The Man Who Invented the Daleks

by Alwyn Turner

  ‘I did admire enormously the dramatic moments of Avon standing over Blake’s body and raising the weapon and starting to smile,’ admitted Nation, ‘which I think was sensational but dumb.’ He also claimed that the production team ‘purposely did not let me know what was happening’, calculating that he would have disapproved of this radical gesture, this slaughter of so many characters, in contradiction of ‘my old axiom: Never kill anything off.’ But when his initial anger at what had been done faded, he reasoned that at least we hadn’t definitively seen Avon die. There was no reason why he couldn’t make a return, if the possibility for further episodes arose. Boucher made the same point: ‘It was an ending in itself, but it wasn’t necessarily the end of the programme. If Blake’s 7 had returned for a fifth series, then the episode would now be regarded as a cliff-hanger, following in the tradition previously laid down by Terry Nation.’ For now, however, there was no doubt that it was the end of Blake’s 7 – this time there was no last-minute reprieve from a BBC executive. Viewing figures had fallen (the season averaged 8.5 million viewers, down from 9.5 million the previous year) and no one appeared to have an appetite to continue.

  Meanwhile, back in Hollywood, Nation appeared to have fallen on his feet. He became involved in a proposed series titled The Young Arthur and discovered the delights of the development deal, an entirely unknown concept in British television. ‘They paid me a lot of money, gave me an office and a secretary and paid my expenses,’ he explained. ‘The idea was that I was to come up with episode and series ideas for television.’ The contract, with Columbia Television, was followed by similar deals with 20th Century Fox, MGM and Paramount. But The Young Arthur never got made, nor did anything else, and gradually the joy of receiving a regular wage began to pale. ‘I was very frustrated by it,’ he admitted. ‘I just didn’t want to work at the studios anymore, so I quit and waited for people to say, “Good God, he’s available!” But nobody did.’

  In fact very little of Nation’s later writing ever appeared on American television. There was work to be done doctoring other people’s scripts, but it was not until 1985, when he contributed to a new series titled MacGyver, that he got an on-screen credit at all. He was listed as producer for three episodes and also wrote the pre-title sequence for three, supplying five-minute stories that had no connection with the main plot of the following episode. MacGyver, played by Richard Dean Anderson, was a secret agent who relied more on his wits than on weaponry, allowing Nation a chance to indulge his love of an action hero making use of everyday objects; in prelude to the episode ‘Target MacGyver’, our man rescues a kidnapped general using only a collection of saucepans, a bag of ice, some cooking oil and a garden hose. It was all perfectly agreeable and the show was, eventually, a huge success, running to 139 episodes over seven seasons, but it was no match for the wit and style of ITC in the 1960s. And Nation’s contributions were all made within the first ten episodes, before it really took off.

  He was now inhabiting a very different world to that of the BBC, where he could wander into the office of his friend, Ronnie Marsh, pitch an idea for Blake’s 7 and walk out with a commission for a pilot that evolved into a series. ‘What is difficult in the United States is that you work for twenty-seven masters each time,’ he complained. ‘You have several producers, you have the studio, you have the actors, and all of them seem to be asking for something different. It drives you insane.’ But the stakes were so much higher, and the rewards so much greater, that the temptation to continue playing the game was almost irresistible. ‘If you make a smash-hit here – had Blake’s 7 been made here and had the same level of success – I would be a multi-multi-millionaire,’ he said. ‘These are the glittering prizes in the United States. It’s not just the fact that you have a good audience out there, it’s the fact that you are making vast amounts of money, and people kill for less.’ As MacGyver once observed: ‘Typical! Just when you’re getting ahead, somebody always changes the odds.’

  The idea of a two-month trial period had long since been overtaken by events, and in 1983 the Nations burnt their bridges with the sale of Lynsted Park. The family was now settled in Los Angeles and it would remain his home until his death, however unsatisfying it was in creative terms.

  By the end of the decade he had notched up just two more screen credits. One was an episode of the short-lived series A Fine Romance, also known as Ticket to Ride and not to be confused with the British sitcom starring Michael Williams and Judi Dench. Titled ‘The Tomas Crown Affair’, it was, unsurprisingly, a parody of the 1968 movie The Thomas Crown Affair and featured a dentist (played by David Rappaport) concealing a smuggled diamond inside the tooth of Michael Trent (Christopher Cazenove). Nation, in an interview conducted at the time of writing, described it as ‘a kamikaze episode. You know it’s going to go down and nobody’s going to watch it – not even me!’

  On a slightly happier note, there was A Masterpiece of Murder, a television movie screened in 1986 that he co-wrote with Andrew J. Fenady. It told the story of an ageing private detective and an equally ageing crook teaming up in pursuit of an art thief, and while it may not have set many pulses racing, it was notable for teaming up the veteran actor Don Ameche with Bob Hope, the comedian to whom Nation had listened so avidly on the American Forces Network as a child during the war. Nation didn’t originate the storyline, and he never cited the piece in interviews as any kind of achievement, but if, thirty-five years earlier when he was trying to establish himself as a stand-up in South Wales, he’d been shown a vision of his future self, living in Hollywood and writing for Bob Hope, he would surely have considered it the wildest, most fantastic success story. ‘He absolutely loved that,’ remembered Kate Nation. ‘These were idols to him. He was just like a kid with a new toy.’ Unfortunately, the reality was not as impressive as the dream. ‘Hope is game, but painfully past his prime’, noted one review, adding that ‘the script is never more than mediocre.’

  Apart from working on other people’s scripts, Nation also spent time trying to bring his own work to the screen. In the mid 1980s this primarily meant a remake of Survivors, which he wished to relocate to America. The new Abby would be living in the north-east of the country, with her son, Peter, in Los Angeles. The story would thus come closer to his original concept of a trek across vast distances, with a makeshift convoy of ‘strange vehicles crossing empty America, where there are little pockets of survivors here and there, all doing different things’. There had always been a strong element of the frontier western in his episodes of the BBC original and in his novel; this new version would emphasise the theme still further, tapping into ‘the American ethos of the wagon train – there’s always that great urge to push west for the Americans’.

  It was an inspired idea, and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t have worked, at least commercially. One suspects that, had it been made, it would have ended up a more cheerful affair than Nation might have wished, but revisiting America’s greatest myth could have fitted well into the more bullish cultural climate of the country in the 1980s, during the years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. There were, however, other changes in the culture of the times that made the idea of a post-plague drama less appealing to executives. ‘We were so close to getting it on one occasion,’ remembered Nation, ‘and then AIDS reared its head, and everyone was terrified to do anything with it. They didn’t want to be associated with it.’ That, at least, was his explanation, though there were plenty of other factors militating against him: neither he nor the series itself had any real track record in the States, and it was asking a lot of US television executives to put their money on an outsider when he was touting what appeared at first sight to be such a depressing concept. The made-for-television nuclear disaster movie, The Day After, may have achieved record audience figures when it was aired in 1983, but it didn’t spark any enthusiasm for other similarly downbeat dramas.

  With the abandonment of that project, Nation turned instead to the idea of trying to revive B
lake’s 7. The series had finally been screened in America and, like Doctor Who, it had acquired a cult following, sufficient to warrant the presence of Nation, Paul Darrow and others at fan conventions. By 1989 Nation was talking about making a series ‘next year’, and outlining his thoughts as to how it would work. This time it was not a remake he had in mind, but a continuation of the story from where it had been left off in ‘Blake’. We hadn’t seen Avon die, so he was to return, a decade or so on from that final episode, exiled on an island on a remote planet, like Napoleon on Elba. He appears to have changed sides, making broadcasts in support of the Federation and against an outlaw called Blake, who may or may not be the real Blake: ‘It may be simply that anybody who leads the fight against the Federation becomes Blake; “Blake” has now become a title.’ But in reality Avon is merely awaiting his opportunity to return to the fray, his chance to relive Napoleon’s final campaign in the Hundred Days. ‘That’s the kind of thing I have in mind,’ Nation said. ‘Avon comes out of nowhere and scares everybody to death. Of course, in the end, he cannot win. Like I said, Avon dies.’

  This proposal made no progress either, as Nation admitted in a 1992 interview: ‘Nothing has been happening, although I’ll never say never again.’ But it was still in his mind and he was even suggesting that he might bring back Vila as well. More significantly he was now talking about the vague hope that the BBC might take up the idea, as though he had lost any faith in doing anything further on American television. ‘Points of View got more letters for Blake’s 7 than any other series, so there is a demand,’ he argued. ‘I’m ready to go with it, and we’ll give it to them, but I have no idea. The BBC doesn’t talk to me, I don’t talk to them, not for any other motive than we just don’t talk together.’

  He was certainly right about the enduring popularity of the programme. In 1983 the BBC had reported that – with the exception of breakfast television, which had been launched that year – the subject that attracted the greatest amount of correspondence from viewers was Blake’s 7. More than two thousand letters were received asking for the return of the series. The BBC dismissed the letters as being ‘part of an organised lobby’, which was true, but it was nonetheless a tribute to the enthusiasm that the show continued to inspire. When in 2000 the British Film Institute polled more than 1,500 people in the industry to find the best British television programmes ever made, Doctor Who came in third, behind Fawlty Towers and ‘Cathy Come Home’ from Sydney Newman’s The Wednesday Play. But when the BFI then asked the public to vote for their own favourites, Doctor Who rose a place to number two, kept from the top position only by Blake’s 7. Admittedly the turnout was very low, the 113 nominations for Blake’s 7 accounting for nearly twenty-five per cent of the votes cast, but it was testament to the loyalty of fans that such a campaign could still be mounted, a generation on from the ending of the show.

  Unusually for a science fiction series, a great deal of this support came from women. ‘When the Blake’s 7 Magazine was launched it was hoped it would sell to maturing Doctor Who fans,’ noted Paul Darrow. ‘It didn’t. A survey was undertaken and it revealed that most readers were in the twenty-two to thirty range, with a significant number of older people. Ninety per cent were female.’ He observed the same phenomenon when attending his first fan convention in Chicago.

  Although the proposals to bring back Survivors and Blake’s 7 continued to fall on stony ground, seeds were still being sown. And it was a tribute to the roles that Nation had created that, in both instances, a good deal of the running was made by the series’ lead actors. Paul Darrow became heavily involved in the attempts to relaunch Blake’s 7, while Ian McCulloch developed – with Nation’s approval – a concept for a new series of Survivors. Set some fifteen years on from the original, this would show a rudimentary society having evolved but coming under attack from an external power, bent on imperialist domination. He got as far as writing a pilot script and outlines for a further twelve episodes before the idea was rejected by the BBC on the bizarre grounds that it would be racially offensive.

  This was, it should be noted, the same corporation that, within very recent memory, had happily broadcast The Black and White Minstrel Show, only ending the programme in 1978, around the same time that Bill Cotton had thrown the dance troupe Ruby Flipper off Top of the Pops on the grounds that ‘the British public didn’t want to see black men dancing with white women’. By the end of the 1980s, however, the BBC had belatedly become sensitive to multicultural sensibilities in the country, even if it remained unsure of its ground. So when McCulloch explained his suggestion that the raiding parties assaulting Britain came from Africa, the BBC panicked and rejected it out of hand ‘because they thought it was racist’. It was an absurd argument, but McCulloch didn’t entirely lose faith. He returned with a reworked proposal in the mid 1990s, though again without success.

  But if all these projects came to naught, and if Nation’s writing career in America was little more than a long series of professional disappointments, there were compensations. The income generated by the Daleks had ensured that he and his family could live comfortably, and the rise in popularity of conventions gave him the sort of personal acclaim that writers seldom enjoy. ‘I retain an enormous affection for the Daleks,’ he wrote in 1988. ‘They have rewarded me in many ways, and not least amongst these benefits have been the opportunities to meet fans all over the world. They are dedicated and wonderful people, and I am extremely grateful to all of them.’ Among those fans, helpfully enough given the celebrity-based hierarchy of Hollywood, were some big names, as Nation’s obituary in The Times pointed out: ‘American aficionados of Doctor Who, such as Steven Spielberg, made “the Dalek Man” welcome.’ And, according to Kate Nation, the daily working routine was not always disagreeable. ‘He loved it. He loved going out to the studios to his office, getting involved with people, because writing can be very solitary.’ She added, however: ‘He didn’t get a lot on – he didn’t like that part of it.’

  Nation wasn’t missing a great deal at home. As an old socialist, who had grown up in the depression of the 1930s in South Wales, he was unlikely to have taken with any enthusiasm to living in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. Nor was British television a particularly happy place in the 1980s for the kind of programmes that he wrote. There had been a brief attempt to pour new wine into old bottles with The New Avengers (1976) and Return of the Saint (1978), but neither was entirely convincing, and when Brian Clemens found a durable action adventure vehicle in The Professionals (1977), it owed more to the grittiness of The Sweeney than it did to the fantasies of Steed and Simon Templar.

  Science fiction was also struggling. The huge success of Star Wars prompted the making of further Hollywood epics with the likes of Star Trek: The Motion Picture and The Black Hole, both in 1979, and the following year ITV bought in two American series whose high-gloss production values, while not quite on the scale of Star Wars, were a long way from the make-do-and-mend approach to which British fans had become accustomed on television. Battlestar Galactica was screened on Thursdays, while – in an act of virtual sacrilege – Buck Rogers in the 25th Century was broadcast on Saturday evenings, up against Doctor Who itself. Worse still, it began to win the ratings war. In response the BBC moved Doctor Who in 1982, after eighteen years in the same slot, screening it twice weekly on Mondays and Tuesdays. By 1985 it was back in its proper place at a Saturday teatime, though in its new format it now lasted forty-five minutes rather than its traditional twenty-five.

  More importantly, the entire episode had demonstrated the BBC’s loss of faith in the brand. The chief villain emerged as Michael Grade, the nephew of Lew Grade and now the controller of BBC1. He was later to say that he thought the show ‘was rubbish, I thought it was pathetic. I’d seen Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E. T. and then I had to watch these cardboard things clonking across the floor trying to scare kids.’ The option of increasing the budget to keep pace does not seem to have been seriously consi
dered, even though the revenue from merchandising and foreign sales was by now said to be seven times higher than the production costs. Instead, after that 1985 season, the programme disappeared entirely for eighteen months. When it did return it was for a series of much briefer seasons that migrated from Saturdays to Mondays and then to Wednesdays, and attracted ever smaller audiences. The last storyline to be seen by more than seven million viewers was 1985’s ‘Revelation of the Daleks’, written by Eric Saward; by the time of Ben Aaronovitch’s ‘Remembrance of the Daleks’ (1988), which – as part of the show’s silver jubilee season – took the story right back to the junkyard in Totters Lane, the figures were barely scraping past five million and were set to plunge further. The final episode of Doctor Who was broadcast in December 1989 and, although there was no formal announcement of the end of the show, it was clearly understood what was happening. ‘We were told to wait and see about a new season,’ remembered the last script editor, Andrew Cartmel, ‘but it was definitely a flavour of “you’ll have to wait a very long time”.’ Having lost both BBC support and its public, the series was finally cancelled, ending an extraordinary 26-year run.

  Unable to match the special effects-driven scale of Hollywood, television science fiction in Britain reverted to comedy, following the lead of David Croft and Jeremy Lloyd’s Come Back Mrs Noah, Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the saga of Captain Kremmen, first heard on the Capital Radio programme of disc jockey Kenny Everett. The two latter eventually made the transition all the way from radio via television to film. Of those that followed, Red Dwarf (1988) was clearly in a class of its own, but there was too a host of other British-made science fiction comedies on television, many of them scarcely remembered: Metal Mickey (1980), Kinvig (1981), Luna (1983), They Came From Somewhere Else (1984), The Groovy Fellers (1989), Mike & Angelo (1989), Kappatoo (1990), Watt on Earth (1991), Space Vets (1992) and WYSIWIG (1992). One of the few serious attempts to produce a science fiction series, a BBC adaptation of John Christopher’s trilogy The Tripods in 1984–5, was cancelled at the end of its second season, a decision again made by Michael Grade, while Chris Boucher’s Star Cops (1987) didn’t get beyond a single season.