The Man Who Invented the Daleks (27 page)

Nation’s relationship with Whitaker ended with that play and the two men did not work together again. Paul Fishman, who as a child had witnessed some of the writing sessions that produced the Souvenir books under the direction of his father, Jack, was only surprised that the partnership had lasted so long. He recalled Nation struggling to deal with the starchier end of the BBC and, perhaps under the pressures of feeding the fire of Dalekmania, actually coming to blows with Whitaker: ‘There was a terrible fight. Terry took out David Whitaker. It was because he couldn’t handle this Oxbridge attitude. It was the first time I’d ever seen anybody hit somebody.’ It should be remembered, however, that Whitaker had been, alongside Verity Lambert, the first champion of the Daleks at a time when the BBC hierarchy was distinctly unimpressed. ‘The Daleks were a smashing invention,’ he said later. ‘I would say they’re worthy of Jules Verne.’ And he was adamant that, even if it might appear to focus on forbidden bug-eyed monsters, the first serial had fitted perfectly within the remit given to
Doctor Who
by Sydney Newman: ‘Actually, that Dalek story was educational in a subtle way it showed the dangers of war, pacifism and racial hatred. It contained many admirable and idealistic truths in it, and it was also a jolly good adventure story.’ It was the encouragement, rather than the altercation, that Nation tended to remember: ‘I got along well with David,’ he reflected in 1995. ‘He supported me very thoroughly.’

Notwithstanding the outbreak of Dalekmania the previous Christmas, 1965 was the great year of the Daleks: they appeared in a record fourteen episodes of
Doctor Who
that year, as well as in the cinema, on stage, in comics and in two books. And emerging from all that work was a pattern that was clearly related to Nation’s comments in August about the possibility of an American television series of the Daleks. The intention to break away from
Doctor Who
was self-evident.

It was not, however, until the late spring of 1966 that any firm steps were taken to make this a reality. Beryl Vertue had attempted to persuade American television that a stand-alone series could be viable. ‘I had a go at that,’ she remembered. ‘I tried to talk about science fiction, and how well
Doctor Who
had gone in the UK.’ But the initiative only really got off the ground through her contact with a toy manufacturer, Fred Alper, who was intrigued by the merchandising opportunities if the creatures could be launched in the States. Nation formed a new company, Lynsted Film Productions Ltd, and he and Alper met with BBC Enterprises to pitch the idea of producing a pilot for American television, with the hope that the corporation would come in as joint partners. There was sufficient interest for Nation to develop a storyline, which he then worked up into a full script for a half-hour pilot episode, ‘The Destroyers’, featuring an SSS team that centred on Sara Kingdom, Captain Jason Corey (evidently drawn from the same source as Marc Cory in ‘Mission to the Unknown’) and an android named Mark Seven.

The concept for
The Daleks
, as the series was to be called, was fairly novel, pitching a team of security agents against a single race of alien monsters, with a female lead character, but it was not immediately clear how this could be sustained over an entire series. Certainly the pilot gave little indication of breaking new ground, relying instead on characteristic Nation elements: jungles, caves, killer vegetation. Considerably more problematic, from the point of view of the BBC, was that when Nation submitted his script in October 1966, it came with an estimated budget of £42,000, appropriate for an American production but wildly excessive by the corporation’s standards. Even then there were doubts that it could be brought in on budget. There was concern too that the peak of the craze had already passed (‘I have very serious reservations as to the audience pull of the Daleks in the UK at this late stage,’ noted a senior figure in BBC Enterprises), leaving the financial success of the project entirely dependent on the unknown American market.

Aware of the pressures of time – it was proposed to film the pilot in December, ready for the buying season in American television the following March – Fred Alper had a contract drawn up that would split the investment costs for the pilot and a subsequent series between the BBC on the one side and himself and Lynsted Park on the other. But the BBC, panicked by how fast the commitment was escalating into a series, got cold feet and backed out of the project altogether. By the end of 1966 it was clear that they no longer had an interest, save in the merchandising rights that might result, and over the first few months of 1967 discussions took place about what the level of these would be. Still talking about raising the finance elsewhere, Nation visited America in search of potential partners. ‘I went to the United States,’ he remembered. ‘I went there to hustle and got very close to doing it.’ But by now the impetus had been lost, and the entire proposal slowly withered away during the course of the year. It had, however, come remarkably close to realisation. There had been talk of interest from the American network ABC and, in a mistaken belief that the BBC were more committed than they actually were, Nation had even booked time for the shoot in Twickenham Studios, where construction work had begun on the sets.

Meanwhile, there were new Dalek serials on
Doctor Who:
‘The Power of the Daleks’ (1966) and ‘The Evil of the Daleks’ (1967). Nation had been given the first option of writing the stories, in line with his agreement with the BBC, but was unable to commit himself to the project and agreed instead that they should be written by David Whitaker. Nation was later to express his disapproval of the serials (‘I didn’t like them and I responded very badly to them’), and his attitude was not much ameliorated by the fact that he received little more than a nominal sum for the use of his creation: he was paid £15 for each broadcast that featured the creatures in a script written by someone else, which even the Head of Business at Television Enterprises was later to acknowledge was ‘a ludicrously small fee’.

These were intended to be the last ever Dalek stories in
Doctor Who
, leaving the field clear for Nation’s proposed series, but the continuing importance of the monsters to the show was demonstrated when William Hartnell left the programme in 1966 and the concept of regeneration was hurriedly invented to allow for a transition to another actor. Just as the Daleks had been used to smooth the departures of Susan, and then of Ian and Barbara, so they were employed in ‘The Power of the Daleks’ to make the transformation from Hartnell to Patrick Troughton easier for viewers to absorb. Even so, viewing figures, which had been falling in the later Hartnell stories, did not regain the peaks to which they had been pushed a couple of years earlier by ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’.

With their apparent farewell from
Doctor Who
and the abandonment of the solo series, it seemed by the end of 1967 that the era of the Daleks had drawn to its close. There were no more annuals forthcoming from Souvenir Press, the idea of a third movie had fallen through, and the comic strip had also come to an end – having moved from
TV Century 21
to
TV Comic
at the beginning of 1967, with a different writer and artist, it had lasted only a few months. In December that year, Nation did agree in principle to the idea of a new story for the 1968 season, but refused the BBC’s suggestion of pitching his creations against the new monsters on the block, the Cybermen, and nothing came of the proposal. At their height, the Daleks had ensured the survival and then the success of
Doctor Who
, and had at times completely eclipsed the programme itself, but now they were finished, and the series was continuing.

They had had a good run, and it’s unarguable that Nation had reaped enormous rewards from their glory years, but the failure to secure an American series was a bitter personal blow. ‘Terry was really ambitious,’ said Beryl Vertue. ‘He wanted to be international.’ By that he meant, as did all his British contemporaries, that he wanted to make it in America, where the real money and prestige was to be found. From 1966 onwards, as BBC Enterprises began serious efforts to sell
Doctor Who
around the world, he received a steady stream of income from sales to dozens of countries, from Australia to Zambia, but that wasn’t the same thing as breaking the States. And it wasn’t his show. He was also receiving only the standard BBC royalties due to a writer, an arrangement that made no allowance for the significance or merit of the work; ‘The Daleks’ earned a little more when it was sold to Jamaica than did ‘The Keys of Marinus’ in the same territory, but only because it comprised seven episodes rather than six.

None of this was a substitute for the real thing. In a career as long as Nation’s there were bound to be any number of missed opportunities, projects that never materialised, but the failure of
The Daleks
was perhaps the biggest and most significant of all. Yet it’s not easy to imagine it being much of a hit, even if the series had been commissioned by a US network. The verdict of the BBC hierarchy on the pilot script was encouraging enough but was hardly a ringing acclamation of a major new piece of work: ‘representative children’s science fiction’, thought Shaun Sutton, the head of drama serials; ‘a typical – and therefore excellent –
Doctor Who
-type story’, was the verdict of David Attenborough, then the controller of BBC2, as he turned down the idea of taking the proposed series for his channel. These were experienced broadcasters who knew how big the Daleks had become, and still their enthusiasm was strictly limited.

Even if the show had made it on to American television, it seems unlikely that it would have lasted for more than one series, if only because the variations that could be wrung out of the situation were so limited. The formats of British shows that had translated successfully to America, such as
The Avengers
and
The Saint
, had a flexibility that made them capable of almost endless permutations; the Daleks, a purely evil creation with no shades of grey, were a much more restricted proposition. To take a slightly unfair example from a different field, the Daleks had for a moment at Christmas 1964 rivalled the popularity even of the Beatles, but in terms of creativity they had been left a long way behind. The Beatles had then been singing ‘I Feel Fine’; by the time Nation was looking for investors in
The Daleks
, they had moved on to ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. The Daleks were capable of no such development.

For they were ultimately handicapped by their voices and their lack of visual response. There was a very definite limit to how long a viewer could take a conversation between Daleks, as Nation seemed to have recognised in his scripts for
Doctor Who.
Unusually for that series, the Daleks were seldom the sole alien life-form on display, their lack of variety being compensated for by the presence of the Thals, or the Aridians and the Mechanoids, or the Vargas and the Visians, while in ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’ the Robomen had fulfilled the same function. In purely technical terms, there were related problems; as Richard Martin pointed out, the director had to work hard at camera angles just ‘to give them a sort of dynamic that they themselves did not possess’. Had the special effects available at the time been capable of reproducing the full Dalek empire depicted in
TV Century 21
, it might have been different, but they weren’t, and however big the budget seemed from a British perspective, it was always going to look a bit cheap compared to American shows.

And a failure in America would surely have finished the Daleks off for good. It would have been extremely difficult for the BBC to countenance them traipsing back, metaphorical tail between metaphorical legs, to
Doctor Who
. Paradoxically, the collapse of
The Daleks
probably ensured the ultimate survival of the monsters. Untainted by their likely malfunction elsewhere, they remained in the storage lockers of the TARDIS, ready for exhumation at a later date. The truth was that, without their original and greatest foe, they were never going to be as much fun on their own. ‘The Daleks have no value outside
Doctor Who
,’ was Terrance Dicks’s conclusion. ‘Terry made several attempts to launch the Daleks by themselves, and none of them were really successful. They’re
Doctor Who’
s main monster, and they’re inviolable in that position, but that’s the only position they’ve got.’

A
lthough
The Daleks
was never to materialise, the amount of time and energy that Terry Nation put into the project can be gauged by the fact that between April 1967 and October 1968 – the best part of eighteen months – not a single new script for any series on British television bore his name. It was his longest absence from the broadcast media since
It’s a Fair Cop
had aired back in 1961, though he did appear in person at the beginning of 1968 on the documentary programme
Whicker’s World
, in which he was interviewed by Alan Whicker at Lynsted Park; surrounded by Dalek props from the Amicus movies, he looked as though he were reaffirming his status as a major television writer, even if there was presently no new material on screen.

Those eighteen months, as he put aside the dashed hopes of an American show and returned to the world of British television, saw a major shift in the cultural mood. The rise of liberal and radical politics had been one of the defining features of the decade thus far, reaching a peak in the spring of 1968 as the movement against the Vietnam War hit critical levels in America amid a spate of riots, as a general strike paralysed France and as the reformist government of Alexander Dubcek in Czechoslovakia seemed to offer state socialism a way forward from totalitarianism. Immediately thereafter, however, came a powerful reaction. Richard M. Nixon was elected US President, the party of Charles de Gaulle won a landslide election victory in France, and Soviet tanks rolled into Prague to crush dissent, while the Conservative MP Enoch Powell made race relations the most controversial issue in British politics with his ‘rivers of blood’ speech. As if to emphasise the victory of conservatism, two great liberal heroes, Martin Luther King Jr and Robert F. Kennedy, were assassinated.