The Man Who Invented the Daleks (12 page)

In ‘The Writer’ Hancock talks his way into becoming the writer for ‘Britain’s leading funny-man’ Jerry Spring (played by John Junkin), who specialises in the American-style patter that Nation grew up with. ‘Bob Hope, 1945, word for word!’ he exclaims on first seeing Spring’s existing act. But he soon discovers that writing comic material, actually putting the words down on paper, is more difficult than he imagined, so much so that he finds himself resorting to stealing gags from an old box of Christmas crackers. It’s hard not to see this as being a
cri de coeur
on the part of Nation, an implied rebuke to a comedian who would talk about concepts for sketches all night, so long as the drink was flowing, but who panicked when asked to approve a script.

The first show was widely covered, receiving more first-night notices than anything else that Nation would ever do. The
Guardian’s
Mary Crozier, who would later give
Uncle Selwyn
a pasting, revealed that she was one of the few people, let alone critics, who hadn’t appreciated the mundane perfection of Hancock’s last few series: ‘I have sometimes in the past got tired quickly of Hancock, finding amusement grow less as his predicaments seemed too self-centred,’ she admitted. ‘In the series on ATV there is more going on than I seem to remember in the last BBC series. If this is “situation comedy” there is a lot of changing situation which is all to the good.’
The Times
was even more enthusiastic: ‘It is all very funny, because Mr Hancock is funny, and the material suits him to perfection. If Messrs Simpson and Galton do not need him, he does not need them.’ Maurice Richardson in the
Observer
also started with a little, albeit fainter, praise: ‘If we had never seen him before, we should probably have hailed his debut in “The Assistant”, in which he clowned about a bit behind the scenes of a big store, as distinctly promising. We should have complained of the scrappy hackneyed script and might have suggested that here was perfect material for the more intelligent BBC scriptwriters such as Galton and Simpson.’

But Richardson’s conclusion was ominous: ‘Perhaps he will recover, and it will be wonderful if he does, but the first of this new series will have to go down in clowning history as a remarkable act of self-sabotage.’ And Michael Gowers in the
Daily Mail
went further still: ‘The sad, unpalatable truth is that his ATV debut must have left strangers to his enormous talent, if there are any, wondering what all the past stuff has been about.’ He ended on a similarly bleak note to that of Richardson: ‘My devoutest wish is that he could find himself again, but it is probably already too late.’

Hancock was bullish about the negative critical reception. ‘I expected it,’ he shrugged. ‘The critics seem to resent the fact that I want to progress and try something new. No matter how good the programme might be, they would have attacked me. That is something I have grown to live with and it doesn’t bother me. That is because I am satisfied with the series. It is well produced and just as funny as anything I have done on the BBC.’ But the public didn’t see it that way and the audience declined rapidly. ‘The Assistant’ was the third most watched programme of the week, but by episode four the show had dropped out of the top twenty and was not to return. To rub salt in the wounds,
Steptoe and Son
continued to ride high, peaking at number two in the ratings.

Having started out with confidence, and having turned in the best performances of which he was capable (his facial reactions to Owen Bowen’s tales are as mobile and expressive as ever), Hancock was by now actively contributing to the decline. ‘The series was doomed,’ remembered Nation. ‘Tony wouldn’t rehearse and for the first time he was boozing while he was working.’ Unable to learn his lines because of the drink, Hancock became ever more dependent on teleprompters, to the extent that by the end of the filming there were said to be more such machines on set than there were cameras. Given the mix of writers – in addition to Nation, Godfrey Harrison contributed six scripts, while Richard Harris and Dennis Spooner co-wrote another three – and considering how poor some of those scripts were, it required a consistently strong central performance by the show’s star to keep any semblance of unity and coherence; regrettably he was in no condition to provide it.

There was one more encouraging review to come, from Richard Sear in the
Daily Mirror
following ‘The Night Out’. ‘My second look at
Hancock
was easier to take than the first,’ he wrote. ‘The script, by Terry Nation, was not hilarious, nor the situation original, but it let Hancock spread as he woke in an hotel room, wondering where he was, wondering if he was trapped into marriage. Lost, trapped, even haunted, Hancock pressed on, raising a chuckle at regular intervals – and always interesting.’ It sounded as though he were describing life rather than art, but in any event his was a lone voice, and Roger Hancock’s memories of the series were more typical and more pertinent. ‘There were no happy moments,’ he said. ‘And also it wasn’t very good. The public are not idiots. They were right.’

Though the series was a flop, little blame could be attached to Nation. Faced with the prospect of writing for Hancock, he had raised his game and, if his scripts weren’t as good as those of Galton and Simpson, then at least they were as good as he could make them in the circumstances. But the whole episode did nothing to help his career in the immediate future. Indeed the taint of being associated with such a public failure may have been detrimental: no further offers of work developed and, although Hancock was paying well, there was still no financial stability. On a creative level, however, it had been an invaluable experience; writing two hours of material for such a painstaking and obsessive comedian had given him a renewed self-confidence, evident in those scripts where he was prepared to laugh at Hancock’s foibles. The long hours of drinking and talking in hotel rooms had moreover allowed him extraordinary access to the mind of a man who had so recently been Britain’s most adept television performer. In the longer term, the benefits were clear, both in the growth of his writing and in the status he acquired. ‘I was very proud to have worked with him,’ Nation commented in later years. Had he done nothing of note afterwards, the association with Hancock would still have accorded him a place in British entertainment history.

And, testament to his easy-going nature, he had managed to remain on good terms with Hancock, which would have been something of an achievement at this stage even if they hadn’t been surrounded by the wreckage of a failed television series. The professional and personal relationship continued beyond the end of the show and in the spring of 1963 the two men, accompanied by their respective wives, Cicely and Kate, departed for a holiday in the south of France, where Hancock kept a yacht.

It was, recalled Nation, ‘a strange three weeks’. Cicely was by this stage drinking as frequently and excessively as Tony, and both were using tranquillisers in an attempt to numb the pain of their collapsing marriage. The two couples shared a cabin, and the Nations were kept awake much of the night by the sounds of the Hancocks arguing and fighting. Among Nation’s most vivid memories of the holiday was a pathetic scene on the yacht as a collective attempt was made to teach a parrot the Stanley Holloway refrain ‘Brown Boots’: ‘Hancock in rags crouched with a bottle of booze and a glass, and me crouched beside him looking just as bad, and the girls looking pretty terrible crouched nearby, and all of us singing “Brown Boots” to the parrot.’

J
ust four months separated the broadcasting of the final episode of
Hancock
from Terry Nation’s creation of the Daleks. But the change of direction was not quite as abrupt as it might appear, for there had been precedents, both direct and indirect, and there was a reservoir of work on which he could draw.

There had been, even during his years of writing comedy, the influence of Spike Milligan, whose scripts for
The Goon Show
took up the nonsense tradition in British humour and extended it to the point of pure fantasy. The fourth series of the show, for example, broadcast during Nation’s last year in Cardiff, included episodes such as ‘Through the Sound Barrier in an Airing Cupboard’, ‘The First Albert Memorial to the Moon’ and ‘Ten Thousand Fathoms Down in a Wardrobe’, titles that indicated a blend of absurdism and what would – in other circumstances – be considered science fiction. When interviewed at the time, Milligan was keen to expound his theory of Dimensionalism, arguing that the listener ‘is in a dream world, where the rigid dimensions of time-space unity need not confine him’. The free rein he thus gave to his imagination was not far removed from Nation’s own comment: ‘The wonderful thing about science fiction is that if the author says a thing is so, then nobody can deny it.’ Writing patter for Ted Ray might not have given Nation much scope for such adventures, but the proposal for
The Fixers
made it clear that Milligan’s work had helped shape his ideas of what was possible in comedy.

More immediately obvious, there had been, as Nation tried to find work as a solo writer, a transition period of scripting science fiction and non-genre drama that predated his involvement with Tony Hancock and that was to extend beyond it. Though not a phase of his career on which he tended to dwell in later life, it contributed markedly to the range of his writing, and it gave him a grounding in contemporary science fiction. None of the programmes have survived (in common with so much from the era, copies were not kept), but they were significant both in their own right and in terms of their influence on Nation’s later work. And it’s notable that, following his disappointment with the BBC over the rejection of
Uncle Selwyn
, this opportunity to find a new direction came not from the corporation that had nurtured him, but from ITV.

The launch of independent television in Britain in September 1955, though widely reported in the national press, was not actually a national phenomenon. London was the only region capable of receiving the service at that stage, and it took several years before the availability of programmes spread through the entire country. Even at the start of the 1960s some outlying regions, including the north of Scotland and south-west England, weren’t covered, and only in 1962 were the Channel Islands and north Wales finally included in the exciting new world of two-channel television. After a hesitant few months, however, the experience everywhere was the same; in each new region that it reached, ITV had an enormous and virtually instantaneous impact. By 1957 the new channel was attracting a seventy-nine per cent share of the viewing audience in those areas where it could be seen, and was claiming that in London, of the 542 programmes that made the top ten that year, the BBC was responsible for just three. The experience was strongly reminiscent of Radio Luxembourg’s success in the 1930s, when the BBC had been similarly eclipsed by an upstart rival.

The public’s enthusiastic embrace of the alternative offered to them was evidently a response to ITV’s populist stance, its deliberate departure from the paternalism that still pervaded the BBC twenty years on from John Reith’s ‘I do not pretend to give the public what it wants’. The commercial channel, receiving no money from the sale of radio and television licences, could afford no such lofty disdain for its viewers’ taste; its task was to deliver the largest possible audience so that advertisers would wish to invest their money, thus ensuring the survival of the service. ‘This is free television in a free country,’ insisted Sir Robert Fraser, director general of the Independent Television Authority (ITA), ‘and people will get the television they want, as they get the press and government they want.’

Inevitably there was, in the circles of the great and the good, much criticism of allegedly low standards, particularly when the report of the Pilkington Committee on broadcasting was published in 1962; too heavy a reliance, it was said, on game shows, variety entertainment, American westerns and cheap and cheerful swashbuckling dramas. In pursuit of an audience, however, ITV also demonstrated in its early days a willingness to take risks that the BBC conspicuously shunned. It had the best rock and roll shows in Jack Good’s
Oh Boy!
and later in
Ready Steady Go
, it commissioned avant-garde comedy such as
The Idiot’s Weekly, Price 2d
, and it took a chance on oddities like Gerry Anderson’s puppet science fiction shows. It also ended the BBC’s deferential – sometimes even craven – handling of politicians, setting new standards for political coverage. Even when it came to highbrow programming, it had a record to be proud of, giving Sir Kenneth Clark, the founding chairman of the ITA, free rein to produce arts documentaries long before he made the celebrated series
Civilisation
for the BBC, and introducing the brilliant history lectures of A.J.P. Taylor (again subsequently to be poached by the BBC). Perhaps most significant of all, the independent franchise company ABC recruited to head its drama department Sydney Newman, a man who – among all his other achievements – was to play a crucial role in Terry Nation’s career.

Newman was one of the most charismatic and divisive figures in British television over the span of a decade to the end of the 1960s, a big enough character both to hold his own in the frontier years of ITV and to ruffle establishment feathers at the BBC. Peter Luke, a script editor who worked with him, described him as ‘a cross between Genghis Khan and a pussy cat’, while another colleague, Leonard White, saw him as ‘the non-conformist outsider’, adding: ‘Sydney was noisy. And unsubtle.’ Moustachioed and bow-tied, he was ‘more impresario than tycoon, a suave character,’ according to the
Observer
, ‘with a strong line in gently outrageous conversation, whose appearance and purring voice suggest a Tennessee Williams gone right’. The value of his work was even more hotly disputed; according to the
Daily Mail
in 1962, ‘to some he was the great impresario of commercial television, to others the purveyor of pretentious pigswill.’ There was no question, though, that he changed completely the nature of television drama in Britain, and that he brought to the screen two of the most iconic series of the 1960s:
The Avengers
and
Doctor Who.