The Man Who Invented the Daleks (2 page)

It was not, however, the only indication of the durability of his work. Much of his television writing was already enjoying a new lease of life on DVD, while even the few surviving episodes of a neglected comedy series,
Floggit’s
, when rediscovered by BBC radio in 2009, were re-broadcast, more than half a century after they first aired. The appeal was not simply one of nostalgia, for his creations continued to inspire new interpretations. The
Doctor Who
episode that the
Radio Times
was promoting, ‘Dalek’, saw some significant additions to the mythology he had left, and it was followed in 2008 by a remake of his 1970s series
Survivors.
Meanwhile, 2010 saw an American reworking of
And Soon the Darkness
, a film he had co-written forty years earlier, and reports of a continuation – or possibly a revival – of another show from that decade,
Blake’s 7
, appeared in the press on a regular basis for many years. Indeed that series remained familiar enough to be lampooned in the cinema short
Blake’s Junction 7
(2004), starring Martin Freeman, Mackenzie Crook and Johnny Vegas. Clearly this was a body of work whose resilience transcended its origins in what, at the time of its creation, was thought of as the transient, even disposable, world of the broadcast media.

Beyond his most celebrated work in
Doctor Who, Survivors
and
Blake’s 7
, Nation’s list of credits was equally impressive. He wrote dozens of episodes for action adventure shows such as
The Avengers, The Saint, The Persuaders!, The Baron, Department S, The Champions, The Protectors
and
MacGyver.
He adapted some key science fiction works for television, among them the first ever screen version of a Philip K. Dick story. And he wrote for many of Britain’s most celebrated comedians, including Tony Hancock, Peter Sellers, Frankie Howerd, Ronnie Barker and Eric Sykes. There was too a disparate collection of one-off pieces for cinema and television, some of which remain fondly remembered in certain circles, even if they didn’t command huge audiences
(The Amazing Robert Baldick, The House in Nightmare Park
, even
What a Whopper)
, as well as a children’s novel,
Rebecca’s World
, that retains a devoted following. And on at least one occasion he claimed that a largely forgotten television play,
Uncle Selwyn
, had given him more pleasure than anything else he’d done.

The overwhelming majority of that writing came in the twenty-five years from 1955 to 1980, an era that has come to be regarded as the golden age of British television. Nation was present at the outset, as the dominance exerted over popular culture by the cinema and radio began to fade in the face of the new medium, and his contributions were to help define the period and establish the shape of the entertainment industry. If he is remembered chiefly as a writer of popular science fiction (‘I will always be Terry “Daleks” Nation,’ he acknowledged towards the end of his life), that does scant justice to the breadth and diversity of his writing.

Nor does it accurately reflect his own taste and interests, for despite his use of alien planets and future societies as settings for much of his best-known work, there is little to indicate any commitment to, or great involvement in, science fiction as it evolved during his adult life. His near-contemporary Gerry Anderson, who made shows like
Thunderbirds
and
Captain Scarlet
, talked of television having a proselytising, pioneering role: ‘I have always been a great believer that science fiction entertainment makes a great contribution to the progress that we make in all sorts of spheres.’ But Nation never seemed to share that concern. Instead he used the trappings and accoutrements of science fiction simply because they were the conventions expected by the audience, in the same way that when he was writing about a special agent, there would always be a gun, a car and a gimmick. In both instances, the genre requirements were little more than window-dressing, providing a backdrop for his true interest: the telling of a tale of adventure.

Because he was above all else a storyteller, drawing heavily on the literature he had encountered in his childhood, and translating the traditions of adventure-writing from the first half of the twentieth century into a form appropriate for the television age. Certainly that was how he saw the first Daleks story at the time. ‘I set out to write a thundering great thriller,’ he said in 1964, ‘the sort of thing I lapped up when I was a boy.’ In a set of notes he submitted for the second season of
Blake’s 7
, he spelt out his approach to writing: ‘Stories must be strong, well plotted and contain a lot of action and movement. A great deal happens in our stories. Moral points and philosophical discussion must always be well cloaked in our action-adventure.’ It is possible to see his work as an extended love letter to the popular thrillers of his youth. ‘If he’d been writing novels, you’d have called him a page-turner,’ commented Barry Letts, producer of
Doctor Who
in the early 1970s. ‘You always wanted to know what would happen next.’ Verity Lambert, the founding producer of the series, shared the same opinion: ‘I thought he was a terribly good storyteller – that was absolutely his strength.’

Indeed so great was his love of telling tales that it often coloured the accounts he gave of his own life and work. He had a tendency to exaggeration and simplification, reluctant to allow mere facts to get in the way of a good story. When asked in the early days of the Daleks how he’d come up with the name of his creation, he explained that he had taken it ‘from the spine of an encyclopaedia. I looked up on the shelf and saw one volume marked “dal to lek”.’ It was an inspired idea and it continued to circulate, despite his subsequent public retraction. ‘It’s absolute rubbish, it’s a load of lies,’ he admitted in 1973. ‘Persistent journalists wanted a romantic story about how the name came to be, and I didn’t have a romantic story. But then I’m a writer, so I made one up, and that was the story we put around for years.’ His instincts were right the first time. The prosaic truth – that the name simply popped into his head – was much less interesting than the version he’d concocted, and the fabricated story of the origin of the Daleks was repeated even in some newspaper notices of his death.

Similar distortions were to be found elsewhere in his interviews. ‘I suspect that I’ve written more TV scripts than anyone else in Britain,’ he once declared, going on to enumerate his contributions: ‘some thirty episodes of
The Saint
, most of
The Baron, The Persuaders!
and forty episodes of
The Avengers’.
Again, this was not strictly true; the real figures were thirteen episodes of
The Saint
, six of
The Avengers
, and seven out of twenty-four episodes of
The Persuaders!.
The claim to have penned most of
The Baron
was more justified, but only just: he had a writing credit on seventeen of the thirty episodes that were filmed, though four of those were co-written. Perhaps it merely felt like he had turned out that many shows; more likely it was a propensity to embroider whether it were necessary or not.

Nation’s love of story-telling and the durability of his work are not, of course, unrelated. No one went to his shows expecting to come away with a deeper understanding of the nature of the human condition, or to have looked through a window on to the tortured psyche of the author. There was, it is true, sometimes a commentary on politics and society to be found, though it is not always clear how conscious this was, but it was hardly the chief selling point. That was, and remains, Nation’s ability to tell a rattling good tale. He did make some major contributions to the evolution of popular television – he could, for example, claim credit for popularising the ideas of story arcs and season cliff-hangers in television fantasy shows, devices that became taken for granted – but at the heart of everything was pure escapism. ‘I believe that what people want on television is entertainment, and action stories are what I want to write,’ he explained. ‘There are plenty of other people to write sociological dramas.’

It was a lesson he had learnt from the popular writers whose work he so eagerly devoured in his early years. The novelist Edgar Wallace, the most successful of those authors (his dominance of the market was such that in the early 1930s it was estimated that one in every four books read in Britain was written by him), was forthright in his deep dislike of literary fiction, which he saw as being concerned with internal, personal experience; in his own work, he insisted, he sought to remove all elements of subjectivity, concentrating solely on action, on objective events. Such an approach was summed up by the critic Richard Usborne, writing about John Buchan, another of the great adventure writers of the period: ‘The stories kept the heroes constantly on the move. But the rolling stones gathered no atmospheric moss of character.’ Or, as Britain’s most revered film critic, Dilys Powell, pointed out, ‘in a thriller too much character clutters up the plot’. The same attitude was easily extended into science fiction, where, Kingsley Amis observed in 1960, there was an ‘exaltation of idea or plot over characterisation’.

The novels of Wallace, Buchan and others were part of the staple diet of an imaginative schoolboy like Nation in the 1930s and 1940s, consumed for the same reasons that Dickson McCunn, one of Buchan’s heroes, had embraced the work of Sir Walter Scott in his own (fictional) childhood: ‘he had read the novels not for their insight into human character or for their historical pageantry, but because they gave him material wherewith to construct fantastic journeys.’ And on those fantastic journeys, the reader – and, later, the viewer – was not over-concerned with notions of originality or consistency. H.C. McNeile, who wrote the hugely popular Bulldog Drummond books under the pseudonym of Sapper, borrowed freely from the stories of other writers and never troubled himself with building a coherent narrative across the novels. Even his use of names was inconsistent and he wasn’t always sure if a character were alive or dead: Drummond’s housekeeper dies in one book, but returns without a scratch, or indeed an explanation, in the next.

The same traits were to be found in Nation’s work. The subtleties of characterisation were of little interest, influences were seldom hard to identify, and continuity could always be sacrificed if it got in the way of the tale. He was fortunate to find a sympathetic ally in Huw Wheldon, the controller of BBC1 in the 1960s, who was a big fan of the Daleks; Wheldon was convinced that television is ‘overwhelmingly a story-telling medium’, and argued that
Doctor Who
was about something archetypal: ‘the path into the unknown forest’. That was perhaps further than Nation himself would have gone, but there is in his best writing an element of the myth, or perhaps the fairy tale, that has helped it to endure. And, as in all the best fairy tales, the figures are painted with a very broad brush. Heroes fight seemingly impossible odds and (normally) win, but are frequently eclipsed in the popular imagination by the monstrosity of the villains, whether in the form of the evil scientist Davros in
Doctor Who
or of Servalan, the ruthless dominatrix figure who represented the forces of oppression in
Blake’s 7.

Above all, there are the Daleks, the single most enduring creations to come out of British television in the twentieth century. All the other iconic British screen presences, whether on television or film, were in the first instance literary creations, from Winnie the Pooh and Hercule Poirot through
The Lord of the Rings
and the Narnia stories to James Bond and Harry Potter. The Daleks are the only great popular myth, endlessly reinvented and reinterpreted by other writers, to have been created specifically for television. Their 2005 return came in the midst of a phase of revivals, ranging from the film of
The Avengers
(1998) to the BBC’s
Reggie Perrin
(2009), but while the others merely emphasised how frozen in time was the appeal of the originals, the Daleks alone satisfied the demand for nostalgia while also building a huge new constituency. Like any great myth, they have outlived and outgrown their creator, entering the popular consciousness to become instantly recognisable by name alone, even to those who have never knowingly watched
Doctor Who.
Perhaps their only rival is the Doctor himself, and it is arguable that he would scarcely be remembered as anything but a footnote in television history had the Daleks not been such an instantly huge success.

And they were extraordinarily successful. The Dalekmania craze that swept Britain at the end of 1964 saw over a hundred thousand copies of a single toy sold that Christmas; although the fever inevitably abated, a decade later there were still over a hundred Dalek products on the market. The copyright in the creatures was owned jointly by Terry Nation and by the BBC, and it was the royalties from the sales of these products, rather than his writing, that made him a rich man. The scale of the merchandising also inspired the creation of the lucrative BBC Enterprises (now BBC Worldwide), an organisation whose profits rose from a modest £1 million in 1968 to become a major contributor to the corporation’s revenues. Beyond that, the Daleks are the most famous aliens and the ultimate baddies in British popular culture, resolutely evil with no pretence whatsoever of redeeming features.

None of which bore much resemblance to the man himself. ‘He was the nicest guy you could ever wish to meet,’ noted Terrance Dicks, who was for a while his script editor on
Doctor Who.
‘I’ve never really met anybody who didn’t like Terry.’ Almost everyone Nation came into contact with had much the same feeling. He made and kept friends, he was a generous host and he was deeply loyal, both to those he knew and to fans of his work. ‘He was an intelligent, funny, warm and very friendly man,’ commented Roger Moore, who worked with him on
The Persuaders!.
‘He was a joy to have around.’ Perhaps the most eloquent testimony was that of a
Doctor Who
director, Richard Martin: ‘He had this lovely, rich, pastoral voice. And it sounded good and it sounded wonderful, and it was full of courage and personality. When people say “Terry Nation”, I hear his voice.’ The identification of the accent was perhaps misplaced – Nation’s voice revealed his upbringing in Cardiff, a city that was far from pastoral – but the sentiment is clear.