The Man Who Invented the Daleks (25 page)

And then came the Beatles. Having dominated the British music industry in 1963, the group released ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ in America in January 1964, visited the country the following month and, by the end of March, held all top five places in the US singles charts, accounting for 60 per cent of all record sales. In a society still reeling from the shock of President Kennedy’s assassination, their cheerful simplicity swept all before them. In their wake came a host of other bands, from Herman’s Hermits to the Rolling Stones, and where the previous year just one British record (‘Telstar’ by the Tornados) had made the American top ten, the figure rose to thirty-four in 1964. So big were the Beatles that when they made their record-breaking appearance on
The Ed Sullivan Show
, attracting 74 million viewers, their slipstream was powerful enough to launch the Cardiff-born music hall star ‘Two Ton’ Tessie O’Shea on a successful American career, simply because she also appeared on the programme. And into the breach opened up by the Beatles came British television, both programmes –
The Avengers, The Saint, The Baron
– and individuals in the shape of David Frost and Jack Good. As John Mortimer was to put it in
Paradise Postponed
, his 1985 novel of post-war Britain, for a brief moment ‘life in England was thought to be interesting to the American public’. Ironically, one of the few failures of the era was a 1963 exhibition in New York of British pop art.

Terry Nation experienced some of this excitement as a writer on the ITC series, but those were other people’s shows. What he really dreamt of was making it in his own right, and in August 1965 the
Sun
confidently reported that he was ‘negotiating with American TV companies for the rights of what they want to call
The Dalek Show
’.

By now the Daleks were acquiring a life of their own, far beyond the confines of
Doctor Who.
The success of
The Dalek Book
, and particularly the comic strips illustrated by Richard Jennings, was extended in January 1965 when the same artist provided a strip for the first issue of the magazine
TV Century 21
, launched by Gerry Anderson to promote his Supermarionation puppet shows,
Stingray
and
Fireball XL5.
‘I suppose the thing that attracted me to the Daleks,’ reflected Anderson, in explanation of why he included a rival show in his magazine, ‘was jealousy.’ The series ran for 104 instalments over two years, with Jennings’s
Eagle-
derived artwork replaced by the more contemporary style of Ron Turner halfway through. It focused entirely on the Daleks, with no sign at all of the Doctor, gradually building an entire alternative mythology, expanding substantially on the television stories. Officially credited to Nation, the writing was actually the responsibility of David Whitaker, who had already written a novelisation of ‘The Daleks’ (as
Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks
, published in 1964), and who was fast becoming Nation’s understudy in all things related to the planet Skaro. The
TV Century 21
strip attracted its own loyal following, but for Nation it was primarily of significance in establishing that stories about the Daleks could potentially work even when removed from their original context: it could be seen as something between a storyboard and a calling card.

The same was not quite true of the 1965 film
Dr Who and the Daleks
, since it was based on the scripts for the first television serial, but it was notable that the monsters got equal billing in the title and completely dominated the posters. Directed by Gordon Flemyng, the movie featured Peter Cushing in the lead role, in the hope of attracting attention in America, where he was already well known as an actor. For the benefit of an American audience who were new to the concept, the nature of the central figure was also fundamentally changed; the Doctor was here known as Dr Who and, no longer an alien time traveller, was an amiably eccentric human inventor of apparently Edwardian vintage. Ian too was unrecognisable; played by Roy Castle, his function was to provide comic relief rather than to lead the action.

As a consequence, the film has not always been warmly embraced by many followers of
Doctor Who
, but viewed in its own right, it works perfectly well as a quirky little fantasy movie for kids. With a reported budget of £180,000 – a long way removed from the average of around £2,500 per episode for the first season of the television version – and with the benefit of being in colour rather than black-and-white, it has a sense of scale that was lacking in ‘The Daleks’. It may still look tied to its sets, but those sets are much more impressive and, on occasion, it displays a grandeur that television simply couldn’t match, particularly in the advance on the Dalek city. As Barbara, Ian and the Thals make their way across a deadly swamp, over mountains and through rocky tunnels, accompanied by an heroic orchestral score from Malcolm Lockyer, the sequence acquires something of the majesty of an H. Rider Haggard adventure. And there are some nice details, starting with the opening shot, a slow pan around a living room that reveals first Susan reading Eric M. Rogers’s
Physics for the Inquiring Mind
, then Barbara reading a book titled
The Science of Science
, and finally Dr Who himself, absorbed in a copy of
The Eagle
with Dan Dare on the cover. There was also a telling addition to the script, with the Thal leader Alydon (here played by Barrie Ingham) explaining that ‘There were many mutations after the final war. Most of them perished. But this form – two hands, two eyes – has always been best for survival.’

In terms of the Daleks themselves, the biggest change came simply from them being in colour, which enabled distinctions to be made between those with different functions and ranks. ‘I was trying to make them into a full-grown culture with levels,’ reflected Nation. His own involvement in the film, however, was minimal. The screenplay adaptation of his scripts was the work of Milton Subotsky, the creative talent behind Amicus, the film company responsible. Subotsky once claimed that his love of horror movies stemmed from the fact that ‘it was the only kind of cinema where you could avoid sex and violence’, and the reviews of
Dr Who and the Daleks
largely agreed that he’d lived up to his ambitions. ‘One of the few modern films to have a nubile heroine who never so much as touches her boyfriend,’ noted the
Guardian
, concluding that it was ‘not likely to do more harm to childish minds than many other modern weapons of the communications industry’. ‘Shoddy,’ was the verdict of the
Observer
, ‘but the children might like it.’

Despite the criticisms, the film was as successful as everything featuring the Daleks that year and it reached the box office top ten. ‘The money came in so fast,’ claimed Nation, ‘they were in profit within the year, and they actually had to pay me, which was wonderful.’ Even before its release, a sequel was planned, which emerged in 1966 as
Daleks – Invasion Earth 2150 A.D.
, an adaptation of the second television story that removed the Doctor entirely from the title. The central characters were much the same – though Bernard Cribbins replaced Roy Castle as the comic relief and Barbara was dropped in favour of Dr Who’s niece, Louise – and there were again some improvements on the original version, thanks to the shorter running time; the Slyther, thankfully, was absent altogether, though an even more risible scene was added of Cribbins and the Robomen engaging in a choreographed comedy routine. By now, however, Dalekmania was on the wane, and the film not only got the expected poor reviews (‘Grown-ups may enjoy it,’ sniffed
The Times
, ‘but most children have more sense’), but also failed to emulate the takings of the first venture. Plans for a third movie, based on the third Dalek serial, ‘The Chase’ (screened on television in 1965), were quietly shelved, and some of the Daleks used in the films were given to Nation, who kept them in the house at Lynsted Park.

The absence of a film of ‘The Chase’ was something of a missed opportunity, since the television scripts – the last that Nation would write alone for seven years – were full of excellent ideas that were either rejected or toned down, while those that did make it to the screen suffered heavily from the show’s low budget. The director was again Richard Martin, who was unconvinced by the idea of returning to the monsters, but was talked into it by Verity Lambert: ‘We’re in a stick, the rest of the scripts for the next series aren’t ready. I’ve talked with Terry Nation and he thinks we can do one more thing with the Daleks.’ Returning to the anthology format of ‘The Keys of Marinus’, Nation had the Daleks in their own time machine, pursuing the TARDIS through space and time, and he crammed into the six episodes a total of five alien life-forms, three planets, three separate stories set on Earth in the past, present and future, two Doctors and two time machines, as well as finding room for appearances by Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, the Beatles, William Shakespeare and Abraham Lincoln. As one of contributors to the BBC’s audience research report pointed out, ‘All we need now is Yogi Bear and we’ve had the lot.’

It also provided a solution to the mystery of the ghost ship the
Mary Celeste
, discovered in 1872 floating in the Atlantic, its crew having vanished with no indication of what had happened to them. Eighty years after Arthur Conan Doyle had written a fictionalised explanation of the crew’s disappearance (renaming the vessel the
Marie Celeste
), Nation finally revealed the truth: the Daleks materialised on the ship and the crew threw themselves overboard in fear.

A sense of playful imagination runs through much of the serial, but not as much as there was in the original script. In the first episode, the crew of the TARDIS enjoy themselves with a Time-Space ‘Visualiser,’ a sort of time television’ that enables them to view moments from history. Barbara chooses to see William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon and Queen Elizabeth I, though the encounter is a not very inspired account of a royal command to write
The Merry Wives of Windsor.
As originally intended, however, the scene ended with the two writers bemoaning the dwindling numbers attending the theatre, and saw Bacon giving Shakespeare a manuscript for a new play titled
Hamlet.
Back on the TARDIS, the Doctor was then to have revealed that Shakespeare had told him this was simply a publicity stunt: expecting to be overheard, the two men hoped to whip up controversy about the authorship of the play with the aim of boosting the box office. In what remained of this idea, Bacon merely suggests to Shakespeare that the story of Hamlet would make a fine subject for a play; if anything, this played into the hands of those who subscribed to the Baconian authorship of the works, rather than mocking the claim.

It was not simply the wit that got lost. The first tale in the serial was set on the planet Aridius, once covered by a vast ocean beneath which lay the city of the Aridians. (There were shades here of H.G. Wells’s 1896 story ‘In the Abyss’, which also told of humanoid life-forms at the bottom of the ocean.) But then the seas dried up, killing all life save two species, the Aridians and the Mire Beasts, each of which – as is clear from the original script – sees the other as its primary food source, so that both are simultaneously predator and prey. It’s a lovely, teasing detail, but it disappeared from the final version, while Nation’s visualisation of the Aridians was also jettisoned. ‘These are tiny men with vast humped backs,’ he had written. ‘They are incredibly ugly facially, their mouths distorted and a secondary set of eyes on their foreheads. Thick black hair hangs lankly, framing their faces. Their hands have only four fingers each. They are perhaps twice as long as human fingers. Arms appear to trail the ground, whilst the legs seem foreshortened.’ To which Verity Lambert objected strongly: ‘I think Terry has gone too far in making the Aridians unpleasant looking,’ she wrote to Richard Martin. ‘It seems to me that this is just presenting unpleasantness for the sake of it.’ The resulting creatures looked instead like a cross between the Tin Man in
The Wizard of Oz
and a merman with cauliflower ears, and not even an early appearance by the actor Hywel Bennett could save them from ridicule.

Most severely affected was the brief sequence set in a haunted house, familiar from the Universal horror films of the 1930s and their imitators, complete with bats, skeletons, ghosts and suits of armour. According to Nation’s original conception, it represented a manifestation of the fears of millions, preconditioned by horror stories to imagine that this was what nightmares looked like. (The Doctor was to cite the work of Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe and W.W. Jacobs as examples.) The house exists, argues the Doctor, ‘in the dark recesses of the human mind. Millions of minds secretly believing that this place really exists. The immense power of those minds, combined together, have
made
this place a reality. It’s a classic house of horrors.’ The Doctor challenges Ian to predict what will happen next, and event follows description, as Ian says a door will creak open and a man will appear saying … And Baron Frankenstein, who has indeed appeared, duly speaks. This playing with narrative was not far removed from some of the ideas in the fourth series of
The Avengers
, broadcast later in the same year, and prefigured the strand of post-modernist horror films that started with
Wes Craven’s New Nightmare
(1994) and
Scream
(1996). It also, somewhat cheekily, elevated the Daleks, busily charging round the haunted house, to the level of classic horror figures like Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster.

The whole sequence, the blurring of the lines of reality, was an intriguing concept, and was possibly suggested by Nation’s recent reading. The first two of his Leslie Charteris
Saint
adaptations to be broadcast (‘Lida’ and ‘Jeannine’) came from the 1949 book
Saint Errant
, which ends with a tale even stranger than ‘The Man Who Liked Ants’. In ‘Dawn’ Simon Templar finds himself, as a real person, apparently caught up in the dream of a bank clerk whom he has never met, but who is addicted to thrillers. A cast of other characters turn up, all of them clichéd figures from the thriller repertoire, leaving Templar to wonder whether this is reality or whether he truly is trapped in a second-hand dream world, and he reflects that the whole thing ‘sounds like one of those stories that fellow Charteris might write’. The climax is reached when a fat man – clearly based on Sydney Greenstreet in
The Maltese Falcon
, and identified by Templar as such – shoots the Saint and kills him. When Templar wakes up alone twelve hours later, still alive and with no sign of any of the characters he has encountered, he concludes that it has all been his own dream. Until he checks out the address of the bank clerk and finds that, having been in a coma for three days, the man died last night, recovering consciousness just long enough to shout something about a saint’.