasional cheque for an overseas sale (sometimes very small indeed: in 1971 Nation received £3.12 when ‘The Chase’ was sold to Ethiopian television), and there were still payments for the use of Daleks in other programmes, from the quiz show What’s the Sense? through to Look – Mike Yarwood!, the BBC’s vehicle for the up-and-coming impressionist. In 1973 Roger Hancock even managed to get a £10 fee for the use of a Dalek voice on Jimmy Savile’s show Clunk-Click, an agreement which seemed to lack natural justice since the voice was invented not by Nation but by Brian Hodgson. But by that stage Hancock was rapidly proving that his reputation as a determined agent was well founded. There was a continual barrage of letters to the BBC pointing out uses that hadn’t been cleared and demanding payment; he secured, for example, £75 for an appearance on Savile’s other show, Jim’ll Fix It in 1975.
The point of this endless hassling over Dalek appearances was not simply the money, but the desire to keep a tight grip on the creatures’ image. Back in February 1964 a Dalek had featured in a sketch on the children’s show Crackerjack, and later that year one had appeared in Roy Kinnear’s sitcom A World of His Own (written by Nation’s old collaborator, Dave Freeman), but that was before their true value had become apparent. Since then there had been a definite attempt to ensure that they were not used in comedy situations, Nation rightly fearing that their cultural power would be diminished if they were publicly treated with ridicule. ‘Peter Vincent and I once wrote a sketch, “Dalek Theatre: Romeo and Juliet”,’ remembered Barry Cryer. ‘Dalek Juliet was on the balcony and Dalek Romeo down below. And of course you knew he was never going to climb up to the balcony, he kept crashing off the wall. And Terry put the block on it. He wouldn’t have it performed. He guarded the Dalek thing very fiercely.’
The one exception to this rule came in 1975 in a sketch for Spike Milligan’s BBC2 series Q6. The sketch was prefaced by a voice-over explaining that we were about to see a portrayal of everyday life in a modern mixed marriage. A domestic scene of a cliched 1970s housewife laying the table for dinner is rudely interrupted by her husband breaking through the door. He’s a Dalek, though curiously one with a Pakistani accent, who proceeds to smash the room up and to exterminate the household pets and even his mother-in-law, each death being greeted with the catchphrase, ‘Put him in the curry.’ It was, by Milligan’s recent standards, a coherent and focused sketch, embodying his comment on the subject of racial tensions in Britain: ‘You can’t solve the problem so you might as well laugh at it.’ Milligan’s biographer Humphrey Carpenter described the sketch as one ‘in which Spike’s racist humour suddenly becomes irresistible’, and certainly it became one of the most celebrated of the series. It also, of course, mercilessly made fun of the Daleks, both with its summary of a day in the life – ‘Exterminating is hard work,’ he complains – and in the very appearance of a child Dalek. Had it been by anyone else, Nation would certainly have prevented its appearance, but he was more than conscious of his debt to Milligan, and he allowed it as a personal favour, accepting no fee in return.
The fact that there were programmes to chase about their usage of the Daleks indicated how much a part of the cultural furniture the creatures had become. In the wake of the Louis Marks story, the Daleks again became an annual fixture on Doctor Who, and Roger Hancock made clear to the BBC that he at least recognised their value to the corporation. When, following that lunch at Pinewood, Nation signed a contract to write a storyline for what would become ‘Planet of the Daleks’, he received no fee, just a commitment to £400 per episode if it were accepted; the following year, however, the first deal under Hancock’s guidance saw an advance of £100 paid for the storyline of ‘Death to the Daleks’, deductable from the £450 per episode he would then receive. Elsewhere, while the heyday of Dalekmania may have passed, there was a rise again in the amount of merchandising available – 132 products were reported to exist by 1974, shortly to be joined by the Dalek’s Death Ray ice lolly from Wall’s – and there were odd echoes of the past. Back in 1964, when Alec Douglas-Home was prime minister, he was portrayed in a cartoon as the Alek; a decade later, he was foreign secretary in Edward Heath’s government, and a correspondent to the Guardian was suggesting that he be renamed Dalek Hugless-Doom.
While ‘the second coming of the Daleks’, as Nation called it, lacked the fever and fervour of the initial craze, it also looked more sustainable; this time, there was a very real possibility that they might not disappear so readily. The creatures’ status as a mainstream cult really took root in these years, though there were still some parts of the establishment that they struggled to penetrate. When a young student named Charles Braham, whose family were neighbours and friends of the Nations, asked if he could borrow one of the Dalek props from the Amicus movies for use in rag week fund-raising at the art college he was attending, Nation agreed on the proviso that he got the thing insured. ‘I must have visited twenty-five small insurance offices,’ remembered Braham. ‘Have you ever tried to get insurance for a Dalek?’ Unable to convince anyone that the request itself wasn’t simply a rag week stunt, and finding no one willing to give a quote, he ended up persuading the college to underwrite the cost of any damage.
In Nation’s absence there had been changes at the BBC, primarily the embrace of colour broadcasting, which started on BBC2 in 1967 and reached Doctor Who in time for the 1970 season. It was still, however, only available to a minority, fewer than 2 per cent of the licences issued that year giving their holders the right to receive colour transmissions; not until 1977 did colour licences outnumber black and whit
e. Although many ITC shows had, of course, been made in colour, that had been for export reasons alone, and was of no benefit to the British viewer. The change in what was by now the nation’s favoured recreation became for some symbolic of a generational shift in the country. ‘I am a modern man,’ proclaimed Tony Blair during the 1997 campaign that saw him elected as prime minister. ‘I am part of the rock and roll generation – the Beatles, colour TV. That’s the generation I come from.’
There had been changes too at Doctor Who, with the number of companions whittled down from the original three to just one, and amove towards a slightly older viewer. What had been – despite Sydney Newman’s protestations – very definitely a children’s show, that also happened to attract a wider audience, was now aimed much more obviously at the family. It was calculated that nearly three-quarters of viewers in the early 1970s were adults, many of whom had grown up with the programme, and the more mature content was causing some concern. Mary Whitehouse, founder of the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association, who campaigned against obscenity, blasphemy and violence on television, already had her sights set on Doctor Who (for having transgressed in the third of those categories), and in 1972 the BBC Audience Research Department published a report identifying the show as the BBC’s most violent drama series. There was a consequent and immediate impact on Nation’s own writing; when he proposed ending ‘Planet of the Daleks’ with a massacre of the surviving Thals, he had to be warned off by Terrance Dicks: ‘In the present climate of opinion, we have to be very careful about violence, massacres and gloom.’
Other developments derived from Nation’s own work on the series. When he had last written for the show, it was still making detours into historical drama, but that came to an end in 1967 with ‘The Highlanders’. There was a brief reversion in 1982 with ‘Black Orchid’, but apart from that it was bug-eyed monsters all the way; the Daleks had finally rewritten Doctor Who’s original mission statement. The tentative linking together of different storylines that Nation had begun when the Doctor explained the relationship in time between the events of ‘The Daleks’ and ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’, had evolved so that a reasonably coherent mythology was building, most notably with the introduction of the concept of Time Lords in ‘The War Games’ (1969), written by Terrance Dicks and Malcolm Hulke. We now knew something of the Doctor’s background and nature. It was also Nation who had, with Mavic Chen, introduced the theme of the megalomaniac scoundrel, hell bent on controlling the known universe, which had become a staple of the series. In Robert Holmes’s ‘Terror of the Autons’ (1971), this reached its seeming pinnacle with the Master (played by Robert Delgado), a rebel Time Lord intended as the arch-enemy of the Doctor, though Nation was soon to add his own recurrent super-villain to the programme’s pantheon.
There had, too, been a slight shift in structure, so that each serial was now given a single name (in the early years no overall title had been shown on screen for the stories, each episode being individually titled). It was a development that somewhat spoilt Nation’s convention of revealing a Dalek in an incongruous setting as the last scene in the first episode of a story; since we already knew from the opening titles that Daleks were scheduled to appear, there was not much surprise to be had from the revelation. He continued with his format regardless. Most significant of all, there was a new Doctor, with the introduction of regeneration; indeed there was a second new Doctor, since Nation had missed the Patrick Troughton incarnation altogether, and returned to the show to find Jon Pertwee in possession of the TARDIS.
‘I had known Jon for a long time and I knew what he was trying to do with the part,’ Nation said later. ‘We were in the height of the 007 period, and everybody was trying Bond movies; I think that’s how Jon saw the role: a little more dashing, a little more daring, and a little more physical.’ Pertwee’s own description was slightly different: ‘I played him as the flamboyant dandy, really the folk hero figure.’ But there was too a simplifying of the character. Hartnell’s irascible Doctor had been a decent man but appallingly self-centred, prepared to abandon Barbara to her fate in ‘The Daleks’, dismissive of the Thals’ pacifist beliefs, happy to leave his granddaughter behind in the year 2164 in ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’, despite her clear reluctance. Pertwee’s Doctor was a much more responsible figure of liberal authority, lacking the ambiguities and most of the arrogance. Indeed he’s not far removed from the action heroes for whom Nation had been writing, both in attitude and style (the floppy shirt cuffs protruding from the velvet jacket would not have looked wrong on Jason King himself). It is perfectly possible to see the Pertwee era of Doctor Who as a continuation of the ITC adventure shows by other means.
Nation’s script for ‘Planet of the Daleks’ displayed little sense of these changes. In fact, the most commonly levelled charge against the story became that it replayed many of the incidents and plot twists from ‘The Daleks’ itself: the jungle setting, the hiding of a person inside a Dalek shell, the Doctor being captured by the Daleks, and so on. Even the Thals, who hadn’t been seen since the first serial, were back. But this was an era before home video players, let alone DVDs, a time when repeats were rare. It was even before the paperback imprint Target Books began publishing their series of novelisations of old serials, which provided the first opportunity to catch up on the past. (‘One of the reasons for the success of the books was that if you missed a Doctor Who, you missed it,’ observed Terrance Dicks, who wrote many of the novels. ‘You were never going to see it again. There were virtually no repeats.’) In this context, concerns about recurring plot devices meant little; it had been nearly ten years since the first serial and television memories simply weren’t that long.
So we see again the Thals and the Daleks engaged in deadly combat, this time on the planet Spiridon, an inhospitable place with ‘vegetation that’s more like animal life than plant. Creatures hostile to everything, including themselves.’ There is also a sentient life-form in the shape of the native Spiridons, who have perfected the techniques of invisibility (like the Visians in ‘The Daleks’ Master Plan’), hence the presence of the Daleks on their planet, seeking to learn the secret. In the last shot of the first episode, the Doctor and a Thal spray a dead invisible creature with cans of spray-paint to reveal what it is; the Doctor exclaims, in Pertwee’s horrified, sibilant whisper: ‘Daleks!’
As it turns out, there isn’t a great deal of invisibility in the story. The Doctor’s companion, Jo Grant (Katy Manning), has an encounter with a rebel Spiridon named Wester, but the rest of his species – who have been enslaved by the Daleks – tend to wear heavy furs because it’s such a cold planet, making them perfectly visible, while the Daleks themselves find that the process uses too much power, so they too remain visible after the first episode. Likewise, the deadly vegetation isn’t an issue for very long, making only a belated reappearance in the last two minutes of the final episode. There is a clear sense that Nation is making this up as he goes along and losing track of what he’s already written. Terrance Dicks had asked for the scripts to be submitted one at a time, so that he could comment on them during the writing process, and Nation’s self-confessed reluctance to rewrite became apparent when a second Thal mission arrives on Spiridon at the end of the second episode with a female Thal named Rebec on board. ‘She turned up late because Terry Nation had forgotten there was supposed to be a female in the crew,’ remembered Dicks. ‘So I sent him a memo saying, “What happened to the female?” And she arrived by the next spacecraft. He was an old pro, Terry, he could always cope with that kind of thing.’
The same problem recurs throughout the six episodes, a lack of coherence that undercuts some typically inventive ideas, particularly in relation to the planet’s climate. Spiridon has at its core liquid ice, which occasionally explodes out of ice volcanoes (the phenomenon of cryo-volcanoes was then unknown, the first evidence of their existence coming from observations of one of Neptune’s moons in 1989), and is so cold that at night all
the wildlife huddles together on the Plain of Stones, where large rocks have absorbed the heat of the day and release it slowly during the hours of darkness. There are also, following the influence of The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, more borrowings from the early science fiction of H.G. Wells. The invisibility theme clearly derives from The Invisible Man (1897), as well as reprising ‘The Invisible Invaders’, a comic strip in the book The Dalek World, while the anti-gravitational mat that allows Daleks to rise vertically has something in common with the mysterious substance Cavorite that facilitates space travel in Wells’s The First Men in the Moon (1901). Meanwhile there’s an army of ten thousand Daleks in cryogenic suspension waiting for the order to attack the galaxy (not dissimilar to ‘Invasion of the Earthmen’ in The Avengers), and a plan to release a bacteria bomb to kill off all life on Spiridon, the public profile of biological weaponry having supplanted that of the neutron bomb since the days of the first serial.
So packed with incident and ideas does the story become that at one point in the fifth episode the Doctor has to stop for a brief recap to make sure we’re up to speed: ‘First of all, we’ve got to stop the Daleks releasing their bacteria. Second, we’ve got to make sure their army stays inactive. And third, we’ve got to generally put an end to their chances of invasion of other planets.’ ‘Well, how are we going to do all that?’ worries Jo. The Doctor admits, ‘I haven’t the faintest idea.’ Neither, one suspects, did Terry Nation. But it’s just the kind of challenge that both he and the Doctor relish, since it means that a plan is needed. And perils, problems and plans were what Nation liked best.
