by Alwyn Turner
There was also some confusion about the nature of the Daleks themselves. They are repeatedly referred to as ‘robots’, while their portrayal as creatures governed entirely by logic doesn’t chime with what we already know of them. Their long-standing tendency to hysterical, repetitious boasting always suggested an emotional insecurity, while as far back as ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’ we saw the Black Dalek keeping the Slyther as a pet; the idea may evoke the image of a concentration camp commandant, but it reveals a degree of sentimentality that makes a nonsense of the central plot of ‘Destiny’. Nation’s original storyline for the serial made no mention of the theme of two robotic races locked in a logic trap; instead the Daleks have come after Davros in search of missing circuitry. According to the story’s producer, Graham Williams, the change came after a meeting he and Adams had with Nation; there they recommended him a short story by Isaac Asimov with a similar theme, which he then picked up on.
But while Nation’s own contribution to the below-par standards of ‘Destiny’ can’t be ignored, it was clearly Adams who was the more culpable. Nation’s revenge came in ‘Aftermath’, the opening episode of the third season of Blake’s 7. The Intergalactic War between the Federation and the alien forces, presaged in ‘Star One’, has produced a narrow victory for the Federation, but survivors have been scattered in all directions, and Avon escapes in a capsule to a planet named Sarran, where he bumps into Servalan, an encounter that occasions no surprise on his part. ‘It has a perverse kind of logic to it,’ he explains, parodying Adams’s Improbability Drive in Hitchhiker’s. ‘Our meeting is the most unlikely happening I could imagine. Therefore we meet. Surprise seems inappropriate somehow.’
For the new series of Blake’s 7, which began in January 1980, there were substantial changes in the cast. Travis had been killed in ‘Star One’ and both Blake and Jenna had disappeared in the Intergalactic War, presumed dead, Gareth Thomas and Sally Knyvette having separately declined new contracts. ‘I upset Terry enormously when I left the series,’ remembered Thomas. ‘Later on, I realised I really had hurt him a lot, and I was deeply upset about that.’ The circumstances were different, but there was a sense of history repeating itself. Survivors had lost its lead character with the departure of Abby, and slipped away from Nation’s vision; was Blake’s 7 going to go the same way?
During negotiations for the second season, Roger Hancock had asked that the copyright in any new characters created by other writers for the series will become the property of ‘Lynsted Park Enterprises Ltd’, in an attempt to keep the series firmly in Nation’s grip; memories of the loss of control over Survivors, and the consequent difficulties of the novelisation, were still fresh. The BBC had rejected that suggestion out of hand, but did concede for the third season that Nation would at least be given advance information about any new running character that he didn’t himself create. In the event, the new additions to the regular crew made their debuts in episodes scripted by Nation and he was able to direct their characterisation. Del Tarrant (Steven Pacey), intended as a fearless pilot, was modelled on the heroes of RAF Fighter Command in the Battle of Britain, and Dayna Mellanby (Josette Simon) was a weapons designer capable of producing high-tech armaments despite her own more traditional tastes. ‘I like the ancient weapons: the spear, the sword, the knife,’ she explained. ‘They demand more skill. When you fight with them, conflict becomes more personal, more exciting.’
More immediately striking was the meeting of Servalan and Avon. Having emerged as the most intriguing figures in the previous season, they now came together on centre stage, with Servalan proposing a coalition. The Federation has lost its command centre on Star One and is in disarray, but the two of them – together with Orac and the Liberator – could build a new Federation over which they could jointly rule. For a moment it looks as though the implausible alliance might be on: they kiss but, just as she thinks she has won him over, he seizes her by the throat and throws her to the ground, spurning her offers of power and sex. The enmity between the two will come to dominate much of the remainder of the series.
The change in personnel, and in their relative significance, came at a crucial moment in the show’s run. The previous season had been rescheduled to 7.20 p.m. on a Tuesday evening, pitching it against the hugely popular American import Charlie’s Angels, which might reasonably be expected to attract many of the same potential viewers, and the result had been a collapse in audience share. Viewing figures averaged just 7.1 million, a loss of more than two million from the first season, and on one occasion an episode had slipped out of the weekly top 100 altogether. Restored to its original Monday night slot, however, the third season saw the lost audience restored, while nearly half the episodes reached the top thirty. This was despite the absence of Roj Blake, whose name the show continued to bear. It looked as though Nation had created a format that was as sustainable as a soap opera – half of the original characters had now disappeared, and still it survived.
The cause was inadvertently helped by the political transformation that had occurred since season two. In May 1979 the exhausted and largely discredited Labour government that prime minister James Callaghan had inherited from Harold Wilson was voted out in a General Election, and a Conservative administration led by Margaret Thatcher began what turned out to be a generation in office; the Conservatives were still in power when Nation died eighteen years later. In an era when there were few women in political life, let alone domineering right-wing women, Thatcher was seen in some quarters as possessing a cruel seductiveness: ‘Elle a les yeux de Caligule, mais elle a la bouche de Marilyn Monroe,’ in the words of French president François Mitterrand. Even as the numbers of strong women multiplied on television – from police chief Jean Darblay in Juliet Bravo to animal trainer Barbara Woodhouse – the comparisons between Servalan and the prime minister did not go unnoticed. When in 1980 the Guardian diary column asked its readers to suggest nicknames for Thatcher, there were, among such offerings as Scoldilocks, Maggiavelli and Attila the Hen, several nominations simply for Servalan.
Nation’s own writing for the third season was again limited to just three episodes, though he was still involved in discussions to develop running themes. In the event, the continuing storylines he suggested – particularly a search for Blake – were dropped, and the episodes that resulted lacked the narrative thread that had previously been a feature of the show. There remained, however, the concept of a season cliff-hanger in ‘Terminal’, the last contribution that Nation was to make to the series; indeed it was the last thing he ever wrote for British television.
Happily it’s a fitting swansong. The setting is an experimental artificial planet named Terminal, set up as a replica of Earth to study the evolution of life and populated by a primitive ape-like species. These creatures are assumed to be the ancestors of humanity, and are hence called Links, though this turns out to be an error, as Servalan gleefully points out: ‘The planet’s evolution was massively accelerated. It developed through millions of years in a very short time. The creature you saw is not what man developed from; it is what man will become.’
There’s a hint here of the film Planet of the Apes (1968), but essentially we are back on ground prepared by Nation in ‘The Keys of Marinus’, ‘Genesis of the Daleks’ and the short story ‘We Are the Daleks!’, with artificially accelerated evolution, and in territory explored in ‘Death to the Daleks’, with the refusal to accept that evolution necessarily means progress. Except that Nation’s concerns were now emerging into a cultural climate that seemed more receptive. The American rock group Devo had become cult stars with their espousal of the theories of de-evolution on their 1978 album Q: Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo! (its title echoing the Law in The Island of Dr Moreau), while Ken Russell’s 1980 film of Paddy Chayefsky’s novel Altered States depicted a scientist experimenting with biological de-evolution through the use of psychedelic drugs and sensory deprivation. Dystopian visions of the future were far from unusual, but the embrac
e of evolutionary regression seemed ever more appropriate as memories of 1960s liberalism faded in the face of a reactionary move to a much harder political right in both Britain and America. By coincidence ITV had, a couple of months earlier, finally aired Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass story that the BBC had rejected earlier in the decade, showing a Britain where society has completely fallen apart. In the midst of the nightmarish violence are a hippy cult left over from the 1960s, the Planet People, angrily rejecting the scientific faith represented by Professor Quatermass. ‘Stop trying to know things,’ one of them exclaims.
There had been a minor variation on this theme in one of Nation’s other scripts for season three, ‘Powerplay’. Here Vila finds himself on a planet named Chenga, populated by two tribes, the Primitives and the Hi-Techs. Both are descended from the original settlers, having adopted very different visions of the society they wish to build and the technology they are prepared to use. Much of the action on Chenga is played for laughs, including a scene in which Vila tries to scare off potential attackers by adopting different voices and pretending to be a heavily armed force (a routine lifted directly from ‘The Threatening Letters’, a 1958 episode of Hancock’s Half Hour.) But there is also an element of wishing to have the last, ironic word on Survivors, the series that Nation felt was taken from him; the Primitives have followed Abby Grant’s prescription of returning to sustainable technology, and yet are clearly not destined for survival.
The account of de-evolution in ‘Terminal’, however, is merely the backdrop to the main story. Avon, who took over command of the Liberator when Blake disappeared, has learnt that Blake is still alive and well and living on the artificial planet. He takes the ship there and discovers Blake in an underground bunker, hooked up to a life support system though fully conscious. But it’s a trap. Servalan has lured Avon here to offer him a deal: she will give him Blake in exchange for the Liberator. He agrees, unaware – as is she – that the unknown cloud of particles that the ship flew through en route to Terminal has already begun to corrode its fabric. The crew teleport down to join Avon, and Servalan, having revealed that ‘Blake’ is actually a computer simulation and that the real man is dead, takes the reverse route on to the Liberator, just in time for it to explode from the effects of the particle cloud.
The production team expected that this would be the end of the entire series. Nation had gone out in style, destroying the ship that had given the band of rebels their one advantage over the Federation, as well as the computer Zen, who had been effectively part of the cast (‘I have failed you,’ it says plaintively as the Liberator begins to disintegrate), though its rival, Orac, had survived. ‘I was fascinated with the idea of cancer in a machine,’ said Nation. ‘I suppose I wanted to give the machine the same vulnerability as a man.’ He had also, as far as the viewers could tell, killed off Servalan and, having teased us with an apparition, finally laid Blake to rest. The surviving crew were left stranded in a bunker on a dangerous planet with no means of escape. Even so, as Nation pointed out in a covering letter to David Maloney when sending in the script: ‘You’ll notice that I have left the door open for series four, should public demand ever drive us to it.’
As it turned out, it wasn’t public demand that did the trick; rather it was approval from the BBC hierarchy. ‘Terminal’ was such a strong episode that Bill Cotton, the controller of BBC1, phoned up while it was being broadcast and insisted that an announcement be made during the credits that the series would return the following year.
By this stage, however, Nation himself had already departed. His letter to Maloney, enclosing the script for ‘Terminal’, had ended on a valedictory note: ‘We’ve had three seasons of Blake together and I thank you most sincerely for everything you’ve done for the show. Apart from odd moments of creative blackouts, I have enjoyed it. What I value very much is the relationship we have had over such a long haul. I very much hope we’ll work together again.’ He wasn’t even in the country to see ‘Terminal’ being broadcast. ‘I actually missed that episode on its original transmission,’ he remembered later, ‘because I was already in the United States.’
Chapter Sixteen
To America and Beyond
By the end of the 1970s Nation was reaching a critical point in his career. Now in his late forties, he was a major figure in popular television in Britain, coming off two successful series of his own devising, and with the Daleks confirmed as a continuing, integral part of Doctor Who. Like Ray Galton and Alan Simpson and Johnny Speight, his erstwhile colleagues at Associated London Scripts, he had become a name in his own right, even if this was partially achieved in spite of the BBC; they might have refused to put his name above the titles, but the merchandising of Blake’s 7 and the Daleks was doing its best to redress the balance. Within his field, there was little more that Nation could achieve on television at home.
For someone in his position twenty years earlier, the logical next step would have been into the movies, but the British film industry was now at its lowest ebb, with even the established box-office brands failing. Hammer had made its last horror film, To the Devil a Daughter, in 1976, while the Carry On series had petered out with the substandard Carry On England (1976) and Carry On Emmanuelle (1978). Lew Grade, obliged to retire from his television empire at the age of seventy, had moved instead into film-making, but ITC’s touch was less sure when it came to the cinema and the company came a cropper with the hugely expensive flop Raise the Titanic (1980). Less celebrated companies were also struggling: Amicus had a three-year gap before its final production, The Monster Club (1980), and Associated London Films, ALS’s sister company, had made its last big-screen picture with Steptoe and Son Ride Again in 1973.
Nation did try to develop a film project in 1978, to be titled Bedouin. ‘It’s a marvellous adventure story to be shot in the desert,’ he explained at the time. ‘I think twelfth century – the Crusaders.’ There was to be a strong vein of fantasy running through it, going back to an earlier theme of ancient wisdom: ‘The von Däniken kind of thinking. I disapprove of him entirely, but is there a wisdom somewhere that could have been from another source?’ Discussions were held with a production company in Geneva, but it came to nothing.
The opportunities for new challenges in Britain seemed slight, and if he was ever going to make a serious attempt to break America, clearly it had to be soon, before age caught up with him. There was some encouragement that the tide might be turning in favour of his style of writing. In 1977 Doctor Who had finally found a home in the States on the Public Broadcasting Service, and even on some commercial channels, and by the end of the decade it had begun to build a cult following. By 1984 it had become established enough to warrant coverage in Time magazine.
And so, in 1980, Nation and his family moved to Los Angeles for what was initially intended to be a two-month trial. He celebrated his fiftieth birthday in Hollywood.
In his absence, the unexpected commissioning of a fourth season of Blake’s 7 resulted in a very tight production schedule, complicated further by the departure of producer David Maloney, to be replaced by Vere Lorrimer, who had already directed a dozen episodes of the series. There was too a change in the cast. Jan Chappell, who played Cally, decided not to return, so was killed off-screen in the first episode, leaving just two of the original crew members – Avon and Vila – on board a new ship, the much less impressive Scorpio, joined by a new comrade, Soolin (Glynis Barber). Jacqueline Pearce, on the other hand, whose involvement was initially doubtful, did return, via a somewhat tortuous plotline that meant Servalan was posing for some time under the alias Sleer to no discernible dramatic advantage.
Lorrimer visited Nation in Los Angeles to discuss the direction of the fourth season, but it was more a matter of courtesy than of serious consultation, and Nation was far from impressed with the results: ‘I didn’t have anything to do with the last [series], which I hated. I’ve seen some of them and I think, again, that they missed it.’ There was, he argued, an inherent
problem with other writers taking over his characters: ‘I believe that I wrote Blake’s 7 (and Survivors and the Daleks) better than anybody else, simply because I invented them. I knew them deeply and more intimately than anybody else. I knew what I was trying to achieve.’ It was a complaint that he had made repeatedly when others had taken on his creations, though it was hard to see how it could be avoided, given the collaborative medium in which he worked.
Even Nation, however, could not help but admire the last episode of season four. Written by Chris Boucher and broadcast in the Christmas week of 1981, ‘Blake’ was a great piece of television. Again Avon has discovered that Roj Blake is still alive, this time on an obscure, lawless planet named Gauda Prime, raising hopes that he might return as the unifying figurehead for the resistance. And this time the reports are true. Blake is indeed alive, but Avon, mistakenly believing that he has betrayed the rebel cause and gone over to the Federation, shoots him. Federation guards arrive, kill all the others – Dayna, Vila, Soolin, Tarrant – and surround Avon, who stands astride the corpse of Blake and raises his gun to shoot, as he breaks into a smile. The image freezes, and as the credits roll, we hear the sound of a gun battle on the soundtrack.
Few series have ever dared go out on such a triumphantly negative note. But then few series have been prepared to sacrifice characters in the way that Blake’s 7 had. The ending was entirely in keeping with what had gone before; indeed its conclusion echoed its start four years earlier with a Federation massacre of rebels. Blake had now been killed off for the third and final time, on this occasion – it appeared – with every other member of the cast. The only missing element was Servalan herself, a fact which reportedly upset Jacqueline Pearce, though dramatically it was a wise decision not to include her in the episode: this was a tale of grim fatalism, no place for her brand of warped glamour.
