The Man Who Invented the Daleks (10 page)

The show they created,
Hancock’s Half Hour
, ran on radio from 1954 to 1959, and on television from 1956 to 1960. On both media it was, after a slow start, a huge hit and it elevated Hancock to the position of Britain’s most successful comedian. As the show evolved, the attention to detail became ever more profound, and the portrayal of the central character acquired depths that broke new ground for broadcast comedy; the constrained, claustrophobic setting of 23 Railway Cuttings, with its taut relationship between the intellectual and social aspirations of Hancock and the know-your-place attitude of Sid James, set the standard for future British sitcoms. Long before George Costanza tried to pitch the idea of ‘a show about nothing’ to television executives in the 1990s series
Seinfeld
, Hancock, Galton and Simpson had already mastered the concept on radio with the tedium of ‘Sunday Afternoon at Home’, and on television with ‘The Bedsitter’, the latter comprising a full twenty-five minutes of Hancock alone in a single room, trying and failing to keep himself amused. That show came from the final BBC series in 1961, simply titled
Hancock
, which dispensed with Sid James and achieved still greater heights of critical and popular success.

If, for many fans, the radio shows remain the pinnacle of Hancock’s career, there is no doubt that the television version made the more influential contribution to the evolution of comedy. The novelty of the format was such that the term ‘situation comedy’ itself was a recent coinage (its common abbreviation to ‘sitcom’ was a 1970s development), and there were many who didn’t entirely approve of this new concept, among them a correspondent of
The Times
: ‘comedians, inclined by stage experience to pack everything they have into a ten-minute act, are driven by television into situation comedy, so that a single idea, which might have burnt out in one incandescent flash, can smoulder on for several weeks.’
Hancock’s Half Hour
was the most prominent exception, the show that proved the potential of television as a vehicle for comedy to break finally with the music hall tradition. For now at least, it seemed as though the future lay in the character-based style of Galton and Simpson.

Something of the sort seems to have been in Terry Nation’s mind, for when he submitted his play
Uncle Selwyn
to the BBC in 1960, it was as a possible pilot for a six-part series, based around a group of recurrent characters in a very definite historical setting.

The timing was right, for the corporation was, for the first time, in need of new scripts. Television drama on the BBC was, in its early days, firmly rooted in the stage, so that, for example, regulations insisted on a break of five minutes between the acts of a broadcast play, mimicking the conventions of the theatre. These gaps were filled with the much-loved ‘interlude’ films: restful shots of a windmill, a kitten playing with a ball or, most famously, a potter’s wheel. The material was similarly dependent on remaking the classics and, particularly, on bringing in existing theatrical productions; new work tended to mean plays that had only recently debuted in the West End. The same policy had applied for three decades on radio, but while the arrangement worked for both sides – the box-office success of John Osborne’s
Look Back in Anger
was the result of an extract being broadcast to five million viewers – it was now starting to look a little unadventurous in contrast with ITV’s
Armchair Theatre
, busily blazing a trail for new commissions. In response the corporation was changing its emphasis and in 1959, for the first time, more than half its drama output was written specifically for television.

But even in this propitious climate,
Uncle Selwyn
failed to make the right impression; it was rejected by both the light entertainment department in 1960 and, the following year, by the script department. Meanwhile the head of programmes in Wales concluded that it was ‘too crudely farcical and derivative’. In slightly modified form, however, the piece did eventually appear in the
Play of the Week
strand on ITV in February 1964, coincidentally just after the first Daleks serial had finally made Nation’s name.

Set in the aftermath of the First World War, the play told the story of the eponymous Selwyn’s return from a German prisoner-of-war camp to his home village of Pontynarvon in the Rhondda Valley, where he discovers that he’s inherited his father’s oil-lamp shop. (His father, we learn, has been killed by a runaway beer barrel – it rolled into his shop, he drank the contents and died in a drunken stupor.) Unfortunately he also discovers that, in his absence, ‘the colliery owners put the electric in all the houses’, and that the demand for oil lamps is now virtually non-existent. In an attempt to make some money, he rents out his back room to a group of old men who, he learns by accident, are actually a secret society of anarchists plotting a bomb attack on London. Seeing his chance, he joins the group and steals their bomb so that he can blow up the local power station, in order to revitalise the market for oil lamps.

The cast included Mervyn Jones, John Glyn-Jones and Talfryn Thomas, while Selwyn himself was played by Tony Tanner, a stage actor who had taken over the starring role in Anthony Newley’s West End musical
Stop the World–I Want to Get Off
on Newley’s departure for the Broadway production, but who thus far had little television experience. His performance was praised by the critics and, according to the preview publicity, he relished the part: ‘At first Selwyn seems to be all sweetness and naivety with a determination to please. But when it comes to it and Selwyn conceives his devious plan, far from being conscience-stricken, he carries it through without a qualm. In fact, with a good deal of enthusiasm.’ His real feelings were considerably less positive: ‘The play sucked, I almost fell asleep in rehearsal and the director was no fucking good.’

Nation was later to claim that the piece ‘proved very successful’ and was ‘incredibly well received’, but his memory was playing him slightly false. The
Guardian’
s television critic, Mary Crozier, couldn’t work out whether it was supposed to be a comedy or a farce. ‘It was a queer jumble, and its lack of form and drive made it often just a farrago of rather boring dialogue,’ she wrote. ‘Like so many plays on television this never got a grip, because it was impossible to believe in the plot or the people, and not all the Welsh accents or the character acting could pick it up and put it on its feet.’ Disillusioned by the increasing trend towards new works for television, she yearned to turn back the clock: ‘Why don’t the companies and BBC do more of the many good plays that have been written already, that is from the established repertory of drama for the stage?’ The
Daily Mirror
, on the other hand, was more taken with
Uncle Selwyn
: ‘Some of the humour was well in period, smelling of old chestnuts, but the comedy and farce were as continuous as the soft rain on a chapel roof. The fault lay in the many characters who swallowed each other up: no one stood out as a peg on which to hang the main theme of the action.’ The reviewer concluded: ‘I look forward to more of Mr Nation’s humour – but less confused, please, next time by too many actors trying to get a word in edgeways.’

All of this, however, was for the future. In 1961, with the play having been rejected by the BBC, with John Junkin increasingly committed to his acting career, and with only the brief run of
It’s a Fair Cop
to sustain him, Nation needed work. He found it in the unlikely shape of a film screenplay for Adam Faith.

Faith was by this stage perhaps the biggest pop star in the country (or at least, according to the
New Musical Express
, he ranked alongside Cliff Richard and Lonnie Donegan as one of ‘the big three’) and, despite his rather lightweight hit singles, he was emerging as something genuinely new in British rock and roll: an intelligent, articulate, sharply dressed performer who was taken seriously by the artistic establishment. The director Lindsay Anderson wanted him to appear in a production at the Royal Court Theatre in London, he won over his critics with an interview on the prestigious John Freeman show
Face to Face
, where he enthused about J.D. Salinger and Jean Sibelius, and he received the ultimate cultural accolade of a reference in ‘The Blood Donor’, the best-known episode of Tony Hancock’s career. ‘There’s Adam Faith earning ten times as much as the prime minister. Is that right?’ reflected Hancock. ‘Mind you, I suppose it depends on whether you like Adam Faith and what your politics are.’

Faith also harboured ambitions of being a serious actor and sidestepped the standard movie format offered to pop singers – star mimes a handful of hits while trying to save the local youth club from greedy property developer – in favour of more intriguing film choices: the Soho exploitation classic
Beat Girl
(1960, US title:
Wild for Kicks)
and the Peter Sellers vehicle
Never Let Go
(1960), in which he played a petty thief. His third film was perhaps less impressive, but it did have its moments.

What a Whopper
was credited as having a screenplay by Terry Nation, ‘based on an idea by Trevor Peacock and Jeremy Lloyd’, though in truth the idea is wafer thin. Faith plays a struggling writer whose latest attempt at a novel has just been returned by yet another publisher. Figuring that his story of the Loch Ness Monster will stand a better chance if there’s a new sighting of the creature, he fakes a photograph and sets off to Scotland with a few friends, taking with him a tape of an electronically generated roar which he intends to play at full volume in the vicinity of the loch. Into this is woven, none too subtly, a sub-plot about the landlord of a guesthouse trying to keep the fruits of his salmon poaching from the local police, while further complications come from the aristocratic and alcoholic father of one of the women accompanying Faith, who mistakenly believes that she’s eloped (though Loch Ness is a considerable overshoot by anyone aiming at Gretna Green). Much comedy confusion, many mistaken identities and some simple knockabout humour ensue.

The film’s producer, Teddy Joseph, was later to declare that
What a Whopper
was ‘a marvellous family comedy’, though that was a little over-generous. More accurate was
Variety’s
comment that ‘the British appetite for this type of unpretentious, slapstick comedy appears to be insatiable.’ Faith himself, who celebrated his twenty-first birthday during filming, was apparently not too taken with the end result, for he managed to avoid any mention of it in his autobiography; his 2003 obituary in the
Independent
was more forthcoming, dismissing the movie as ‘dire’. That was unkind and not entirely accurate, for there is much that followers of British comedy can celebrate, as one would expect from a cast that included Sid James, Wilfred Brambell, Terry Scott and Clive Dunn, accompanied by Freddie Frinton giving his customary portrayal of a drunk. There is also a cameo by Spike Milligan, as a tramp fishing for trout in the Serpentine in Hyde Park, and best of all a brief but fabulous appearance by Charles Hawtrey as an artist who is developing a technique of flinging paint off his palette-knives at a canvas, titled ‘Daphne in the Nude’. When he’s described as a painter, he bristles at the suggestion:’ ‘Not just a painter,’ he insists haughtily. ‘A flicking painter.’ The opening sequences meanwhile foreshadow what would soon become clichés of Swinging London, with a depiction of artistic types sharing a house in Chelsea; virtually the first words uttered by Faith are: ‘I saw a couple of fabulous birds on the King’s Road.’

It was not quite Nation’s first foray into the cinema, for he and John Junkin had provided what was described as ‘additional material’ for the 1959 film
And the Same to You
, a similarly patchy movie that is saved by its cast: Sid James, Tommy Cooper, Brian Rix and – a man who would soon loom large in Nation’s story – William Hartnell. Nor was it quite his first solo venture, for in 1956 he had written a fifteen-minute sketch for his old Cardiff friend Harry Greene and his wife, Marjie Lawrence, who were fresh from staking their claim to television history as the stars of the soap
Round at the Redways
, the first show made by ITV. Booked to appear in a revue titled
Off the Cuff
at the Irving Theatre in London’s West End, they had approached Spike Milligan for a sketch; when his contribution was turned down by the show’s producer, the job was passed on to Nation, who delivered within twenty-four hours a routine parodying the movies, drawing on his love of Hollywood. ‘Howard and Marjorie Greene performed with as much carefree zing as though the small, cool audience had been huge and enthusiastic,’ commented
The Stage
, ‘and after their delicious demonstration of the growth of the film industry, it had at least become enthusiastic.’

But
What a Whopper
was Nation’s first big solo project and his first full film screenplay. And it revealed some of his strengths as well as some of the flaws that would become familiar to television viewers. On the positive side, there was his Welsh fondness for ornate verbosity, as Wilfred Brambell describes his sighting of the Loch Ness Monster: ‘A terrible sight it was. A yellow mist hung over the waters, and a great brooding silence filled the loch. No breath of wind stirred the air, and as I looked towards the black waters, I saw it! Its terrible head rising slowly and turning towards me, its jaws open …’ There was, too, his refusal to develop a simple situation in a straight line, instead adding new complications at every opportunity, heaping up the material in a way that would find better expression in his thrillers than it did in his comedy. On the negative side, there was a certain loss of concentration, so that later parts of the script start to flounder a little and some loose ends never get tied up (the book that Faith’s character was supposed to be promoting, for example, disappears from the story, once it has done its job of taking the cast to Loch Ness). And then there’s the inescapable, overt borrowing from others: it would be hard not to see in the early scenes, with Hawtrey’s flicking and with parodies of modern sculpture and
musique concrète
, the influence of Tony Hancock’s film
The Rebel
, scripted by Galton and Simpson, which had great fun mocking the follies of contemporary art, and which was released just three months before filming started on
What a Whopper.