The Man Who Invented the Daleks

by Alwyn Turner

  In the 1920s and 1930s the great and the good in society could pretend the Saint and Bulldog Drummond didn’t exist, simply by averting their gaze as they passed the bookstalls at railway stations, and by not venturing into the circulating libraries run by Smith’s and Boots that supplied the working class with their reading matter. The arrival of the broadcast media in the shape of radio suggested that a new world was coming, but the monopoly exercised by the BBC, particularly in its pre-war incarnation, did its best to keep popular entertainment under a benign, paternalist control. Millions might choose to tune into Radio Luxembourg, but there was no official recognition of this fact by the establishment. Standards got looser during the war, but in 1946 came the consolation of the Third Programme, a cultural enclave devoted to classical music, lectures and serious drama.

  Less easily avoided was the growing popularity of American culture, a distressing development that went hand-in-hand with the USA’s eclipse of Britain as the world’s major power. In an attempt to combat this pernicious influence, the post-war Labour government under Clement Attlee set up the Arts Council of Great Britain, building on wartime initiatives. ‘Let every part of Merry England be merry in its own way,’ urged the Council’s founding chairman, the economist John Maynard Keynes. And in case the subtext wasn’t clear, he spelt it out: ‘Death to Hollywood.’ In similar vein, the Communist Party of Great Britain, still an influential political force at the time, staged a conference in 1951 under the title ‘The American Threat to British Culture’. The contemporary campaign against American comics followed along the same lines: a defence of British culture irrespective of what the British people might choose for themselves. But still it was possible for those of delicate sensibilities to avoid contamination by choosing to visit the state-subsidised, Eurocentric opera and ballet, while shunning the cinema of Hollywood.

  Television, though, was a very different matter, once the BBC monopoly had been broken by the independent companies. The entertainment favoured by the masses was now being beamed directly into the most genteel of drawing rooms and it was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore its irksome presence. Some did so by resisting for as long as possible the purchase of the new television sets that could receive the commercial stations, and thereafter by pretending that the button to change channels did not exist: as late as the 1970s, it was still the practice in many normal middle-class homes to have an unofficial ban on watching ITV. Research in 1974 showed that the working class spent 59 per cent of their viewing time watching ITV; the comparable figure for the upper middle class was just 34 per cent. In the first decade and more of independent television, the proportions had been even more pronounced.

  Confronted by the menace of ITV, and with its audience figures in free fall, the BBC couldn’t resist indefinitely and the contagion couldn’t be contained. If it was going to offer any resistance at all to the onward march of ITV, and maintain its unique claim to the funds of the licence fee, the BBC would have to compete on the field of populism. Thus began the process of what would, fifty years later, come to be referred to as dumbing down. With the likes of The Ted Ray Show, the corporation tentatively began the embrace of variety programmes, which had long been looked upon with disfavour (even in pre-broadcast days, there had been a definite social and class divide between the ‘legitimate’ theatre and the music hall), though BBC television did not yet try to match the brassy pleasures of Val Parnell’s Startime or Sunday Night at the London Palladium.

  There were by the end of the 1950s criticisms of popular television in general, but it was ITV in particular that came under intense and sustained attack. Those on the right criticised the appalling decline of artistic standards, while those on the left railed against the duping of the working classes with game shows, variety and lowbrow drama. Few were prepared to argue, as did the Labour politician Richard Crossman, that the public had a ‘right to triviality’ if it so chose, and fewer still were prepared to defend ITV as providing a legitimate expression of popular culture. The assault reached a peak with the Pilkington Report in 1962, published the month before Terry Nation’s first television drama was screened on ITV. ‘The disquiet about television,’ opined Pilkington (or rather, Richard Hoggart, who provided the intellectual backbone of the committee), ‘is mainly attributable to independent television and largely to its entertainment programmes.’

  On the other side of the argument, there was Lew Grade, the principal target of Pilkington, who was baffled by all the criticism. ‘I was determined to prove that British programmes were the best in the world,’ he protested, ‘and I did it. Look at the sales figures!’ It would be absurd, of course, to claim that audience share should be the sole criterion for judging the value of entertainment, but equally absurd to ignore it altogether. Like pop music, which defined itself by the relative weekly sales of various records, television was designed to provide entertainment for large numbers of people, and viewing figures at least provided a crude measure of its success in this direction. Furthermore, Grade’s defence of exports went some way to answering the charge of Americanisation: selling British programmes to the States was surely as valid a response to Hollywood as was Keynes’s allocation of tax revenues to the Royal Opera House, or the Communist Party’s belated endorsement of folk music and Morris dancing.

  In any event, competition between ITV and the BBC, whatever the reservations, proved to be beneficial to both. Despite all the fears, Britain had by chance stumbled upon a near-perfect structure for television. With just two mainstream channels, each dependent on a different source of funding, competition was centred on programming, not on chasing advertising revenue. Meanwhile the establishment of BBC2 – the one positive outcome of Pilkington – allowed an outlet for the new, the experimental and minority interests, including the science fiction championed by Irene Shubik. For twenty-five years from the launch of BBC2 in 1964, through the first incarnation of Channel 4, up to the dawn of the multi-channel satellite future, this was the golden age of British television.

  Terry Nation was a key part of that era. He didn’t create Doctor Who (despite a famously inaccurate answer in the game Trivial Pursuit), but there is little doubt that without the boost given to the series by the Daleks, it would have faded away within a year. And Doctor Who was significant not merely as a show in its own right, but because it laid the foundation for what would become BBC1's most important institution: the family-orientated schedules of Saturday evening.

  Traditionally Saturdays hadn’t been seen as a major prize. The legal restrictions on Sunday trading meant that it wasn’t considered a particularly advantageous time for advertisers on ITV, just as Christmas tended to be of little value to the commercial channel in the days when shops closed on bank holidays: what was the point of encouraging people to buy things when they couldn’t act on your suggestion? So there were, for example, no soap operas broadcast on Saturdays. But when London Weekend Television was launched in 1968, promising to break with ITV’s populism and to provide sophisticated programming for the more discerning weekend viewer, the BBC saw its opportunity and began to target Saturday evenings with straightforward entertainment. Within a few years it had secured complete control of the ratings, with a string of guaranteed crowd pleasers: The Generation Game, The Two Ronnies, The Dick Emery Show, Match of the Day. From Doctor Who through to the late-night chat on Parkinson, Saturday evenings belonged to BBC1.

  And it’s that Saturday evening programming that tends to induce the greatest nostalgia among those who lived through the 1970s, when viewing figures were at their highest. When Jack Kibble-White and Steve Williams wrote an Encyclopaedia of Classic Saturday Night Telly in 2007, they pointed out it was unlikely that they would produce ‘a follow-up looking at, say, Tuesday night’s output; mainly because no one really remembers which shows were regularly transmitted on that day of the week’. The foundation stone for the BBC’s domination of Saturday nights was Doctor Who, the programme whose success was assured by Terry Nation. When the
show returned to British screens in 2005, eight years after Nation’s death, it was a foregone conclusion that it would find its place again early on Saturday evenings, trying to catch a family audience that could be passed on to the remainder of the schedule, while evoking memories of the golden age.

  But even during those years, there remained for many commentators the well-worn suspicion of populist drama, the reluctance to accept that Terry Nation might have a point when he claimed that ‘the function of people in television should be to take people away from all their daily toil’. At the heart of his belief, as well as at the core of the critical hostility, was a love of telling stories, a conviction that the essence of entertaining fiction is to keep the reader wanting to turn the page, or the viewer wanting to see what happens next.

  ‘I’d get very uneasy if a whole page went by and nothing was happening except people talking,’ Nation explained. ‘So if I had a situation where people were going to talk for three pages, I would put a bomb there, and it was going to be ticking. Now you can keep your dialogue, because you can keep coming back to that bomb – will they find it in time?’ From the point of view of the script editor, this sometimes presented problems. ‘If Terry sent you an hour’s script, you couldn’t cut half of it out, because Terry would look at the story as a whole, and it would be impossible to lose any of it,’ commented Dennis Spooner. He reached out for a similar example of the ticking bomb: ‘If Terry had done a sequence with a dustbin, it would fit in, it would hold a bomb or something, and you couldn’t take the scene out. Whatever Terry put in was relevant to the story.’

  There would be other work for a script editor. Nation was sometimes said to be weaker on dialogue than some of his contemporaries, though this wasn’t a view necessarily shared by the actors who delivered the lines. ‘It was not difficult to learn his dialogue because it was true,’ reflected Roger Moore. ‘Things are easy to learn when they’re well written. Noel Coward was like that – to do Coward it was very easy to learn the dialogue because it flows. And Terry could do that too.’ But the rush of story-telling, the love of improbable plot developments was undoubtedly Nation’s greatest strength. Perhaps it owed something to his method of writing, to his dislike of going back to rework his material. He would place his characters in impossible situations of peril and then have to find a way to extricate them from under the pile of problems he had created. ‘I didn’t want anybody to be bored,’ he said. ‘I put in more and more. I put in a lot of stories which I would then have to resolve.’ His experience of writing the stories, as he smoked furiously and spoke the dialogue out loud to himself, commenting on the action, was thus not dissimilar to that of his audience watching them, unsure what might happen next, eager to see how on earth it could all be wrapped up before the closing credits rolled. These were tales designed to be seen in weekly episodes, to provide such exciting entertainment that the viewers would want to come back for more.

  It has long been the case with popular fiction that, for the most part, the successful practitioners are those who identify with their audience – not in terms of political perspective or social experience, but in terms of genuinely liking the genre in which they’re working. It’s notable too that many of the works most readily taken to heart by the public have been written at speed. Matthew Lewis wrote his three-volume Gothic classic The Monk (1796) in the space of ten weeks, Robert Louis Stevenson said that the first draft of Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde took him three days, while Henry Rider Haggard, having read Stevenson’s Treasure Island, decided he could do better and knocked out She (1886) in six weeks, ‘written at white heat, almost without rest’. The year before the Daleks were born, Anthony Burgess had taken three weeks to write A Clockwork Orange.

  So it was with Nation’s most enduring work. In formal terms, ‘The Daleks’ is far from his best piece of writing. But the speed at which he produced it allowed him to tap into his love of adventure tales, to produce his own take on them. Working reluctantly, but out of necessity, for children’s television enabled him to bypass any pretensions to being taken seriously as a writer and ‘to channel the literature that I lapped up when I was a boy’. There was, as ever with such runaway hits, a strong element of luck, but the years of consuming H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle and W.E. Johns had prepared the ground for fortune. And, however impressive the design of the Daleks in look and sound, the essence of their appeal was there in his scripts.

  But the design of the Daleks was certainly part of Nation’s luck. He had chosen to work in the most collaborative of writing environments and was ultimately dependent on others to realise his stories. It often produced a conflict within him, as with so many other screenwriters. On the one hand, the presence of script editors and producers and directors absolved him of the need to rework and rewrite; there was always someone else to do the polishing. He claimed that he didn’t care what happened to the scripts after they left his typewriter: ‘I delivered something into the hands of other professionals, now let them go ahead with it.’ But underneath that professed disregard was a feeling that things would be better if he had more control. ‘If I had my way, I would be down there and I’d hem the dresses and paint the scenery and put the make-up on the actors and then act it all myself. But you can’t do that.’ He never quite reconciled himself to the contribution of others, always complaining that no one else cared as much about his creations – whether it were the Daleks, Survivors or Blake’s 7 – as he did. And he was, inevitably, at the mercy of others. Some of his best stories are to be found in The Baron, intricate, taut little thrillers that are little remembered because the production lacked the gloss and the glamour of The Saint or The Avengers.

  Given his approach to writing, and the sheer quantity of material he turned out, it is hardly surprising that Nation repeated himself from time to time: those ticking bombs, for example. ‘Terry Nation had a thing about bombs,’ reflected Terrance Dicks. ‘You can rely on a bomb turning up in every Terry Nation script, somewhere or other.’ But then he was far from alone in having his obsessions and his familiar tricks.

  The last series from the pen of Dennis Potter, for example, one of the most acclaimed and revered of all television writers, was Cold Lazarus (1996), a science fiction piece set four hundred years in the future, in which scientists are accessing the memories contained in a disembodied head that is held in cryogenic suspension. It’s an intriguing piece of work that contained much that would have looked very familiar to Nation. Helmeted security guards gun down members of a resistance group, the head floats in a tank, echoing the imagery of the Blake’s 7 episode ‘The Web’ (or even ‘The Keys of Marinus’), and a flirtatious, megalomaniac woman seeks to create a disturbing half-hour virtual-reality serial that will enable her corporation to sell anti-anxiety pills; just to make clear that Potter knows his references, she insists that it should have ‘No bug-eyed monsters’. But, this being Potter, no one is much surprised when the memories that the scientists tap into turn out to be those of a boy growing up in the Forest of Dean in the 1930s, nor that the boy is sexually assaulted and later becomes a writer.

  That was the key difference between a writer such as Potter and one such as Nation. In all his most celebrated and lauded work, Potter wrote from his own experience. He may have drawn explicitly on popular culture with the music and detective fiction of the 1930s in, say, The Singing Detective, but the psoriatic arthropathy from which his central character, Philip E. Marlow, suffers is the same condition that Potter himself had.

  There is no equivalent in Nation. When he includes a disability, it tends to be immobility. Time and again his work includes characters trapped in wheelchairs: Dortmun in ‘The Daleks Invasion of Earth’, Lucien in ‘A Memory of Evil’ (The Baron), Mother in The Avengers, as well as Steed in Noon Doomsday’ and Baron von Orlak in ‘Legacy of Death’ from the same series, Davros in ‘Genesis of the Daleks’, Vic Thatcher in Survivors. While a couple of these weren’t actually his creations – Mother came from Brian Clemens, while it
wasn’t Nation who put Vic Thatcher in an improvised wheelchair – it is clearly a recurring image. But it’s not drawn from life, and nor is there any consistent theme. Dortmun leads the resistance against the Daleks, but the scientist who created the monsters is also confined to a chair. There is nothing to be read into these cases except that Nation recognised the dramatic potential of a character with limited mobility. And that he was influenced by other fiction. Much of the enduring power of Treasure Island, for example, is derived from the disabilities of Blind Pew and the one-legged Long John Silver. More directly there were recent cinematic examples of characters in wheelchairs, Blanche (Joan Crawford) in Robert Aldrich’s Whatever Happened to Baby Jane (1962) and Peter Sellers’s eponymous antihero in Dr Strangelove. Nation’s reference points were almost always to be found in the literature and cinema that he enjoyed or admired. One of the few pieces of work that was inspired directly by his own life was the writing of Rebecca’s World for his daughter.

  Beyond the familiar images, there was also in Nation’s work a coherent vision, a set of recurring themes that identify his preoccupations. From Skaro onwards, we find ourselves repeatedly witnessing the decay of societies, whether through conflict, decadence or disease. And from ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’ onwards, many of those societies are under enemy occupation, places of repression, collaboration and personal betrayals; Nation never forgot the fears of his nine-year-old self, sheltering from the bombing raids that were intended to prepare the ground for a Nazi invasion of Britain: ‘As a wartime child, I grew up when bombs were dropping and men were trying to kill me.’ The horrors of the time shaped his adult writing. ‘Much of sci-fi promises a bright future – even if my view is rather bleak,’ he once reflected, and it was a portrayal that grew ever bleaker as Britain’s economic and social decline became more pronounced, as the optimism of his post-war youth faded. Even when the country was congratulating itself on its swinging international image, he was writing tales of dissent; the Doctor may have thwarted the evil plans of the Daleks in ‘Invasion’, but the images that linger are of slave labour camps and of aliens occupying the streets of London.