The Man Who Invented the Daleks (32 page)

At this point, Nation’s fervour seems to have evaporated a little as he realised the scale of the undertaking to which he had committed himself. Previously he had written to a brief, following a structure already laid down, using central characters who already existed; even the pilot for
The Daleks
had been based on previous work. Now he was facing an entirely new proposition: the creation from scratch of a programme that was intended to be the foundation for an entire series, sustainable for potentially dozens of episodes. And he was committed to do it not once but twice, in the space of less than two months. Worrying too about how a series of his own creation would work out in practice (how many episodes, for example, would he write himself?), he told Osborn at the beginning of January that he didn’t think he could meet the delivery dates for the two programmes and that it would take till March to get them both finished. That, replied Osborn, ‘is leaving things so late as to almost constitute a crisis so far as we are concerned over production’. It was agreed therefore that the
Beyond Omega
project be withdrawn, and that Nation should concentrate solely on his script for
Robert Baldick.
Delivered almost on time, it was immediately accepted, and by June 1972 it was in production.

The title went through various permutations in its early stages, including
The Incredible Dr Baldick
and
The Amazing Robert Baldick
, before settling on its final form,
The Incredible Robert Baldick.
What didn’t change, though, was the name of the protagonist, for Nation had overcome the problem of finding new names for his characters – a familiar chore for all prolific television writers – by borrowing that of a friend. The real Dr Robert Baldick, an Oxford academic specialising in French literature, agreed to his name being used for Nation’s latest creation, apparently amused by the concept of being associated with a fictional character. Unfortunately, however, he died in April 1972, before the programme was broadcast, and although his widow was content for the agreement to be honoured, his son – also named Robert Baldick, and then studying for a PhD – was less happy about his name being used in this context. For several weeks in the summer of 1972, with filming already complete, the younger Baldick was in discussions with the BBC, seeking to have the show retitled and ultimately threatening to obtain a court injunction to achieve this end. While refusing to accept that there truly was a legal case here, Andrew Osborn eventually conceded that, although it was too late to change the pilot, the name would be amended – probably to Baldwick – were a series to develop. In the meantime, the uncertainty had been a major factor in the rescheduling of the programme: originally intended as the first of three shows in a short
Drama Playhouse
season, due to be shown on 23 August, it was instead placed at the end of the run on 6 September.

At the time, the rescheduling seemed of little significance. The
Drama Playhouse
strand, broadcast at 8.10 p.m. on Wednesday nights on BBC1, attracted strong audiences and had an excellent track record for launching new programmes. Four of the six pilots previously screened had spawned their own series –
Codename, The Regiment, The Befrienders
and
The Onedin Line
– and great hopes were held out for the new season, which included
Sutherland’s Law
and
The Venturers
in addition to
The Incredible Robert Baldick
, all of them produced by Anthony Coburn, who had written the first ever episodes of
Doctor Who.
And indeed the ratio of winners continued:
Sutherland’s Law
eventually ran to forty-six episodes spread over five seasons, while
The Venturers
managed a single season of ten episodes.
The Incredible Robert Baldick
was less fortunate; despite a repeat screening in February 1974, no follow-up to the pilot was ever commissioned.

The problems started with the programme’s new broadcast date. The Olympic Games, staged that year in Munich, were entering their final week when, just before dawn on 5 September 1972, nine members of the Palestinian terrorist group Black September infiltrated the Olympic Village, shot dead two members of the Israeli team and took a further nine athletes hostage. An increasingly desperate siege lasted all day and finally ended just after midnight, when in a failed rescue attempt all nine hostages were killed together with a West German policeman, as well as five of the gunmen. It was one of the most spectacular terrorist actions the world had thus far witnessed, complete with live footage. For the first time in its history, the Olympic movement suspended competition, instead holding a memorial service to the dead athletes, before resuming in a subdued atmosphere.

British television responded, as it generally does in such situations, by rearranging its schedules in an attempt to show it was aware of the enormity of events. Among the programmes lost in the rush to demonstrate relevance was
The Incredible Robert Baldick
, its broadcast postponed to a 9.25 p.m. slot on Monday 2 October, where it was sandwiched between the
Nine O’Clock News
and
International Show Jumping
from the Empire Pool, Wembley. It was watched by a fair-sized audience of 6.6 million viewers, but it looked a little isolated in the schedules, and undoubtedly suffered from being up against the popular ITV agony-aunt series
Kate
, then in the midst of its third season, and the might of
News at Ten.
Whether it would have fared better in its original time slot – taken instead by
Sutherland’s Law
– is arguable, but the rescheduling certainly didn’t help its cause.

The fact that the show didn’t grow into a series was regrettable, for despite some flaws its premise was eminently sound. Dr Robert Baldick (played by Robert Hardy) is a mid-Victorian scientist of enormous private wealth – presumably inherited, since he’s a baronet living in a manor house in Baldick Park – who is also an independent investigator of mysteries. ‘He cannot resist the inexplicable,’ explains one of his assistants. ‘Almost any happening qualifies for his interest so long as it is out of the ordinary. He’s a man of insatiable curiosity.’ The man adds that his employer prefers to be known as Dr Baldick rather than Sir Robert: ‘After all, he does have the highest scientific qualifications in the country.’ (This is not, it has to be said, Nation’s best writing; even allowing for the necessity of setting the scene and establishing character in a pilot, there is a prosaic quality to it, quite apart from the silliness of those ‘highest scientific qualifications in the country’.) Baldick is accompanied by his valet, Thomas Wingham (Julian Holloway), who happens to be an expert researcher with a sound grasp of archaic languages, and by his gamekeeper, Caleb Selling (John Rhys-Davies), who can bring his knowledge of nature to bear on the case in hand. A thoroughly meritocratic type of Victorian, Baldick treats these two not as servants but as colleagues, albeit junior colleagues who are never quite up to speed, though this is largely because their master shares Sherlock Holmes’s habit of not revealing what he has deduced until after the denouement: ‘All in good time, Thomas, all in good time!’

Armed only with intelligence and enthusiasm, and adorned with the facial hair considered appropriate for the nineteenth century (Caleb has the edge on the others, sporting a pair of sideburns that would have been envied by early 1970s pop stars like Ray Dorset of Mungo Jerry and Trevor Bolder of the Spiders from Mars), the three heroes travel to the site of their investigations in Baldick’s private train, a luxuriously furnished affair known as the Tsar, since it was originally built for Nicholas I of Russia. Their only other companion is a pet owl named Cosmo.

All of this is attractive and appealing, suggesting one of the fifty-seven varieties of Edwardian detective that had recently been collected by Hugh Greene in book form as
The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes
(1970), a volume which had subsequently inspired the Thames Television series of the same title. Among the characters featured there was William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghost-Finder, who investigated seemingly paranormal events, some of which had rational explanations while others turned out to be supernatural manifestations. Carnacki was the last in a line of psychic doctors dating back to Sheridan Le Fanu’s Dr Hesselius in the 1860s and reaching maturity in the Edwardian era with Algernon Blackwood’s Dr John Silence and others, before starting to look merely quaint and out-of-date in the aftermath of the First World War and the rise of Freudianism. Robert Baldick can be seen as sitting squarely in this now defunct tradition, while also sharing something with William Hartnell’s incarnation of the Doctor: another Edwardian figure intent on bringing his intellect and curiosity to bear on unknown situations.

The pilot episode, ‘Never Come Night’, is similarly promising, with an eclectic blend of Gothic, detective, fantasy and science fiction genres. It starts in Hammer Films style on a dark and stormy night with the death of a servant girl, savagely beaten to death in a ruined abbey. The local squire and the vicar call in Baldick, for this is not the first violent death in the vicinity of the abbey. ‘Local legend has it that the deaths go back into prehistory,’ explains the vicar. ‘There are written records covering the last two hundred years, and documented proof of at least forty-three deaths.’ As he excavates the site, Baldick argues that there is something in the place itself that stores up fear: ‘An accumulation of terror that has festered in men’s minds for all of time and has given this place a real power of evil.’ That power is unleashed on those who venture too near during hours of darkness, manifesting itself in the form of the victim’s personal phobia. The dead servant girl, for example, had a fear of being beaten, thanks to an abusive father, while Baldick himself, terrified of cobwebs since he was a child, finds himself alone at night in the abbey becoming enveloped in a web. (In the original proposal, the vicar also had a fear of snakes, and the squire of leeches.)

Summoning up all his reserves of will, Baldick is able to rationalise his fear and thus overcome it sufficiently that he can carry out his intention of burning the place down. He concludes that the evil here pre-dates humanity, and the suggestion is of a supernatural force, though the final scene opens up an alternative, rational explanation that could take us into the realms of science fiction. For Baldick has discovered, in the course of their digging, a strange object; made of an unknown metal, it comprises some kind of electrical circuit and a keyboard of mysterious design. ‘Something from the past,’ ponders Baldick. ‘Or the future?’

There are elements here reminiscent of Nigel Kneale’s 1958 television drama
Quatermass and the Pit
: the depiction of a localised evil pre-dating humanity and requiring excavation, the explanation of paranormal events as the product of alien technology, even the deconstruction of place-names. The abbey is set in Duvel Woods, which were originally known as Uvel, the Middle English for evil, just as Hobbs Lane in
Quatermass and the Pit
was originally Hob’s Lane, Hob being an old name for the Devil. There is too, in this tale of ‘a physical manifestation of a mental condition’, a memory of the house of horrors created by Nation in the
Doctor Who
story ‘The Chase’, a place that ‘exists in the dark recesses of the human mind’. And, of course, Nation’s recurrent interest in phobias is central to the plot. The fear of cobwebs and spiders expressed by Baldick had been a key part of the original script for ‘The Chase’, with the Doctor explaining to Ian that such phobias derive from early memories: ‘All your life, you have believed that a spider running across your hand is an unpleasant experience. As an intelligent adult, you know it can’t hurt you. Despite that, your earliest childhood memories dominate. You have an unfounded – pre-conditioned – fear of spiders.’ This was dropped from the screened version of ‘The Chase’, but Nation was reluctant to lose anything, and the idea resurfaces in
Robert Baldick.

But perhaps the most obvious association in the mind of a modern viewer is with Nigel Kneale’s
The Stone Tape
, a similar blend of science and the supernatural, in which the walls of an old mansion record the violence that has happened there. Any such resemblance, however, was entirely coincidental. Kneale’s play (directed by Peter Sasdy, who had earlier made ‘The Caves of Steel’ and ‘A Kiss Before Dying’) was not broadcast until Christmas 1972 on BBC2, and had not even been commissioned when Nation delivered his script.

Despite all the potential of the character, the pilot episode didn’t entirely convince. For the most part it was a stylish, well-produced piece. A crane shot of the drive to Baldick Park was impressive enough to have come from an ITC production, while Baldick’s private train – courtesy of the Severn Valley Railway – was shown in all its finery, steaming through the English countryside, almost as though it were a period parody of the luxury cars we had seen in those action hero series. (‘Should add the railway nuts to the horoscope consulters and swell the ratings even further,’ wrote critic Clive James in the
Observer.
) But there was a strange lack of drama at both beginning and end that fatally undermined the piece. The title sequence was so casual that it had no theme tune and used captions that looked like an amateur slideshow, while what should have been the climactic burning of the abbey was low key to the point of being perfunctory. Nor was the final reveal of the unearthed object from the future given the weight that it deserved, hurried over as though time had got the better of the director.

A more serious difficulty, since those problems could be addressed in later episodes, was the casting of Robert Hardy as Baldick. A respected, highly competent actor, Hardy was solid and believable, but was simply too smooth a presence for a character who needed a fair degree of eccentricity if he was ever going to become an audience favourite. There was insufficient intensity, an absence of quirk, in the depiction. The ghost-finder Carnacki in Thames’s
The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes
the previous year had been portrayed by Donald Pleasance, and Baldick similarly needed someone rather less emollient than Hardy. Nor did the two sidekicks add sufficient colour to the proceedings, either in the writing or in the acting.