The Man Who Invented the Daleks

by Alwyn Turner

  The overarching theme for the second season, he said, should be Blake’s attempt to launch ‘a bold and stunning strike against the oppressors. Something that will stiffen the spines of the waverers and give them the courage to join in the fight. One spectacular event that will both damage and humiliate the enemy.’ This would occupy several of the thirteen episodes and would provide the cliff-hanger finale, in which Blake finally locates Star One, the ‘city sized space station’ that is the command centre of the entire Federation, only to discover that it is about to be attacked by an alien empire. ‘The aliens intend to destroy life on all the Federation planets and repopulate with their own kind. Must Blake now save the Federation?’ This, of course, was the two-part storyline that Nation never managed to write, but his idea did form the basis of the season cliff-hanger, ‘Star One’. (Early on, according to Boucher, Nation had tentatively suggested introducing the Daleks at this point: ‘We stamped on that idea very firmly.’)

  The other key theme that Nation wanted to run through the second season was the feud between Blake and Travis, who was still seen at this point as being the arch-enemy. Travis was to be dismissed from the service of the Federation but, obsessed by his desire for revenge, was to continue the pursuit of Blake, aided unofficially by Servalan. This storyline was followed, but it suffered from the absence of Stephen Greif, who had made Travis such a splendidly excessive figure. ‘I kept piling it on,’ said Nation of the character and of Greif’s portrayal. ‘I was sending it up slightly but he played it with such panache and reality that it didn’t seem overloaded at all.’ Greif’s decision to leave the show at the end of the first season left a gap that was only partially filled by his replacement, Brian Croucher, who was dealt an almost unplayable hand. It was ‘an unenviable task’, observed Paul Darrow, to have to take on another actor’s character. ‘Poor Brian was on a hiding to nothing.’ The double-act with Servalan was no longer a partnership of equals, and Travis was killed off in the final episode of the season, slain not by Blake but, significantly, by Avon.

  For the balance of power was shifting within the series. The rivalry between Blake and Travis was supposed to form the core of the story, personalising Blake’s doomed struggle with the Federation, but both characters were gradually being eclipsed by Avon and Servalan respectively. It was their relationship that came to dominate memories of the series, largely because, as Darrow pointed out, they were the ones who brought an element of sexuality to the screen: ‘Servalan hit on any male that moved and Avon kissed a lot of girls before blowing them away.’ Fifteen years after the series ended, Elizabeth Coldwell, editor of the erotic magazine Forum, was still celebrating the sexual subtexts of the show, with the ‘show’s dominant, arrogant anti-hero Avon always dressed in tight black leather’, and Servalan, ‘science fiction’s only prime-time dominatrix’, whose ‘sadistic love of cruelty and ability to wander over any alien landscape in ridiculously high stilettos caused disruption in many an adolescent trouser area’. There was, she pointed out, ‘a scything sexual tension’ between the two.

  This relationship was to emerge more fully in the third and fourth seasons, but already there were signs that the characters were coming to dominate the storylines, though each for slightly different reasons. Servalan herself never changed, since she was already so far over the top there was nowhere else for her to go. ‘I never really saw her as possessing any great depth or detail somehow,’ said Boucher. ‘She was an archetype. She was Terry’s villainess and he wrote her as a villainess.’ Her growth was simply a result of Jacqueline Pearce inhabiting the part with ever more commanding authority and sheer relish. Avon, on the other hand, developed new sides to his character. Having originally been introduced as an unemotional computing expert, he had evolved into an action hero, though a particularly ruthless one: he’s the only Nation hero happy to shoot his enemies in the back and to kill women as well as men. Balancing this contempt for the conventions of the genre, he also acquired new subtleties, particularly in the episode ‘Countdown’, a Nation story for season two that was arguably his finest script for the entire series.

  Much of the first half of the episode is an entirely characteristic Nation plot. The people of the planet Albian wish to secede from the Federation but are kept in check by the threat of a solium radiation device, a weapon that when triggered will cause the destruction of all life on the planet. As Avon explains: ‘Once in fission, it creates intense radiation, it destroys living tissue instantly.’ But isn’t it, wonders Vila, a little extreme to threaten to destroy the planet in reprisal for rebellion? Avon has to clarify: ‘But they don’t blow it up, that’s the point. Solium itself produces a very small explosion and the radiation fallout decays rapidly. They could wipe out a whole population and still leave the buildings and the installations intact. In less than a day there is no trace of any radiation.’ It is, snorts Blake, ‘typical Federation policy – things are more important than people.’ (It’s also, a viewer might be forgiven for thinking, a typical Nation concept: an improved neutron bomb, as previously seen in ‘The Daleks’, though given renewed resonance at a time when the proposed deployment of American neutron bombs in Europe was proving highly controversial.) Albian rebels take over the command complex, but the device is triggered and it starts counting down to the ultimate explosion. Avon thinks he can disable the device, but first they have to find it.

  Thus far, this is almost self-parody, Nation’s love of ticking time-bombs taken to its ultimate level, with the entire episode structured around a countdown. But he has some twists to come. It transpires that the coup has been organised by a mercenary, a man named Del Grant (Tom Chadbon), brought in by the resistance to coordinate the uprising, when they realise they aren’t up to the job themselves. Our appetite to meet the man is further whetted by Avon’s revelation that he knew Grant of old, and that the last time they met, Grant made it clear that he wanted to kill him. This back-story is sketched in with a conversation on to which we effectively stumble, as though eavesdropping:

  AVON: That last day, when it was all over, did they hurt her?

  GRANT: They kept her under interrogation for nearly a week. They tried everything, but she never broke. If she’d spoken, told them what they wanted to know, she’d be alive now.

  AVON: She should have told them.

  GRANT: She held on because she believed in you. She didn’t know that you’d run out and leave her to face it alone.

  AVON: That was not the way it was.

  GRANT: I know exactly how it was. She died under Federation torture. But it was you who killed her.

  It’s a beautifully taut piece of writing, a complete story in under a hundred words, with all the elegant simplicity one might find in a 1940s movie. When the conversation is resumed later on, the impression is heightened, as Avon seeks to give his side of the story of the dead woman, Anna. He was, he says, buying escape visas for the two of them from an underworld dealer who double-crossed him. Avon killed the dealer, but was himself shot and lay unconscious for over thirty hours, during which time Anna was captured. There was nothing he could do for her. But still he remained, risking his own freedom, until word was received of her death and, all hope having been lost, he finally used his forged visa to flee the city. ‘You expect me to believe that?’ challenges Grant, and Avon replies: ‘Not particularly. But it happens to be the truth. If there had ever been a time when I could have given my own life to save her, I would have done it. The only grain of consolation that I have is that Anna knew that.’

  This truly is the romance of the resistance, the doomed martyrdom of a Casablanca, except that here the heroic words are delivered not with the bruised machismo of a Humphrey Bogart, but in Avon’s precisely enunciated, emotionally neutral tones. The disjunction between his sarcastic superiority and the spirit of self-sacrifice he evokes is surprisingly effective. And there is also our knowledge that Avon and Anna were not part of any resistance movement fighting selflessly against the Federation, but rather crim
inals engaged in the theft of millions of credit from bank computers.

  Being Nation, of course, there is much else happening both here and elsewhere, for these conversations are undertaken in conditions of extreme stress, as the timer continues to count down. The solium device has been located by now, buried in a block of ice, deep in the frozen polar wastes of the planet, and Avon and Blake have been beamed in to defuse it. While they race against time to save the lives of the six million people who live on Albian, they also seek a resolution to their personal, historical conflicts. And all the time, the ice is thawing, with huge blocks dropping around them because, as ever, there’s always something new to add to the danger of the situation.

  Neither of Nation’s other two episodes for the second season came close to matching ‘Countdown’, though there were some strong ideas in both. The first episode, ‘Redemption’, resolved the cliff-hanger from ‘Orac’ at the end of the previous season, by taking the Liberator back to its original makers, hitherto unidentified. They turn out to be a network of computers, known collectively as the System, ruling a group of three planets that used to be in a state of perpetual warfare. ‘Now there’s no war, no famine …’ explains a humanoid worker. ‘And no freedom,’ interrupts Blake. It’s a telling exchange, for on the face of it, there’s little to choose between the System here and Doctor Who’s Conscience of Marinus some fifteen years earlier. Except that in ‘The Keys of Marinus’ the Doctor had automatically sided with the machine, while Nation’s new hero has no hesitation in identifying with the oppressed. Meanwhile, the solution to how the Liberator was going to escape its inevitable destruction, as foreseen by Orac, was resolved very neatly; in fact it is a sister ship, identical in all respects, that is blown up.

  In ‘Pressure Point’ Blake’s gang return to Earth, with the intention of hitting Control, the much vaunted central information computer of the Federation. The plan is to link up with a resistance group led by a woman named Kasabi (Jane Sherwin), though by the time they arrive the rebels have already been killed or captured, leaving only Kasabi’s daughter at large, and she promptly betrays Blake in the hope of saving her mother. It’s all in vain, of course, for Kasabi has fallen into Servalan’s hands and it transpires that there is history between the two. Kasabi was once a senior Federation officer, training classes of cadets, until Servalan, one of her students, reported her to the authorities for teaching treason.

  After a dangerous – and not very convincing – journey into the fortified base where Control is said to be housed, Blake finally achieves his objective. But he discovers that he, and everyone else, has been deceived: in one of Nation’s best plot twists, there is nothing there but an empty room. Control isn’t here at all, hasn’t been for thirty years, and they’ve all been tricked into attacking a decoy target. ‘It’s the great illusion, Blake,’ taunts Travis. ‘You give substance and credibility to an empty room, and the real thing becomes undetectable, virtually invisible.’ (If only the resistance displayed this level of strategic thinking, their cause might not be so hopeless.)

  The episode is chiefly remembered, however, for the death of one of the original crew. As the gang escape from the complex, Gan is fatally injured though he does at least end on an heroic note. ‘Go! I’m not worth dying for,’ he urges the others in time-honoured fashion, as he’s trapped in a tunnel. It’s a sudden and entirely unexpected development, but one which Nation had long intended. ‘It was Terry’s instinct,’ explained Chris Boucher, ‘that you had to convince the audience that everyone really was under threat, and so the only way to do that was to kill someone.’ Nation himself portrayed it as a simple shock tactic: ‘We made the decision that we needed a major publicity jolt. There is nothing like a death in a show.’ There was a suggestion that his eye had fallen first on Vila, though in his preparatory paper for season two he had clearly identified Gan and Cally as the weak links, confirming the BBC’s audience research that these were the least popular characters with viewers.

  The killing of Gan tied in with the random, meaningless deaths that had been such a feature of the Survivors novel, even if it went against what Nation claimed had been his philosophy ever since he’d been obliged to resurrect the Daleks: ‘From that time on, I have always said, “Whatever happens, whatever we do, we do not kill off any of my characters. You always give them a little swab of hope somewhere.” ’ In fact, there had long been a high mortality rate among his characters, from Sara Kingdom in ‘The Daleks’ Master Plan’ to Tom Price in Survivors. But the underlying truth remained: however happy he was to dispense with individuals, he ensured that the format would never again be jeopardised – the ending of ‘The Daleks’ would not be reprised.

  As if to make the same point, the second season of Blake’s 7 was followed later in 1979 by ‘Destiny of the Daleks’, the first new Daleks serial on Doctor Who for over four years and the last story that Nation would write for the creatures. It included the return of Davros, last seen in ‘Genesis of the Daleks’ apparently being killed by his own creations, his body buried deep in the Kaled bunker on Skaro. But, whatever our assumptions, we hadn’t actually seen the scientist die and Nation had been careful to keep his options open, insisting in his script that the light on Davros’s life support should be seen to be still switched on. That detail didn’t in fact appear on screen, but Nation never lost sight of his intentions. ‘There is a legend that people tell in space,’ explained the 1978 Dalek Annual. ‘It is said that Davros had built into his life-support system a device that would keep him in a condition of suspended animation; that the spark of life could never die. Some people believe that if his body is ever recovered he could again be brought to full and active life …’

  The story concerned a centuries-long stand-off between the Daleks and a race of androids called the Movellans. Both have huge battle fleets waiting for the most propitious moment to launch an attack, but since both races are governed exclusively by logic, and both are dependent on computers, the moment never arrives – any move by one is predicted and pre-emptively countered by the other, leaving the forces in a perpetual stalemate. ‘Two vast computers so evenly matched they can’t outthink one another,’ as the Doctor puts it. And so the Daleks have returned to Skaro, their former home, long since abandoned, in order to find Davros, that he might reprogram their computers. ‘That’s why they came back for you,’ exclaims the Doctor to Davros, as the penny drops. ‘They remembered they were once organic creatures themselves, capable of irrational, intuitive thought, and they wanted you to give it back to them, to get them out of their trap of logic.’ The Movellans, meanwhile, are here to prevent the Daleks from achieving their objective.

  The discovery of the cobweb-shrouded Davros (played here by David Gooderson), kept alive in long-term suspended animation by his secondary and back-up circuits, is the highlight of the story and is couched in religious imagery. ‘So, the long darkness has ended and the eternity of waiting is over,’ he declares as he recovers. ‘The resurrection has come, as I always knew it would.’ The almost blasphemous language is countered by a subsequent scene in which the Doctor holds Davros hostage, threatening to blow both of them up with an improvised explosive device if the Daleks make any move. It’s an idea that leaves the Daleks puzzled: ‘Self-sacrifice illogical,’ they argue, ‘therefore impossible.’ There’s also a nice moment when one of the creatures mentions the Supreme Dalek, which throws Davros entirely. He evidently hadn’t considered the idea that the hive might have developed a social structure in his absence: ‘Supreme Dalek! Hah! That is a title I shall dispute most vigorously. I created the Daleks, it is I who will guide their destiny. I am the Supreme Commander.’

  Beyond the reappearance of Davros, however, and his survival for future stories, it is not one of the more memorable Dalek tales, and there is some doubt about how much involvement Nation had in the final result. ‘“Destiny of the Daleks” needed top-to-bottom rewriting,’ said Douglas Adams, the script editor. ‘When you did a Dalek script, it had t
o be done by Terry Nation – a canny fellow, and very charming. He had to get paid for the script, but the script that he brought forward was a couple of explosions, and a couple of people running up a corridor. You had to turn that into a story.’ Ken Grieve, the director of the serial, had much the same memory: ‘To be honest, Douglas wrote about ninety-six per cent of it with [series producer] Graham Williams. And myself a little. Terry Nation came up with the ideas, but the hard work was done by Douglas.’ There is clearly some exaggeration in such accounts, since the broadcast serial did not depart as substantially from Nation’s original twelve-page storyline, let alone from his script, as they imply. But the influence of Adams can be detected, and not always in ways of which Nation approved.

  Adams had taken over the role of script editor on Doctor Who in late 1978, at a time when his own star was definitely in the ascendant. In March that year Radio 4 had broadcast his science fiction comedy The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which had attracted an enthusiastic following – it was repeated twice that year – and would go on to spawn a sequel, several books, a television series and ultimately a movie. To celebrate the fact, he inserted a self-indulgent reference into ‘Destiny of the Daleks’, with the Doctor seen reading a book titled The Origins of the Universe by Oolon Colluphid, a figure from Hitchhiker’s. Adams also, less happily, added some gags about the design of the Daleks, so that the Doctor jokes about how he’ll be received by the creatures. ‘Oh, I’m sure they’ll welcome me with open ar … I mean, they would welcome me with open arms if they had arms,’ he says to Davros. ‘Please, please, no offence meant at all.’ And when he climbs up a rope to escape the pursuing Daleks, he throws back a taunt: ‘If you’re supposed to be the superior race of the universe, why don’t you try climbing after us?’ This was precisely the humour that Nation had striven for so long to avoid, the reason why he had blocked Barry Cryer and Peter Vincent’s sketch about a Dalek Romeo and Juliet. The appearance of jokes within Doctor Who itself was deeply deplored by Nation.