The Man Who Invented the Daleks (20 page)

Having delayed the appearance of a Dalek until the final shot of the opening episode in the previous storyline, Nation repeated the trick here to what should have been startling effect. Except, of course, that the massive blaze of pre-publicity was such that the revelation of a Dalek was never going to be a shock; apart from anything else, the front cover of the
Radio Times
that week had been given over to the show, heralding the return of the monsters. As a result the late arrival was distressing for all the wrong reasons. ‘A howl of anguish went up all over Britain,’ reported the press. ‘Angry viewers protested that the Dalek’s appearance was far too brief; that children who had waited months for another sign of the monsters were weeping and refusing to go to bed.’ A BBC spokesperson admitted: ‘Our switchboard was flooded with calls from viewers who thought the Daleks would be on for the major part of the programme.’ Undeterred, Nation was to make the shock reveal in the final scene something of a signature for his Dalek tales.

It transpires that we are in London in the year 2164, exactly two hundred years into the future, and that Earth has been taken over by the Daleks. Some humans have been brainwashed to act as the occupying force’s henchmen – these are the Robomen, one of whom we saw in the opening scene – while others have formed a determined, if largely ineffective, resistance. It would be difficult to see this as being anything other than a development of the Nazi associations of the Daleks, an extension of that theme into an invasion of Britain (for, despite the title, we don’t leave south-east England). The serial’s director, Richard Martin, was more than aware of the connections: ‘Terry and all of us who were making it were very influenced by the Second World War, because those images and those wrecks were still abundant. There were still bits of London where you could find the weeds growing, that they hadn’t rebuilt. So when I was looking for locations, and when he was describing locations, he was describing the stuff that we had intimately known during the Second World War.’

It was an impression reinforced by key scenes over the course of the six episodes. Daleks swagger – inasmuch as Daleks can swagger – around London landmarks like Trafalgar Square and the Albert Memorial; human beings are used as slave labour in a mine, under the direction of uniformed Robomen; and there is a genuinely shocking scene when Barbara and Jenny, a member of the resistance, having escaped from London into the country and found refuge in a cottage, are betrayed to the Daleks by the two elderly women who live there. ‘We’re old, child,’ one of the women tells Barbara in a deleted passage from the original script. ‘Times are difficult. There’s only one law now – survive.’ And just in case there might be any mistake, in the last episode the commander of the Daleks issues the ultimate orders: ‘Arrange for the extermination of all human beings – the final solution.’

Nation was not the only person pursuing such imagery. A coincidence of timing had seen the release a month earlier of Kevin Brownlow and Andrew Mollo’s film
It Happened Here
, which had been eight years in the making. The movie’s portrayal of what Britain would have looked like in the aftermath of a Nazi invasion in 1940 bore some striking, if accidental, parallels with ‘Invasion’, not only in broad terms – both are set some years after the invasion has actually taken place – but in particular scenes: the shots, for example, of German troops around key London landmarks, including the same two sites of Trafalgar Square and the Albert Memorial. (Nation had also suggested, but didn’t get, Daleks at the statue of Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens, in symbolic destruction of existing children’s fiction, and – a fine piece of self-aggrandisement – Daleks invading the BBC Television Centre.) The central figure in
It Happened Here
is a nurse named Pauline Murray, who a doctor friend tries to recruit into the resistance, using arguments not dissimilar to those employed in ‘The Daleks’: ‘The appalling thing about fascism is that you’ve got to use fascist methods to get rid of it.’ But Pauline is worn out by standing up for her principles, and has no appetite for a prolonged struggle: ‘My point is we’ve fought a war and lost it. There’s been a terrible lot of suffering on both sides, so why prolong that suffering?’ Many of the same issues had also turned up in Robert Muller’s novel,
The Lost Diaries of Albert Smith
, published earlier in the summer of 1964, which told the story of contemporary Britain sliding into fascism, while Gillian Freeman’s
The Leader
, on a similar theme but a smaller canvas, was to come the following year.

This was not the image of the country that was being propagated for international consumption. London was fast approaching its anointment as the swinging capital of the modern world, but that development could hardly be deduced from these works, or from ‘Invasion’ – the scene of Daleks in Trafalgar Square could only have been less swinging if they’d actually blown up a red double-decker bus. And reality was no more encouraging than fiction; when the production crew arrived at 6 a.m. one Sunday morning to film the Daleks, they had to move out of shot not the dedicated followers of fashion stumbling homewards after a night on the town, but several vagrants who were sleeping rough in the West End. The General Election in October 1964 had seen the removal of an ageing, tired Conservative government, to be replaced by a Labour Party under Harold Wilson, who made great play of his meritocratic credentials, his comparative youth (he was the right side of fifty) and, therefore, his alleged solidarity with the thrusting new generation that was threatening to transform the popular culture of the western world. But already doubts were being raised within that same cultural movement about Britain’s self-image; there was a stark discrepancy between, on the one hand, Wilson’s vision of a country reforged in the white heat of the technological revolution and, on the other, Nation’s grim portrayal of the English countryside overrun by Daleks.

And some of it was very grim indeed, especially in the context of a teatime children’s show. Some viewers found even the opening scene, with the Roboman committing suicide, too much to take. A woman from Uxbridge wrote to the BBC to complain: ‘My two children aged 5 and 7 were quite looking forward to seeing more adventures with these weirdly amusing robots. Unfortunately I found the beginning of the series so horrifying as to compare with the
Quatermass
series of some years ago where at least it was for adults.’ She spared the children further horrors by switching off, but still, ‘the little they did see caused them considerable distress at bedtime’. For those who stayed with the serial, there was more horror to come. The fratricidal reality of a society under military occupation achieves literal expression when a resistance fighter named Larry discovers that his brother has become a Roboman; in an ensuing fight between the two, they slay each other. As David, another member of the resistance, warns Susan: ‘Not all human beings are automatically allies. There are people who will kill for a few scraps of food.’

Meanwhile the debate about pacifism in the first serial has a successor in the shape of an argument, spread over two episodes, about how best to respond to the Dalek occupation. ‘What’s the point in running away all the time?’ asks the history teacher Barbara, and Jenny replies: ‘I’m not running. I’m surviving, that’s all.’ She later spells out what she sees as Barbara’s illusions: ‘You’ve got this romantic idea about resistance. There is nothing heroic about dying. There’s no point in throwing lives away just to prove a principle.’

The idea of surviving, of simply living in the face of overwhelming odds, was a concept to which Nation was repeatedly to return, and in his original script for ‘Invasion’ there was a more explicit statement of the theme than finally appeared. ‘The world you have come into is one where friendships mean very little,’ David was to have told Susan. ‘There’s been no place for sentiment in society. Just staying alive is the most anybody has time for.’ Susan reflects on her own experience of extreme situations, the positive element of how they can build stronger ties between people: ‘The four of us faced dangers together and it seemed to give us a greater understanding of one another.’ So it was to prove here, for the story ends, after the defeat of the Daleks, with Susan staying behind on the future Earth to help David in the reconstruction of society, a prospect they have already contemplated. ‘One day this will be all over,’ says David. ‘It’ll mean a new start.’ Susan is enthused by the challenge: ‘A new start? Rebuilding a planet from the very beginning. It’s a wonderful idea.’ One might see here the germ of the idea that would become
Survivors.

There were other elements that would recur in Nation’s work, including the central conflict between a totalitarian state and a scattered resistance movement. And the resistance is painted in the same, extravagantly idealist colours that would become a feature of Nation’s writing. The group we meet are led by a wheelchair-bound scientist named Dortmun, who – having developed a hand-held bomb that he believes will be effective against Daleks – organises a raid on a ship at their launching pad. As it turns out, the bombs are completely ineffective against the Daleks’ casings, but it is in any case a deeply flawed plan; this is intended as a symbolic strike that will galvanise other resistance groups, but how anyone would hear about it when the Daleks control all the communication systems is far from clear. Here, as elsewhere, one gets the impression that while Nation’s enthusiasm might be of use to the leaders of an underground movement, they would be loath to turn to him for practical advice. Like Barbara, he often seems seduced by ‘this romantic idea about resistance’.

None of these themes, of course, is allowed to get in the way of what is at its heart a thundering good tale about terrifying aliens invading our world and being seen off. As a piece of television, it also benefited hugely from a move to a more spacious studio and from the extensive location shoots used for the first time in a
Doctor Who
story; consequently it looks much bigger than ‘The Daleks’ or ‘The Keys of Marinus’. Much more than the first story, this felt like a major piece of work, a modern myth in the making. In particular, the scenes of Dortmun being hurriedly pushed in his wheelchair through deserted London streets, with the knowledge that Daleks might be lurking around any and every corner, were disturbing in a way not previously seen on British television, though it had been fore-shadowed in literature with the chapter ‘Dead London’ in
The War of the Worlds.
(Nation suggested getting footage of a depopulated London from the 1950 film
Seven Days to Noon
, a thriller about a scientist trying to force the
country to abandon nuclear weapons, which suggests another source of his vision.)

Much of the plot is gleeful nonsense – the Daleks are trying to extract the molten core of Earth so that they can use the planet as an intergalactic spaceship – and the denouement that sees their evil plan thwarted is confused at best, but Nation is clearly enjoying himself, and the absurdities are less intrusive than might be expected. The one exception is perhaps the Slyther, an alien creature kept as a pet by the Black Dalek, who is heading the mining operation. (The idea of a hierarchy within Dalek society was beginning to emerge.) As it appears on screen, the Slyther is patently a man in a monster suit, looking like a homemade approximation of a deep sea sloth; though it’s supposed to be a terrifying beast that eats humans, it gets killed without adding anything of any value to the story. It was, however, meant to be more impressive than that. Drawing on his radio experience, Nation was keen to convey the creature essentially by sound – ‘this awful panting, gasping sound’ – and his original conception of ‘a huge, black jellyfish’ that we never quite see, just ‘the hint of a shapeless, pulsating mass’, had a hint of Lovecraftian menace that was never realised. Even so, the creature prompted a number of complaints to the BBC about it being too horrific for children’s television.

As was already characteristic of Nation’s writing, there are echoes of other stories. There is, for example, a hint of John Wyndham’s
The Day of the Triffids
in the account of how the Dalek invasion was preceded by a cosmic storm of meteorites, and by a plague that killed off a large part of the population: ‘The Daleks were up in the sky, just waiting for Earth to get weaker. Whole continents of people were wiped out: Asia, Africa, South America. They used to say the Earth had a smell of death about it.’ Likewise the Daleks’ plan to burrow to the Earth’s core is reminiscent of Arthur Conan Doyle’s
When the World Screamed
(1928), in which Professor Challenger drills through the Earth’s crust to prove his theory that the planet is actually a living organism in its own right. The result of his experiment is a series of explosions and volcanic eruptions all over the world, just as at the end of ‘Invasion’, and the Doctor’s comment could well have come from the mouth of Challenger himself: ‘The Earth rebelled and destroyed the invaders.’

The story ends with the departure of Susan, Carole Ann Ford having become bored with the role. ‘I just felt my part wasn’t really going anywhere,’ she explained. ‘It seemed to me that the people coming in – our visitors – were always getting much more interesting things to do than I was.’ Behind the scenes, David Whitaker also left the production team, though his work with Nation on the Daleks was to continue. His replacement was Dennis Spooner, another client of Associated London Scripts, who had earlier been introduced to Whitaker by Nation as a possible writer for
Doctor Who.
Spooner specialised in historical tales, including ‘The Reign of Terror’ and ‘The Romans’, pointing out, as he took over the job of script editor: ‘Writers have to be divided into those who can cope with trips back into the past and those who can write adventures set in the future. Very few can do both.’ He too was to contribute to the emerging mythology of the Daleks.

Meantime ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’, fuelled by the Dalekmania of Christmas 1964, was a major triumph, bigger even than ‘The Daleks’ had been. For the first time
Doctor Who
broke into the weekly top ten of the most watched programmes, and its position as the country’s favourite science fiction show was assured. That second story broke new ground for the series: the first monsters to return, the first invasion of Earth, the first attempt to establish continuity between two different serials. There was no guarantee that it would work, for much of this was without precedent in science fiction on British television.
Quatermass
may have enjoyed periodic revivals, but it was the humans not the aliens who were the common factor. Nor was there a parallel in the movies, with the possible exception of the alien children in
Village of the Damned
and
Children of the Damned
(1964), adapted from John Wyndham’s
The Midwich Cuckoos
, though the second film is a straightforward sequel.