The Man Who Invented the Daleks

by Alwyn Turner

  The realisation of Davros – designed by Peter Day, with the face created by sculptor John Friedlander, both from the BBC Visual Effects Department – followed that prescription, adding a hint of the Mekon, Dan Dare’s archenemy, in the expansive cranium. It was a superb piece of work. Since the commissioning of the serial, both Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks had left the show, replaced by producer Philip Hinchcliffe and script editor Robert Holmes, neither of whom had any fondness for the Daleks at all. They were, however, stuck with the story. ‘So I thought that we’d better do something bloody good with the Daleks,’ said Hinchcliffe, ‘because people had seen them ad nauseum. They were silly things, running around on castors. So I just tried to inject more atmosphere.’ The strength of the design was complemented by the performance of Michael Wisher, the first and best of the actors to take the role. In his hands the character emerged as a worthy opponent for the Doctor, a Professor Moriarty to his Sherlock Holmes. ‘The courage and resourcefulness of a hero figure,’ Nation once wrote, ‘is directly related to the strength and ruthlessness of his opponent.’ Nowhere was this more true than with Davros. And from the Doctor’s point of view, he at last had a representative of the Daleks with whom he could engage, the first one with a face, a name, and a voice capable of expressing an emotion beyond insecure hysteria.

  The conflict between the two reaches its peak in the second half of the story, which, as in other Dalek tales by Nation, features discussions of morality. The Doctor attempts to reason with Davros as a fellow man of science: ‘If you had created a virus in your laboratory, something contagious and infectious that killed on contact, a virus that would destroy all other forms of life, would you allow its use?’ Davros replies, thoughtfully at first but with increasing levels of self-abandon: ‘Yes. Yes. To hold in my hand a capsule that contains such power, to know that life and death on such a scale was my choice. To know that the tiny pressure on my thumb, enough to break the glass, would end everything. Yes. I would do it. That power would set me up above the gods. And through the Daleks, I shall have that power.’

  For he is not at heart a scientist at all, but the ultimate arch-villain of the thriller tradition, the power-crazed would-be dictator, who dismisses his opponents as weak-willed and feeble-minded: ‘They talk of democracy, freedom, fairness. Those are the creeds of cowards, the ones who will listen to a thousand viewpoints and try to satisfy them all. Achievement comes through absolute power. And power through strength.’ Intrigued though he is by the Doctor, ultimately he dismisses him for the same reason: ‘You have a weakness that I have totally eliminated from the minds of the Daleks so they will always be superior,’ he sneers. ‘You are afflicted with a conscience.’ He is even prepared to betray his own people to the Thals, in order to thwart an attempt by higher-minded Kaleds to curtail his activities: ‘Today the Kaled race is ended, consumed in a fire of war, but from its ashes will rise a new race, the supreme creature, the ultimate conqueror of the universe – the Dalek!’

  We have encountered his kind before in Nation’s writing. The character Croft in ‘The Fanatics’, an episode of The Champions, for example, with his suicide squads and his lust for power. Or the professional revolutionary Theron Netlord (John Carson) in ‘Sibao’ in The Saint, who seeks world domination through organising the oppressed nations of the world: ‘For a thousand years they have been searching for a leader to take them to their rightful place in the world.’ Or possibly Curt Hoffman (Robert Hardy) in ‘A Memory of Evil’ in The Baron, a neo-Nazi whose ambitions might seem to make him a candidate for the presidency of the European Union: ‘The whole of Europe. A dozen countries, all scrambling for the seats in the halls of power. If they were one country, with one leader, then they would have enough manpower and resources to conquer the world.’ There were to be more such figures to come, but never was the character manifest in such pure, unadorned form as Davros.

  All of this is building towards the climactic scene in the final episode. The Doctor places explosives in Davros’s laboratory, with the intention of destroying the genetically mutated Kaleds who will become the Daleks, but then hesitates over whether to detonate the charge. ‘Do I have the right? Simply touch one wire against the other and that’s it: the Daleks cease to exist. Hundreds of millions of people, thousands of generations can live without fear, in peace, and never even know the word “Dalek”.’ As Davros has correctly identified, the possession of a conscience brings with it moral uncertainty. ‘If I kill, wipe out a whole intelligent life-form, then I become like them. I’d be no better than the Daleks.’ He spells out the dilemma in its simplest form: ‘If someone who knew the future pointed out a child to you and told you that that child would grow up totally evil, to be a ruthless dictator who would destroy millions of lives, could you then kill that child?’ The quandary is resolved when he is distracted from his task and a Dalek subsequently passes over the wires, making the connection that detonates the explosives. As Tom Baker pointed out: ‘It’s the villains exploding them-selves because, of course, the moral hero which I play can never actually press the button. He just sets up a situation in which they actually take the decision because good conquers evil in melodrama. It’s not like in real life.’

  But there are sufficient numbers of Daleks already in existence to ensure that the race will survive, and as the Thal forces blow up the entrance to the bunker, sealing the creatures inside, the creations turn on their creator in time-honoured fashion, apparently killing Davros himself. Through a television monitor, the Daleks are seen accepting their fate in the sure and certain knowledge of their survival: ‘We are entombed, but we live on. This is only the beginning. We will prepare. We will grow stronger. When the time is right, we will emerge and take our rightful place as the supreme power of the universe.’ Unusually for Doctor Who, the story ends on a note of failure. The Doctor had been sent to prevent the emergence of the Daleks, and the best he has managed to do has been to delay them a little, by no more than a thousand years in his own estimation. As a rule, Doctor Who opted for happy endings, for the restoration of normality after the removal of a deadly threat; here there was simply a temporary cessation of hostilities.

  The bleakness of the ending was fully in keeping with a serial that had been resolutely downbeat for much of its course. Suitably exercised by the third episode, Mary Whitehouse wrote publicly to the BBC to complain about the story: ‘Such was the level of violence that I believe this particular episode should not have been screened before 9 pm. It is difficult to imagine the effect it must have had on any pliable mind under the age of fourteen.’

  As ever in the six-part serials, there is a certain flabbiness around the middle, sequences of action that detract from rather than augment the main story. And there are absurdities that have to be endured for the sake of the plot. We are expected to believe that the main Kaled and Thal cities are still, after a thousand years of war, linked by a network of service ducts, allowing the Doctor and his companions (and even Davros) to pass between the two with the same ease that Biggles’s arch-enemy, Erich von Stalhein, displayed when moving between German and British camps in Biggles Flies East (1935). There is also an unfortunate encounter with some giant clams, the fruits of one of Davros’s experiments. Despite the flaws, however, the great majority of the serial works splendidly, eclipsing not only the recent Dalek adventures but also the classic stories from the 1960s.

  It also contradicted entirely the history of the Daleks as seen in previous television serials and elsewhere. In the 1960s comic strips, the equivalent of the Kaleds, though they were not given that name, were short humanoid figures with blue skin, and the scientist who created the machines was named Yarvelling. An alternative account of the origins was offered by Nation in ‘We Are the Daleks!’, a short story he contributed to a Radio Times special, published to mark the tenth anniversary of Doctor Who in 1973; here alien scientists were said to have taken early humans to a planet named Ameron, accelerated their evolution and created from them the Daleks.r />
  None of this related to ‘Genesis’. But then Doctor Who was not at this stage particularly obsessed with consistency. Explaining the programme’s attitude, Terrance Dicks cited the maxim ‘history is what you can remember’, from the anti-history textbook 1066 and All That by W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman, commenting: ‘Continuity on Doctor Who was what I could remember of the past and what future script editors could remember about what I’d done. Star Trek, I believe, had a bible, in which everything was laid down. We never did that on Who. There are varying accounts of almost everything. And I really don’t care. I always say: if they’re asking questions about inconsistencies, the show’s not good enough. They shouldn’t have time to think about that.’ Of course, he was quite right; the discrepancies made no difference to viewers’ entertainment, and this new account of the origin of the species became happily accepted as the correct version.

  Reinvigorated by the possibilities opened up by ‘Genesis’, Nation was quick to talk up his creatures to the press, suggesting that he hadn’t entirely abandoned his dream of a stand-alone series. ‘I see no limit to their lifespan,’ he enthused. ‘I would think that it’s possible the Daleks could survive even beyond Doctor Who. This is something we’ve talked about: if he ever runs out of steam the Daleks could have a programme of their own.’ The passion wasn’t shared by others on Doctor Who. In keeping with their dislike of the creatures, Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes next commissioned a non-Dalek story from Nation, which became ‘The Android Invasion’, screened later in 1975. Before that was broadcast, however, he had finally realised his long ambition to see a credit that read: ‘Series created by Terry Nation’.

  Chapter Twelve

  Journal of a Plague Year

  Back in December 1971, when Terry Nation had met Andrew Osborn to discuss potential programme ideas, it had been The Amazing Robert Baldick that had first found favour, perhaps because of the nascent nostalgia boom that came to dominate so much of the decade. But other currents running through popular culture, following the upheavals of the late 1960s, were to make his other proposal that day, originally entitled Beyond Omega, a more viable proposition.

  There was, in the first instance, a trend away from industrialisation and towards ruralism, a movement initially manifested in the world of youth culture, and in the growing appeal of hippy communes, particularly in the West Country and Wales. The example was followed, in a milder form, by rock musicians. Previously the first objective of a new band had been to rehearse a live set and get out on the road as swiftly as possible, but when in 1967 Stevie Winwood left the Spencer Davis Group to co-found Traffic, the group’s initial move was instead to a cottage in a small Berkshire village, where they spent some months jamming and writing, before releasing the fruits of their labour on vinyl. By 1970, when Led Zeppelin retreated to a remote Welsh cottage to write their largely acoustic third album (there was no electricity in the place), the idea of serious musicians seeking inspiration far from the urban centres of the music industry was becoming one of the great clichés of the time. And gradually the same tendency became visible in the country more generally, beyond the bounds of music and youth culture.

  In 1975 the BBC launched The Good Life, one of the most popular sitcoms of the era, celebrating a suburban expression of the instinct to get away from the rat-race in favour of a more natural lifestyle. The same year the pop artist Peter Blake and his wife, Jann Haworth, moved to Somerset to found, with several others, the Brotherhood of Ruralists, seeking to reconnect to an older tradition of art rooted in the English landscape. It wasn’t a huge success. ‘The critics were very much against it,’ Blake explained later, ‘and other artists thought we were kind of sentimental and silly.’ But it was another symptom of a feeling that modern culture, with its emphasis on city-based life, had lost its way. Given that this was the high point of the brutalist concrete housing estates, from the Barbican in the City of London to Broadwater Farm in Tottenham, the appeal of an escape to Arcadia was self-evident, even if there were cultural suggestions – including And Soon the Darkness – that all was not quite as lovely in the country garden as it might look to a city-dweller.

  Allied to this trend was the rise of environmentalism, which found official expression in the declaration of 1970 as European Conservation Year, and which concerned itself at this stage with issues such as those outlined by Prince Philip: ‘Problems of overpopulation, environmental pollution, depletion of finite resources and the threat of widespread starvation.’ Effectively this was the flip-side of ruralism: underpinning the optimism of the move to the country with a sense of potential catastrophe arising from contemporary life, and with both tendencies expressing a rejection of modernism. The boom in ecological campaigning did not last long, withering in the cold winds that blew through the economy in the late 1970s and early 1980s – though the arguments survived to re-emerge later in the century – but for a brief period environmentalism was taken very seriously. And, as ever with such issues, the BBC was very keen to demonstrate relevance by responding to new social concerns; the most celebrated early result was Doomwatch (1970), a drama series concerning environmental and technological problems that was created by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis, who had earlier invented the Cybermen for Doctor Who. (A 1972 film of Doomwatch was scripted by Clive Exton and directed by Peter Sasdy.)

  Some of this thinking was undoubtedly behind the BBC’s commissioning in May 1972 of a pilot episode for the post-apocalyptic Beyond Omega project, now retitled The Survivors and ultimately to be made as simply Survivors. Nation had a great deal of other work on at the time – ‘Planet of the Daleks’ had just been commissioned, followed by ‘Death to the Daleks’, there were episodes of The Protectors to write, The Amazing Robert Baldick was in pre-production and The House in Nightmare Park was also in the pipeline – and it wasn’t until October of the following year that he received the second half of his payment, due on delivery of the pilot script. Thereafter things moved considerably faster. The pilot was accepted and the project expanded into a series, expected to run for ten episodes in mid 1975, with the theme succinctly identified as: ‘Bubonic plague sweeps the world, killing all but a handful of people who escape to the country with absolutely nothing and who start civilisation again from scratch.’ Contract negotiations were concluded by January 1974, with Nation receiving a fee of £850 per script, plus £50 per episode as the creator (£100 for each episode written by someone else) and an additional £50 per episode as script consultant. He also retained the film and merchandising rights and signed separately a publishing contract for a novel based on the series.

  At the heart of Nation’s thinking about this new series was a sense of the fragility of civilisation. He had researched the Black Death, the pandemic that killed around half the population of Europe in the fourteenth century, but had concluded that the modern world was even more vulnerable. ‘In those days, the Death travelled through Europe and Asia at the speed of a man on a horse because that was the fastest means of locomotion,’ he noted, but today it would ‘travel at the speed of a jet plane. In twenty-four hours it would be in every major city in the world.’

  Bringing this potential defencelessness into focus was the epochal moment in 1969 when human beings first set foot on the Moon, an achievement which was at least partially responsible for the growth of environmentalism. The images sent back of Earth as seen from its nearest neighbour revealed our planet to be a much more delicate entity than it had previously appeared, while the barrenness of the Moon itself served to emphasise the precious rarity of life. Nation, however, drew another lesson from the episode: the huge gap that space exploration illustrated between the scientific possibilities of humanity as a species, and the technological ignorance of the individuals within that species. We were the first known beings to have consciously escaped from their own planet, and yet the complexities of modern life had alienated most people in the developed world not merely from the intricate technologies that we now took for granted, but
from the most basic skills that had allowed the emergence of society in the first place. The interdependence of humanity, the division of expertise, meant that no one individual – nor even a small group of individuals – could live a genuinely self-sufficient life in any form that would be recognisable to contemporary culture. The premise of the series, a cataclysmic event that produces the near-extinction of humanity, was intended to illustrate this gap between individual and society; it was summed up in the Radio Times listing for the first episode, using the words of one of the characters: ‘Incredible, isn’t it? We are of the generation that landed a man on the moon and the best we can do is talk of making tools from stone.’

  There was also a personal dimension to this concern. However impressive Lynsted Park might be as a house, there were also problems. ‘We are at the end of the electricity and water mains,’ Nation told the Daily Mirror in 1964. ‘If somebody in the village uses extra electricity, our lights go out.’ In later interviews he was to cite this as part of the motivation for Survivors: ‘We had a big house in the country at the time and I was becoming more and more aware of the difficulties in just surviving in a big house with running water, electricity and all that. I was also aware of how little I knew. I didn’t know how to preserve food, I didn’t know how to make anything, and I suddenly realised that I and my whole generation were virtual victims of a tremendous industry.’

  With this in mind, he attempted to introduce a note of self-sufficiency to Lynsted Park, though, as he happily acknowledged, his contribution to the experiment was in directing, rather than running, the project, the burden of which fell squarely on his wife, Kate. ‘We had geese, chicken, sheep,’ he remembered. ‘I would say, “Why don’t we get some goats?” and before I knew it there were goats up there, trying to knock us down every time we moved. She tried baking bread, but the truth was if you needed it, you would go down to the store and get it, but I was just fascinated, seeing it done.’ He was attracted to the ideas contained in John and Sally Seymour’s influential book Self-Sufficiency (1970), even if he lacked the commitment to follow them through too far. ‘My wife was exhausted,’ he admitted. ‘This poor woman was living this Survivors thing while I was sitting up in this room. I’d come down and say, “God, what a day I had today!” and she’d say, “You had a day?”’ With a daughter, Rebecca, and an infant son, Joel (born in 1973), to look after, it’s a tribute to Kate’s supportive nature that she went along with the idea at all. ‘She slaved through the years of that, and afterwards she said, “You know, I want your next show to be about this couple who live on a yacht in the south of France, and they’ve got servants, and they’re terribly rich.” She’d had enough of surviving.’