The Man Who Invented the Daleks

by Alwyn Turner

  But if 1975 was mostly a series of triumphs for Nation, he didn’t exactly end the year in style. November saw the broadcast of ‘The Android Invasion’, his first non-Dalek story for Doctor Who in over a decade, and perhaps his least celebrated of all. Its low critical standing is perhaps a little unfair, for it starts tremendously well, with the TARDIS landing on what is assumed to be Earth (‘Oak trees don’t grow anywhere else in the galaxy,’ reasons the Doctor), just outside a picture-postcard village that Sarah Jane Smith recognises as Devesham. Almost immediately the travellers find themselves in an altercation with men who wear white isolation suits and helmets and who shoot with their fingers; they also witness a soldier running off a cliff to his certain death for no apparent reason. Escaping their pursuers, the Doctor and Sarah make their way into the village, only to find it entirely deserted, until a flatbed truck arrives, from which disembark dozens of villagers who behave as though they have been brainwashed. The Doctor goes off to investigate at the nearby Space Defence Centre, leaving Sarah in the local pub, where unfortunately she is discovered – by the very soldier they had earlier seen killing himself. Nor is the Centre immune to the strangeness.

  It’s a great first episode, the image of the abandoned English village reminiscent of an episode of The Avengers or, more particularly, one of the best Department S stories, Donald James’s ‘The Pied Piper of Hambledown’. To confirm the impression, the Doctor comments that it’s all a bit like the Mary Celeste, the original reference point for Department S. And while the title of the story, ‘The Android Invasion’, seems to give the game away, there are other details to suggest this might not be simply a reprise of the 1956 movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers; most puzzling of all, it appears that every coin in the vicinity is from the same year. As the story progresses, it turns out that they aren’t actually on Earth at all, but on Oseidon, a planet occupied by a race of rhinoceros-looking aliens named the Kraals, who are planning to invade Earth to escape the rising radiation levels at home, and have built this replica village for the purpose of a training exercise. The invasion of the androids has not yet happened, and it can still be prevented if only the Doctor and Sarah can get back to Earth in time to deliver a warning, a process made more difficult by the fact that they have temporarily lost the TARDIS.

  Thereafter, the story degenerates rapidly. Nation returns to his idea from ‘The Chase’ of having an android Doctor, and adds a duplicate Sarah to be on the safe side, both of whom add some nice complications, but much of the remainder of the tale involves a great deal of aimless rushing around. And at the centre of it all is a yawning hole where there should have been an explanation of why the Kraals went to so much trouble recreating Devesham. For once it is revealed that the Kraal plan is to release a virus on Earth that will kill all humans within three weeks (a not unprecedented theme in Nation’s writing), the existence of the imitation village becomes entirely inexplicable. Nor is it clear why the Kraals then proceed to destroy their creation, since they are planning on leaving the planet anyway. The lack of logic is not unique in Nation’s work for Doctor Who – or elsewhere – but here it is actively intrusive; his tendency to leave loose ends, evident as far back as What a Whopper and the Hancock episode ‘The Assistant’, renders the story somewhat meaningless. There are, as ever, some tense and exciting moments, but never before had there been such a sense of him having lost interest in a story quite so quickly and comprehensively. The serial still commanded audiences averaging more than eleven and a half million over the four episodes, far in excess of anything Survivors achieved, and higher than any of the more celebrated stories from the same season, but Kenneth Williams had it about right when he noted in his diary after the second episode: ‘Doctor Who gets more and more silly.’

  By this stage, however, Nation was not much concerned by the reception of ‘The Android Invasion’, for he had already pitched a new idea to the BBC, and had been commissioned to write a pilot. And this time, scarred by the experience of Survivors, he was determined to keep a tighter grip on his creation.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Fighting the Federation

  At conventions and in interviews in the last decade of his life, Terry Nation often told the story of how Blake’s 7, his last major work, came into being and of his absolute confidence in the concept. ‘I said to my wife: “I’m going to pitch this show today, and I know they’re going to do it.”’ His account of the subsequent meeting evokes an era at the BBC that has long since passed. ‘I wanted to do another science fiction show, a good, rousing adventure series in space,’ he remembered. ‘I went and pitched the idea. I said, “The Dirty Dozen in Space”, and they said, “Yeah, let’s do it!” It was just like that, truly. We went on a bit further and I said: “The leader is a little more Robin Hood.” But that was it. Then I went home and I got a call from my agent. He said that the BBC had been in touch and said they would do it, but I had to write the first thirteen episodes.’

  It sounds like an implausibly easy way to get a series made, but such things were not unheard of in the mid 1970s, in the days before bureaucracy took a firm grip of the corporation. Around the same time, David Croft and Jeremy Lloyd, then riding high with their sitcom Are You Being Served?, approached the head of comedy at the BBC with an idea that, said Croft, ‘was so hot that I didn’t want to tell him what it was’, for fear of word getting out and the idea being plagiarised. ‘To his eternal credit, he didn’t protest or ask for a script. He told me to go ahead and do it.’ The resulting pilot, Come Back Mrs Noah, starring Mollie Sugden as a Yorkshire housewife sent into space in the year 2050, resulted in a short series. Although it was a resounding flop, its very existence demonstrated the freedoms accorded to those with a proven track record. Over at ITV in its heyday, things could be even more straightforward. When Patrick McGoohan tried to explain his concept for a new series called The Prisoner to Lew Grade, the head of ATV interrupted him mid-flow. ‘I don’t understand one word you’re talking about,’ said Grade. ‘The money will be in your company’s account on Monday morning.’

  It was true, then, that commissioning policy allowed for a much greater degree of individual decision-making on the part of executives than in later years, but even so Nation’s familiar version of the origins of Blake’s 7 did not quite tell the whole story. More accurate was his 1982 account of a meeting with the BBC which was coming to an inconclusive end when he was suddenly struck by an idea for a series. ‘It is set in the third century of the second calendar,’ he improvised. ‘A group of criminals is being transported to a prison planet. Under the leadership of a wrongly convicted patriot, they escape and get hold of a super spacecraft, then begin to wage war against the evil forces of the Federation.’ He claimed that, when asked for a name, he spontaneously came up with the title Blake’s 7. The whole thing, he added, was not so much a flash of inspiration as ‘the product of desperation’.

  Again, however, his memory of events, this fully formed vision of the plotline of Blake’s 7, shouldn’t be taken at face value. A memo recording his meeting on 9 September 1975 with Ronnie Marsh, the head of drama series at the BBC, shows that he pitched two separate ideas. The first concerned Dan Fog, an American who has been a policeman and a district attorney, and is also the author of a book titled Criminal Investigation. Now in his fifties, he becomes a professor of criminology at Oxford, moving to Britain with his younger, second wife and finding himself involved in a series of adventures through his contacts with the police and the higher reaches of government. Intended to be a ‘witty, glossy thriller’, it was surely conceived with at least one eye on the American market, still the great unrealised dream. It did not, however, make any further progress, perhaps because the idea of an expert being called in when all other agencies have failed seemed too reminiscent of the special agent series of the 1960s, at a time when both American and British television were moving into more straightforward police shows with Columbo, Kojak and The Sweeney. (The idea of an Oxford don of mature yea
rs who’s also an author was strongly reminiscent of the character Robert Cullingford in the original proposal for Department S.)

  The second proposal was received more warmly. Nation may well have pitched the idea as ‘the Dirty Dozen in space’, but the memo of the meeting records no such phrase, instead describing Blake’s 7 as ‘cracking Boy’s Own/kidult sci-fi, a space western-adventure, a modern swashbuckler’. The same note summarised the proposed plotline: ‘Group of villains being escorted onto a rocket ship (transported) which goes astray and lands on an alien planet where inhabitants are planning to invade and destroy Earth. Possibly live underground.’

  A script for a fifty-minute pilot was immediately commissioned, but Nation’s recollection that he was expected from the outset to write all thirteen episodes of the first series was incorrect. The pilot was approved and a second episode commissioned in June 1976; this was delivered in September, more than a year after the initial meeting. By November he had been commissioned to write the first seven episodes, but still the BBC did not envisage him completing the whole series: ‘it is our intention to commission other writers for later episodes although Terry Nation has agreed to write further scripts towards the end of the strand of thirteen programmes.’ It was not until December 1976 that the BBC agreed in principle to him writing all thirteen episodes, and not until the following May – twenty months after the pilot had been commissioned – that a contract was signed for the remaining five shows. The initiative, it seems, came from Nation himself rather than from the BBC; determined not to repeat the experience of Survivors, it was he who insisted on writing the whole season, so that he didn’t lose control of his work again. Meantime Roger Hancock had been busily negotiating a better deal on the fees, so that the £975 paid for the pilot had become £1,200 for each script from episode three onwards.

  The resulting series inevitably faced comparison with Star Trek, the American science fiction series which began airing in Britain in 1969 – after production had ceased – and which had steadily acquired a cult following. There were points of similarity. In both shows a small crew on a highly advanced spacecraft (the Enterprise in Star Trek, the Liberator in Blake’s 7) roam a galaxy dominated by a political structure known as the Federation, and encounter alien races and cultures in a series of weekly adventures. The differences, though, were more significant than the resemblances. Above all there were questions of tone and of the status of the protagonists. The United Federation of Planets in Star Trek is an essentially progressive force, envisaged as a kind of galactic United Nations, whereas the Earth Federation in Blake’s 7 is a repressive regime existing somewhere between the worlds depicted in George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The Enterprise is on an official mission ‘to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilisations’, but the Liberator is on the run, fighting rearguard actions and engaging in guerrilla attacks on key installations. It is the difference, perhaps, between the rampant optimism of 1960s America and the doubt-ridden, nervous state of Britain in the 1970s, where few believed that the immediate future offered much hope for improvement. Even with his love of story-telling, Nation couldn’t avoid the inherent negativity of his vision.

  There was a similar discrepancy between Blake’s 7 and the movie that Nation cited as its inspiration, Robert Aldrich’s 1967 film The Dirty Dozen. Both featured groups of convicted criminals embarked on a desperate mission against a fascist state, but there was a gulf between the idea of military prisoners recruited by the American army to operate behind enemy lines in the build-up to D-Day, on the one hand, and Blake’s gang of renegades on the other. In Blake’s 7 there is no official force for good in the struggle against fascism, no higher authority on which to call.

  More pertinent was Nation’s other reference point: Robin Hood, the greatest of all English myths, the noble-born hero who makes himself an outlaw in order to fight a guerrilla war in the name of justice, the rights of the oppressed and the restoration of honest governance. Just as important as Robin’s campaign is the company he keeps. The Merry Men are popularly depicted mid-feast, quaffing flagons of mead and laughing uproariously as they gather round an open fire on which a whole deer is being spit-roasted. This very English revolutionary has no time for Spartan self-denial when there’s drinking, singing and general roistering to be had. It’s a seductive image that has run through the national culture for centuries, and variations on the theme turn up throughout Nation’s work, from The Fixers through The Saint and The Persuaders! to Jimmy Garland in Survivors. Even the Doctor – however crotchety William Hartnell was, however severe Jon Pertwee could be – is essentially cut from the same cloth: the fight against the Daleks is always conducted with a twinkle in the eye. Blake’s 7 was to be Nation’s final expression of the myth, with some very deliberate echoes of Robin Hood, in terms both of character (Olag Gan is clearly derived in part from Little John) and of costume.

  And yet there was the same dark twist to the tale. Robin was sustained by the knowledge that one day King Richard would return to reclaim his land from the evil Prince John and his henchmen, represented by the Sheriff of Nottingham, but for Blake and his companions there is no such king over the water, no real hope of ultimate victory, only the fact of resistance against overwhelming odds. ‘Virtually all revolutionary movements, once established, are outlawed by the establishment,’ Nation wrote in a document setting out the themes for the second season. ‘If their cause is just, they generally emerge to overthrow the authorities and themselves become the establishment. So it is with Blake. Except that Blake will never achieve that final objective.’

  Trapped in perpetual opposition and lacking any official sanction, the outlaws are cast in a different light. ‘If you grew up when I did,’ Nation reflected, ‘it was simple to read stories about Robin Hood, and Robin Hood was the good guy, Prince John was the bad guy – very simple.’ In the late 1970s, however, with Irish and Arab terror attacks dominating the news, Blake’s campaign against the Federation ran the risk of looking more like terrorism than resistance. It wasn’t an angle that Nation had consciously considered but he did concede that it was a reasonable interpretation: ‘What set out to be a good, rousing adventure yarn started turning into something different.’

  Other currents also fed into the show’s concept. Paul Darrow, who starred as Kerr Avon through all four seasons and became a close friend of Nation, claimed that the name of the protagonist derived from that of the British spy, George Blake, who was sentenced in 1961 to a record forty-two years in jail, but who escaped after serving just five years and fled to the Soviet Union. ‘Terry Nation, while not necessarily approving of his politics,’ noted Darrow, ‘liked Blake’s style and stole his name.’ There was also, however, a more obvious association with Sir Percy Blakeney, the hero of Baroness Orczy’s classic adventure novel The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905), an Englishman who, with a band of followers, stages operations to rescue condemned aristocrats from the guillotine during the French Revolution. Indeed Blakeney might be seen as one of the key templates for Nation’s heroes, with ‘his reckless daring, his mad bravery, his worship of his own word of honour’ and his inspired improvisations in moments of danger: cornered by his arch-enemy in an inn, he fills his snuff-box with pepper and offers it to his adversary. When asked why they risk their own lives to save strangers, one of the gang brushes aside suggestions of heroism in the same self-deprecating terms that the Baron and Lord Brett Sinclair would later evoke. ‘Sport, Madame la Comtesse, sport,’ drawls Lord Antony Dewhurst. ‘We are a nation of sportsmen, you know, and just now it is the fashion to pull the hare from between the teeth of the hound.’ Orczy’s novel was required reading for boys in Nation’s childhood and its influence was apparent in much of his writing; at one point in The Persuaders! Danny even refers to Brett as ‘the Scarlet Pumpernickel’.

  Given this rich pedigree, it was unfortunate that Blake emerged as one of Nation’s less entertaining heroes. ‘He was supposed to be swashbuckli
ng and dashing and all those things,’ regretted Nation, ‘but I never found it, I never really gave him a chance.’ He is sincere, committed to his cause and concerned for the well-being of his crew, but there is a lack of the devil-may-care hearty bravado that was surely required, and no compensating charisma. ‘To a man of my spirit, opportunities are duties,’ declares Rudolf Rassendyll, hero of Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda (1894), and it was that defiant embrace of life that Blake should have embodied as a kind of Jimmy Garland in space. Instead, as played by Gareth Thomas, a doleful-faced actor with a vague resemblance to Tony Hancock, he was, observed Shaun Usher in the Daily Mail, ‘a thoroughly decent, rugger-playing chap, rather than a maverick anti-Establishment man-of-the-future’. Thomas himself became disillusioned with the role, and ultimately left the series that bore his character’s name. ‘One of the many reasons why I left Blake’s 7 was because I wasn’t really quite sure where else I could go with it,’ he reflected. ‘I mean, within the bounds of what could happen in the series, I felt I’d explored most avenues of Blake.’

  That development, however, was for the future. When the first episode of Blake’s 7 was broadcast on the first Monday of 1978, it was clear who was intended to form the centre of the story. As in Survivors, the first three episodes form a single, sustained narrative and, as normal with Nation, the back-story is established early on. Some four years before the start of the opening episode, ‘The Way Back’, Roj Blake was the leader of a revolutionary group on Earth, seeking the overthrow of the Federation, but was captured by the authorities. Not wishing to create a martyr for the cause, they brainwashed him, blocking out existing memories through intensive therapy and implanting new ones, before bringing him to court in a show trial, where he confessed his crimes and professed his loyalty to the Federation; they then removed his memory of the trial itself. Now living a normal, unexceptional life amid a population kept in ‘a state of drug induced tranquillity’, he is taken to a meeting of a new rebel group, who are desperate to recruit him to their cause, as a powerful symbol of resistance. But the meeting has been betrayed and Federation troops arrive to break up the illegal gathering.