The Man Who Invented the Daleks (40 page)

The distance that Nation had come as a writer over the last fifteen years was highlighted when the episode ‘The Future Hour’ was scheduled immediately after a rare television screening of
What a Whopper
(‘written by Terry Nation,’ noted the
Guardian
, ‘who’s seen to better effect in the next programme’), but the overall tone of pessimism was not unprecedented. Ever since he had encouraged his most famous monsters to run rampant through the streets of swinging London in ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’, Nation had been exploring ever darker material and, left to himself,
Survivors
too would have been even more bleak. He wrote seven episodes and helped create the shape of the overall series, but four episodes were also contributed by another writer, Jack Ronder, and two by Nation’s old friend Clive Exton, writing here under the pseudonym M.K. Jeeves.

There was no problem with the latter – Exton was a great television writer and one of his scripts, ‘Law and Order’, is among the most celebrated of the
Survivors
episodes – but Ronder’s work seemed to go against the grain of Nation’s vision. It was not simply that he wrote the episodes that saw the community established, giving a more domestic focus to the story, but that the emphasis was a little wayward. In his story ‘Revenge’, Vic Thatcher and Anne Tranter meet again for the first time since she left him for dead in their quarry hideaway (his legs had been crushed under a tractor), and the episode rapidly descends into melodrama with Anne, a character full of interesting potential, now cast in the simple role of soap opera bitch. The wheelchair-bound Vic, meanwhile, has been given the job of teaching the children in the community, and there is the beginning of a discussion about what should constitute education in these circumstances – whether learning sums is necessary, for example, or the history of ancient Rome – but such concerns are soon forgotten when Anne tries to murder him before he can exact his revenge on her.

It was a long way from the harsh reality that Nation heard about from his cousin, a paratrooper captured by the Germans at the 1944 Battle of Arnhem and marched off to the east. ‘One night, many years afterwards when he was drunk, he told me about it,’ remembered Nation. ‘This was survival’, he said, ‘when your best friends, the people you care for, became your enemy. If they had a potato in their pocket, you’d want to steal it because that was survival. I knew the drive to live was very powerful and that’s what I wanted to investigate.’ In 1972 he had talked about his ambitions for his own work, suggesting a certain impatience with the restrictions he felt under and a desire to move away from escapism: ‘I’d like to be able to write a show that made people turn off on occasions, to feel some emotion, either hate or loathing or fear or disgust or something. But really to feel something again. I would just like to outrage and shock and horrify and make people know they’re watching something on television, to know at least that they’re alive.’

Survivors
was a starker piece of work even than ‘Genesis of the Daleks’, but it never lived up to his aspirations, and was never likely to, given its time slot of 8.10 p.m. on a Wednesday evening, before the 9 p.m. watershed that was intended to demarcate family viewing from more adult themes. There wasn’t much appetite at the BBC for such an extreme tone anyway. Even as Nation was writing the pilot in 1973, the corporation pulled the plug on Nigel Kneale’s fourth and final
Quatermass
story, which had already started preliminary filming, ostensibly for budgetary reasons but also, as Kneale saw it, because the depiction of a near-future Britain torn apart by rival gangs of thugs, vigilantes and security forces was too much for the BBC to take; it ‘didn’t suit their image at the time; it was too gloomy’. Nation was aware that he had created a great series and couldn’t help but be disappointed with its realisation: ‘This one was, I thought, important, and I’d like to have done it better, I’d like it to have been a better show.’

Even if the production didn’t quite live up to his concept, however, Nation did have the satisfaction of having finally brought to the screen an original series of his own. After nearly two decades of false starts, dating back to
The Fixers
on radio, and fifteen years after the BBC passed up on
Uncle Selwyn
as a pilot for a proposed television series,
Survivors
was unequivocally his creation, and it had been commissioned for a second season. As it turned out, however, he was to have no further involvement with the show, having fallen out with the producer, Terence Dudley, who was, he declared, ‘thick as a board’. Perhaps even worse, he had also fallen out with an old friend and colleague, Brian Clemens, over claims that he had stolen the idea for
Survivors
in the first place.

T
erry Nation’s problems on
Survivors
started with the selection of a producer for the series.
The Incredible Robert Baldick
had been produced by Anthony Coburn, and Nation discussed the new project with him, since it too was originally intended for the
Drama Playhouse
slot. As it turned out, however, that strand didn’t come back for a fourth season, and anyway
Survivors
rapidly progressed beyond the level of a pilot into a fully fledged series. Coburn left for other shows, and in his place came Terence Dudley, who had earlier produced series such as
Cluff
and
The Men from Room Thirteen
, though his most recent and relevant success had been
Doomwatch
, several episodes of which he also wrote.

Perhaps it was Dudley’s aspirations to writing that helped sour the relationship with Nation, for he came to the series with very definite ideas about how it should be shaped, and few of them matched the original vision. ‘I fell out instantly with the producer, Terence Dudley,’ remembered Nation. ‘He didn’t see it at all. Not at all.’ The problems, he said, began very early on, and he used to cite a pre-production meeting at which Dudley insisted that, in the event of such a massive disaster, the BBC would continue to broadcast. This argument was, in Nation’s view, indicative of the man’s inability to grasp the concept of the series fully, though one might feel that he exaggerated the level of what he viewed as naivety. Dudley’s point was not entirely fanciful, as Nation, to whom the radio had been so important during the war, might perhaps have recognised. A couple of years after
Survivors
, the government and the BBC began working together on plans for how to respond to a nuclear attack, and even got as far as scripting the initial announcements: ‘This is the Wartime Broadcasting Service,’ it was to begin. ‘This country has been attacked with nuclear weapons ...’ It was not unreasonable to assume that, faced with civil disorder following a deadly pandemic, the government would see broadcasting as being among its highest priorities, an essential part of keeping alive at least the illusion of authority.

Nation evidently won the argument, for the BBC is conspicuous by its absence in the series, but it didn’t set the two men off on a good footing. And others involved in the series noticed that Dudley was not a man who easily forgot disputes. Carolyn Seymour, around whose character of Abby the entire first season revolved, ran into problems with the producer even at the stage of contract negotiations. ‘It was a tortuous affair, because I was pushing the envelope a little bit and we were asking for a little bit more money than they were used to paying,’ she recalled. ‘That was one of the problems, that he lost ground, and he had to give up some things he didn’t want to give up.’ Others too fell foul of Dudley, including Clive Exton and the writer Michael J. Bird, who had been commissioned to write three scripts but left the project after the first episode he submitted was rejected.

From Nation’s point of view, a large part of the problem was that there was no script editor to act as a buffer between himself and the producer. Officially he himself was being retained as script consultant, but – isolated in Lynsted Park, with a heavy writing schedule – his ability to shape the continuing storylines was extremely limited. And while Dudley might have conceded the point about the BBC, much of what emerged on screen was determined by him. It was significant, for example, that the discovery at the end of ‘A Beginning’ that Abby Grant’s son Peter is probably still alive was not in Nation’s original script for the episode. Its late addition allowed the season to end on an optimistic note, as well as preparing the ground for Abby’s departure from the series altogether, a development which Carolyn Seymour believed was already in Dudley’s mind long before she learnt of it.

The disputes with Dudley meant that for Nation the creation of
Survivors
was not a particularly happy experience, and the bitterness was evident in interviews given years later. ‘He wanted to get the electricity turned back on. That was their main aim by the third episode. I could have fought him, and I could have won on every possible occasion, but I was trying to write the episodes, and it gets so exhausting to fight every inch of the way.’ Nation was probably overstating his ability to emerge victorious from any conflicts, but the note of weariness was genuine enough. Pennant Roberts, who directed five episodes of the first season, remembered him chiefly for his absence: ‘He was basically quite a shy man, who kept himself very much to himself down in Kent.’

Nation’s enthusiasm for the series was not increased when Brian Clemens initiated a court case against him for allegedly stealing his idea in the first instance. While the two men were working together on
The Avengers
and
And Soon the Darkness
, said Clemens, ‘I came up with this idea called
The Survivors
, about a holocaust that destroyed the world and what the people did. I couldn’t get it off the ground with London Weekend Television, but then I should think a year later, suddenly I read in the papers that the BBC is doing a series called
The Survivors
, and it was absolutely my idea. What pissed me off – I didn’t mind him stealing the idea – was that he was so lazy he didn’t even change the title!’ To make matters worse, he thought the series that emerged did no justice to the concept at all: ‘They did it ever so badly. It became a sort of tract on how to survive. Oh, it was awful.’

The lawsuit was brought in the spring of 1975 and dragged on for nearly a year before, in May 1976, Clemens decided that the only beneficiaries were going to be the lawyers and he abandoned the case. ‘After I spent a few thousand pounds, I realised it was a bottomless pit,’ he said. ‘I pulled away.’ Since it never reached a full court hearing, it is impossible to know what Nation’s defence against the accusation of plagiarism would have been, but one can perhaps assume that he would have been able to cite large parts of his own previous writing to demonstrate that
Survivors
fell clearly into that body of work, from the title onwards. (Though it should be noted that there is no copyright in titles.)

Nor was the idea itself particularly original. Many post-apocalyptic fictions had concerned themselves with the fate of human society in the wake of near-extinction, from Jack London’s
The Scarlet Plague
(1912) through George R. Stewart’s award-winning
Earth Abides
(1949) to John Christopher’s
The Death of Grass
(1956) and John Wyndham’s
The Day of the Triffids
and
The Chrysalids
, traces of all of which can be seen over the course of the series, whether deliberately or not. Indeed the estate of John Wyndham might have had cause to look quizzically at the series, for there are some very obvious nods to
The Day of the Triffids
, which also featured the proliferation of small communities in the wake of an apocalyptic event, an attempt to impose martial law by the Emergency Council for the South-Eastern Region of Britain, and a widespread belief that help would come from across the Atlantic: a ‘Micawber fixation on American fairy godmothers’. Much of the thinking articulated by Nation is foreshadowed in the same book. ‘There won’t always be these stores,’ a character explains, arguing that the survivors must go ‘back and back and back until we can –
if
we can – make good all that we wear out’. Wyndham’s novel ends with a colony of survivors on the triffid-free Isle of Wight looking across the Solent at a land under enemy occupation. Similarly the suggestions of empty streets in
Survivors
are familiar from H.G. Wells’s
The War of the Worlds
, while the 1953 film version of that book featured a church full of the dead, an image that recurred in Arthur Conan Doyle’s
The Poison Belt
: ‘The church was crammed from end to end with kneeling figures,’ notes Malone the narrator, one of only five people to have survived the end of humanity (as it seems). ‘It was a nightmare, the grey, dusty church, the rows of agonised figures, the dimness and silence of it all.’

Given the literary precedents, alongside Clemens’s feeling that ‘I didn’t think they made the series I wanted to do,’ it’s not easy to see how a charge of copyright infringement could have been made to stick, even if he were correct that Nation was inspired by his concept. But the episode ruptured the friendship between the two men, and they remained estranged for nearly two decades until Clemens brought the dispute to an end in the mid 1990s. ‘I wrote to Terry and said: Look, I want to bury the hatchet; we were always good friends before. And he wrote back and said: God, I wish I’d written this letter to you.’ They continued to correspond for the last couple of years of Nation’s life.

Combined with the disputes with Terence Dudley, this distressing affair did little to endear Nation to the idea of further work on
Survivors.
Even before the first season ended in July 1975, a second had been commissioned and Dudley was writing to Nation, discussing which actors should be retained: ‘All the regulars are available with the exception of Carolyn Seymour. Her availability in future is very much in doubt and I think we should forget about her.’ The final plot twist of ‘A Beginning’ had suggested that Abby wouldn’t be making a reappearance, but the decision still came as a kick to Seymour: ‘It was a shock, it was a blow, I certainly was horrified.’ Abby was not the only casualty of Dudley’s new approach to the series. ‘Thinking hard about Garland,’ he wrote to Nation, ‘I feel that the character has limitations and that he will counter audience identification. I think the “Roger Moore” cardboard is ideal for the hokum series with the stylish tongue in cheek approach. Audiences for this sort of thing escape in fantasy and are voyeurs of the antics of superman.’ Arguing that the bulk of the correspondence he received from viewers was about how they identified with the everyman normality of the characters, Dudley dumped Garland and began to shape the future direction of the series so that it depicted a more settled farming community.