The Man Who Invented the Daleks (29 page)

The prime shapers of the show by this stage were Albert Fennell and Brian Clemens, but when Rigg decided to leave the series in 1967, the company decided to make a clean break in the hope of returning to a style that at least approached reality. Fennell and Clemens were fired, and replaced by John Bryce, who had been script editor and then producer in the earlier years. He recruited a Canadian actress, Linda Thorson, to be Steed’s new partner, Tara King, and began to film the next season. After just three episodes, however, the results were deemed to be unacceptable and a call went out to Fennell and Clemens, the latter of whom was on holiday, touring England and Wales: ‘Every time I got to another hotel there was a message saying: Could you phone? And eventually, after about two-and-a-halfweeks, I did phone, and they said: Could you come back?’ The two men returned to find that of the three shows already filmed, only one met with their approval, ‘Invasion of the Earthmen’. And since that was written by Terry Nation, he was given the job as script editor. He was expecting at the time to be writing further episodes of
Department S
, but the chance of joining the production team on a show that had been a regular fixture in the television top ten for seven years was clearly too good a chance to miss.

‘It got wilder,’ was Nation’s memory of that final season of
The Avengers.
‘It probably got too wild by the time we finished. There was no other market for that sort of thing. The acid test for our show was: what is the story? Now turn it on its head! Instead of seeing somebody shot, we would see the chalked outline of the body. Then somebody would walk in, get shot and fall into the chalked outline. Always turn it on its head, always make it more and more ridiculous – but then justify it.’

Despite his background in writing comedy, this kind of spoof was not the kind of thing for which Nation was primarily known, though there had been moments to suggest it could easily become part of his repertoire. ‘The episode Epitaph for a Hero’ in
The Baron
, for example, had opened in a cemetery after a funeral, as a woman arrives, spits in the open grave and leaves. She is followed by two men, one of whom – another of Nation’s loquacious Welshmen, played here by Artro Morris – delivers an effusive eulogy: ‘In this black hour of fond remembrance, when the great sorrow, dark as a raven’s wing, swoops into the memory and clouds the eyes with tears as cold as the angel of death himself, we call back in gentle memories the man who was so dear. Kind, decent, honest and true friend that he was, a man of infinite goodness, his forgiveness for those he loved was endless.’ During the latter part of this speech, the barely suppressed giggles of the two men have built into uncontrollable laughter, and they depart in a state of near-hysteria, as the title sequence brings a moment of pause. The story that follows is a routine bank heist, but there remains an element of strangeness. Much of the action takes place in a fairground House of Horrors that’s closed for renovation, and one scene is set in a steam bath, where Mannering encounters a man complaining that it’s not hot enough: ‘We must have more heat, so we can get used to the flames of eternal damnation. It should be hotter, much hotter.’ None of which would have been out of place in an episode of
The Avengers.

In his scripts for the show, Nation clearly enjoyed the freedom to laugh. ‘Legacy of Death’ bounced ideas off John Huston’s 1941 film
The Maltese Falcon
, with Stratford Johns giving a magnificent performance in the Sydney Greenstreet role (his character is named Sidney Street, in case we didn’t spot the reference) as a man on the trail of ‘a pearl of great price, a monstrous pearl, black as night and spawned up by some gigantic mollusc before time began, the largest, the most priceless pearl on earth’. (This is the pearl that ends up being dissolved in wine, in contravention of the words of Leslie Charteris.) The over-writing is entirely characteristic of a script in which Nation displays a glorious lack of restraint. ‘We’re near it now,’ Sidney pants as his delirious, fevered dreams appear to be reaching fruition. ‘I feel it, I smell it, all around like the perfume from some rare and exotic blossom comes the sweet smell of success. Victory is near, we have but to reach out and grasp, to take that delicate blossom in our hands and crush its petals to inhale the perfume of triumph.’ Not even Steed is immune; when Tara, who is driving the two of them, asks where they’re going, he replies: ‘Where indeed? Philosophers have asked that question for a thousand years. Quo vadis? Whither goest thou? Man’s eternal search for his destiny. You may well ask where are we going.’ So she asks again: ‘Where are we going?’ And he answers: ‘Turn left, next lights.’

In ‘Take Me to Your Leader’ – a shaggy dog tale in which Steed and Tara follow a talking attaché case around London – they encounter a precocious schoolgirl (played by Elisabeth Robillard) who possesses the secret key that they’re pursuing, and who happily declares herself open to bribery. ‘Twenty-five pounds invested in blue chip equities will show a high yield by the time I’m twenty-one,’ she explains. Steed is unimpressed and reminds her that money isn’t everything, to which she replies in wide-eyed innocence: ‘Oh Mr Steed, don’t shatter a little girl’s illusions.’ The episode ‘Thingumajig’ was less successful, concerning a mad scientist who has developed metal boxes that feed off electricity, move around of their own free will and emit a high-voltage charge that kills. The concept was fine – and Iain Cuthbertson as the scientist gave it his best shot – but the story foundered on the fact that small featureless boxes are neither frightening nor entertaining as a visual image. There was, however, room for a restatement of an argument from
The Caves of Steel
as Steed explains how vulnerable modern life is in the face of a threat to the electricity supply: ‘Take a city. London, for instance. Its appetite for electricity is insatiable. It gulps up millions of kilowatts and converts them into heat and power and light.’ It was a theme to which Nation was to return.

Other favourite concerns turn up in ‘Invasion of the Earthmen’, where Steed and Tara investigate an institution called the Alpha Academy, run on strict military lines – one might almost say as a hive – by Brigadier Brett (William Lucas), who is busily recruiting a private army of youthful soldiers. When their training is complete, he freezes them in cryogenic suspension, so that when Earth begins to explore and settle on other planets, he will have his troops ready to conquer the space colonies. It’s a ludicrous proposition, of course, but Nation doesn’t simply stay with the caricature of science fiction, instead expanding into a parody of his own action tales. The Academy is surrounded by a protective zone full of snares and booby-traps, snakes and scorpions, and when Tara successfully lasts for an hour outside, the Brigadier is impressed. ‘I congratulate you on your powers of survival,’ he tells her, and she shrugs: ‘They’re instinctive.’ There is also a tunnel beneath the Academy, whose function is explained by one of the cadets: ‘The Brigadier says everybody’s got a secret fear. In that tunnel you come face-to-face with that fear.’ Inevitably Tara and Steed end up in this fully equipped Room 101, where they find rats, spiders and a concrete tube designed to engender claustrophobia, as well as snares, acid pools and other hazards.

How much influence Nation had over the last season of
The Avengers
, beyond the six scripts with which he is credited, is uncertain. The show had become very much Clemens’s baby and, although he was now officially the producer, he appears to have retained many of the script editor’s responsibilities. He commissioned Nation to write ‘Noon Doomsday’, a spoof of the movie
High Noon
, but was disappointed by the result: ‘He turned in a script that was really inferior. I totally rewrote it. Although Terry’s got the sole credit, there’s not really a word of his in any of that episode. He hadn’t been rewritten like that in a long time, and it was a shock to his system. And I must say that thereafter he wrote several
Avengers
episodes and I never had to rewrite them. I forced him to get off his arse really, and do it.’ No one questioned Nation’s ability to write well when he tried, but even he seemed to have doubts about whether he was capable of stepping into a more supervisory role. ‘I am not a good script editor,’ he admitted, many years later. ‘If somebody sends me a script, it could be absolutely perfect, but it wouldn’t be my way of doing it, and I would tend to rewrite until it reflected my way of thinking, which is not a good thing to do.’ Clemens’s take was more direct: ‘He wasn’t suited to what I call executive decisions.’

In any event, this final season of the show was, and remains, much less celebrated than its immediate predecessors. The troubled start to the series had left Fennell and Clemens with Linda Thorson already cast as the replacement for Diana Rigg, a decision on which Clemens was lukewarm at best: ‘I wouldn’t have cast her. She developed into a good actress, but she was too young and she was Canadian. And Canadians notoriously don’t have a British sense of humour.’ In an attempt to find another companion figure (because ‘Steed’s got to strike sparks off someone’), he revealed for the first time their superior. Known only as Mother and played by Patrick Newell, he was a wheelchair-bound man who swung around his room by means of straps hanging from the ceiling, an image Clemens borrowed from Michael Powell’s 1961 film
The Queen’s Guard.
The British critics were divided both by Tara King and by Mother, though mostly the goodwill towards the show carried it through. ‘The programme – arguably the best series produced by British television – is as good as ever,’ was the verdict of the once and future Conservative MP, Julian Critchley, in a review in
The Times.
Dennis Spooner remembered that the imminent end of the show liberated the writers: ‘We went really weird, because we knew there wasn’t going to be any more.’ And Clemens himself thought that the scripts for the final season were ‘the best of all. Much more variety, ingenuity, originality.’ It was a view shared in retrospect by Patrick Macnee, though he hadn’t been enthusiastic at the time: ‘They rate as some of the very best episodes that were ever made.’

In America, however, where the show had been a big hit, and had even been nominated for an Emmy in the last two seasons, the ratings fell off sharply – partly, it is argued, because it was scheduled up against
Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In
, then at the peak of its popularity. When
The Avengers
was cancelled by the American ABC network in 1969, it was clear that the show wasn’t going to be recommissioned, and the last episode, ‘Bizarre’, ended with Steed and Tara being blasted into space, as Mother turned to the camera to reassure us: ‘They’ll be back, you can depend on it.’

Lew Grade’s ITC was also having difficulties in America, and had been struggling to find a winning formula for some time. A string of series, including
Man in a Suitcase
(1967) and
Strange Report
(1968), as well as
The Champions
and
Department S
, had failed to make it to a second season and – despite strong overseas sales elsewhere – had met with only moderate success in the crucial American market. Meanwhile, the company’s two guaranteed winners had by now finished production:
Danger Man
when Patrick McGoohan quit in order to develop the more experimental series
The Prisoner
(1967), and
The Saint
when Roger Moore finally decided in 1968 that the show had run its course. What was needed, evidently, was one unmistakably big, sure-fire hit, and in 1970 Robert S. Baker began discussions with Grade about a new series to be titled
The Friendly Persuaders
and built around the partnership of an English aristocrat and a self-made American businessman. Both would be wealthy playboys, sufficiently bored with their lives of leisure that they would be prepared to team up for the usual crime-busting adventures.

Roger Moore was always intended to play the English half of the pairing and, despite his reluctance, Grade soon had him on board, airily dismissing the actor’s move into films (with the 1970 classic
The Man Who Haunted Himself
), and insisting that the earning of dollars was a patriotic duty. ‘The country needs the money,’ argued the newly knighted Sir Lew. ‘Think of your Queen.’ A more important and difficult consideration was the casting of the American actor who would join him. ITC had used American leads in series before, but they had hardly been A-list stars: Steve Forrest in
The Baron
, Stuart Damon in
The Champions
, Richard Bradford in
Man in a Suitcase.
This time, there was to be no such skimping. Grade had authorised a budget of £100,000 per episode, making the series the most expensive drama in British television history, and he needed a major figure to sell it around the world. After some consideration of Rock Hudson and Glenn Ford, it was finally agreed that the ideal candidate was Tony Curtis, still a big name internationally, even if his screen work had, with the notable exception of
The Boston Strangler
(1968), been undistinguished in recent years. Robert S. Baker, Roger Moore and Terry Nation – the latter already recruited to be script editor and associate producer of the series – were sent to Hollywood to persuade him to do the show.

Moore’s main memory of that encounter was the British trio’s awareness that Curtis was ‘the head of the anti-smoking lobby in America’ at a time when they all smoked. Eventually, some way into the meeting at Curtis’s house, Moore plucked up the courage to ask if it was all right to light up. An ostentatious search for an ashtray ensued, while their host used the time to pass round anti-smoking propaganda – pictures of diseased lungs and the like – to his guests. The meeting was a success, but the moral high ground so carefully established by the American star looked a little less secure when Curtis subsequently flew into Heathrow to start filming and was promptly arrested for possession of cannabis. Had he not passed a handful of pills to production executive Johnny Goodman just before going through Customs, he might have faced even more negative publicity and a harsher penalty than the small fine he actually received.