The Man Who Invented the Daleks (19 page)

Every report, every sighting, merely stoked the fires of the craze further, and helped boost what became the toy phenomenon of the season. The range of products available that first Christmas was fairly limited by later standards, but it was already possible to buy jigsaws, badges, birthday cards and sweets, as well as a single, ‘I’m Gonna Spend My Christmas with a Dalek’, by the Go-Go’s (written by Johnny Worth, who had earlier contributed the theme song to
What a Whopper)
, which seemed to miss some of the menace of the monsters:

I’m gonna spend my Christmas with a Dalek,

And hang him under the mistletoe,

And if he’s very nice,

I’ll feed him sugar spice

And hang a Christmas stocking from his big left toe.

The record quite rightly failed to trouble the charts, but the toys attracted massive attention. Most desirable were the five-foot-high Dalek suits, retailing at £8 15s 6d. ‘Within days of the start of a new Dalek story in the
Doctor Who
serial three weeks ago, our whole stock was sold,’ commented the head buyer at Hamleys, the biggest toy store in London. ‘Some parents were buying two at a time, and if I had hundreds more they would still sell.’ It was reported that frustrated parents, desperate to keep their children happy at Christmas, were trying to buy them off customers lucky enough to have secured one, offering up to twice the retail price. Meanwhile six-inch-high mini-Dalek toys, costing 15s 11d, were also doing extraordinary business. ‘Sales have been fantastic,’ said the spokesman for Cowan, de Groot Ltd, the company manufacturing them. ‘By only showing a photograph we sold out our first batch of Daleks before they had even arrived in this country. A new shipload has just arrived and we are working flat out to distribute them. People have gone Dalek mad.’ A hundred thousand units were sold.

The press threw its weight behind the craze. The
Daily Express
obtained fifty of the full-size suits, and used its front page to offer them as prizes in a ‘Name the Dalek’ competition (winning entries included Bleatnik, Bleatle, King Klonk, Frankintin and – appropriately for what was ultimately a Welsh creation – Dai Leek). Celebrities too saw an opportunity for some easy publicity. The comedian Norman Vaughan, then the host of
Sunday Night at the London Palladium
, managed to get two separate articles in the
Daily Mail
with the same story of buying a Dalek suit and ostentatiously donating it to Oxfam. ‘I was going to give this Dalek to my son for Christmas, but other children obviously need the money that this Dalek will raise,’ he pontificated. ‘I think we should all give to save.’

Cartoonists also joined in, with contributions from Franklin in the
Daily Mirror
and Giles in the
Daily Express
among dozens of others. Leslie Illingworth of the
Daily Mail
depicted a meeting of NATO leaders, busily discussing a proposal for an Atlantic nuclear force and being interrupted by the Degaullek, a monster topped with the familiar nose of French president Charles de Gaulle. Politicians themselves, who were then less keen to jump on passing bandwagons than they later became, took slightly longer to get off the mark, but at the 1966 Conservative Party conference, the future MP Hugh Dykes made up for lost ground by calling the defence secretary, Denis Healey, ‘the Dalek of defence, pointing a metal finger at the armed forces and saying “We will eliminate you”.’ He got the catchphrase wrong, but it was nonetheless an indication of how readily the creatures had passed into the language. A survey earlier that year of slang terms used in the mining industry found that the term Dalek was being used in that context to refer to ‘Rescue men wearing oxygen apparatus.’ In the new high-security wing of Durham prison, meanwhile, it was the warders operating the modern electronic security system who were nicknamed Daleks by the inmates.

The story even reached America, where
Doctor Who
had not yet been seen. Under the headline Heck with the Beatles – here come the daleks!, the press reported on the British sales frenzy of Christmas 1964, and quoted one sales director as promising that ‘Next year it’s inflatable, floating Daleks for the beach’. In fact 1965 – with the copyright question now resolved – saw a tidal wave of products, from soap to slippers, candles to kites, Easter eggs to wallpaper, crockery to sweet cigarettes. Licences were issued for almost anything that could be branded with the logo of a Dalek, and the Harrogate toy fair that year saw some twenty-five companies exhibiting products, including – for those who wished to resist the onslaught – anti-Dalek guns. The craze (‘the startling “I-am-a-Dalek” boom’, as the
Guardian
called it in October 1965) continued until the following Christmas; though it tailed off a little thereafter, new products still continued to appear, with a full-sized Dalek for amusement arcades making its debut in 1967.

The concept of marketing on this scale was entirely new to the BBC, and there was initially no structure in place to deal with the situation. ‘We started the merchandising,’ remembered Beryl Vertue. ‘There wasn’t a department at the BBC or anything.’ Terry Nation’s own memory was similarly of the corporation’s unpreparedness: ‘The BBC, not being the great commercial operator, wasn’t ready. It had taken us all by surprise, so there was no merchandising, there were no plastic Daleks, there were no buttons, there were no anythings. My God, was that to change! Within the year, there were Dalek everythings.’ Previously some of the corporation’s more successful radio and television shows had spawned the occasional book or record, and some even turned up in comic-strip form in the magazine
Radio Fun
, but there had been nothing to hint at this level and diversity of sales, and it opened the BBC’s eyes to the possibilities of subsidiary income from popular programmes. By the autumn of 1966 the press were reporting the successes of BBC Enterprises, ‘formed lately to deal with broadcasting’s commercially viable byproducts, in film, print and on records’; the new body was inspired directly by Dalekmania.

The phenomenon made Terry Nation a wealthy man, collecting half of the licensing fees; since these averaged ten per cent, he was thus entitled to five per cent of the sales, less his agency fees. He was still being paid for writing the show, though only at the standard BBC rates of 275 guineas per episode of
Doctor Who
, and by now additional work was coming in. But when the
Daily Mirror
estimated in March 1965 that he had earned £300,000 from the Daleks, it was clear that – even if that figure (almost £4.4 million at 2010 prices) was almost certainly overstating the case – his primary source of income was no longer the scripts he turned out. ‘It was the first outbreak of merchandising,’ noted Terrance Dicks, ‘and Terry got rich off it. I always used to say that he was the only man to get rich off
Doctor Who.’
More than that, in one bound he leapt past his colleagues at Associated London Scripts, including the founding members. ‘He was the first one of the group to get a manor house,’ said Vertue, ‘which was lovely.’

The house was Lynsted Park, a mansion dating back to Elizabethan times, complete with the crypt of what had been a family chapel, standing in 35 acres of ground near Sittingbourne, Kent, and it was purchased in the summer of 1964, just in time for Nation to celebrate his thirty-fourth birthday with a party. ‘He threw good parties,’ remembered
Doctor Who
actress Carole Ann Ford, who went on that occasion, though her chief memory was of his excitement at having a swimming pool in the garden, and then discovering that ‘it was full of rubbish’. Deb Boultwood went to a later party with her father, Dave Freeman, and reflected the general impression that Nation was enjoying his new-found wealth: ‘They had loads of champagne and food, and there was Roger Moore in a blue jumpsuit with Luisa Mattioli. And Linda Thorson and Patrick Macnee and all these people. It’s one of my happiest memories. I think we stayed till dawn before we drove back; Terry and Kate were very good hosts.’

It was a time when a new, supposedly meritocratic, showbiz aristocracy was emerging from popular culture in Britain, an era when pop stars and photographers, designers and hairdressers were being courted and celebrated by the media. Nation was, if not a member of this aristocracy, at least a peripheral part of their world, embodying the rewards that talent and (in his case) enduring dedication could bring. After nearly a decade of trying to make ends meet in London as a writer, he was determined to enjoy his moment in the sun. ‘He sort of invented a life for himself,’ was Brian Clemens’s perception of Nation in the 1960s. ‘He wore wonderful Liberty-print shirts. He looked American. He was a bit flamboyant and he drove a big American car for a while. And when he swapped that, he had an open E-Type. He was a bit of a poseur.’ As the
Guardian
put it in January 1966: ‘He is proud of his material success, of his country house and the nearby cottages he has bought for his parents and his wife’s mother and father.’ In fact, Nation was spending less time at Lynsted Park than he might have wished; pressure of work meant that he mostly lived in a flat in Swiss Cottage in North London, not far from the Hampstead flat that he had recently vacated, supposedly to move to the country. His own memory of the period was the way that the Daleks seemed to be taking over his career: ‘They became such a large business concern in their own right that I had very little opportunity to do much else.’

In all the noise and excitement of Dalekmania, it was sometimes possible to forget that the Daleks were not officially supposed to be the stars of the show. The BBC as an organisation was, of course, earning as much as Nation from the merchandising, but he was the only individual from
Doctor Who
to benefit directly from the bonanza. As the extent of the marketing enterprise became clear, Raymond P. Cusick asked his boss: ‘Is any of this money coming my way? I got an answer the following week, and that was: No!’ As a BBC employee, Cusick was entitled to nothing more than his salary for having produced the original Dalek design, though he was later given ‘an ex-gratia payment of £100, which after tax came to £80 10s 6d’. He left the show in 1966, partly because he felt he was not being given the recognition he deserved: ‘I worked on the programme for three years but quite honestly I got fed up with it. Nobody, apart from my bosses, was actually saying thanks to me.’

Terrance Dicks insisted that there was no resentment among the other
Doctor Who
writers then or later about Nation’s wealth: ‘Envy, I think, not resentment. You thought: good luck to him.’ But there was a very real danger that the series itself might get swallowed up by the burgeoning Dalek empire, a fact of which the production team were well aware. Their concern was presumably the reason why the press were able to report that the creatures would definitely be killed off in ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’, and that this time it would be for good: ‘this, according to Television Centre, is positively their last appearance.’ When the
Daily Mail
journalist John Sandilands interviewed Verity Lambert during the run of the serial, he found the message being spelt out very clearly: ‘Tall, dark and shapely, she became positively forbidding when I suggested that the Daleks might one day take over
Doctor Who.
“I feel in no way obligated to bring them back for a third time even if this present story is a tremendous success,” she said with a noticeable chill.’

In fact a third story had already been commissioned, though Nation’s own comments suggested that there might be some disagreement between the BBC hierarchy and the programme-makers. ‘I don’t want to bring them back,’ he told the press in December 1964, as the new serial ended. ‘They’ve hit such a level of popularity that nothing they do can be quite as popular again. The Beatles and pop groups have dropped a bit in popularity, and the Daleks seem to have filled the gap. I can’t see them hitting this level for much longer. But what can one do? I don’t want the Daleks back, the BBC does. They’ve insisted on it.’

If this had indeed been the swansong for the Daleks, they would at least have gone out on a high, for ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’ was one of the best scripts Nation was to contribute to the series. It was written at weekends, he later explained, because he was busy at his day job, writing episodes of
The Saint
, during the week, and consequently there was a two-month gap between the delivery of the proposed storyline and the finished scripts; he still insisted, however, that it took him only eight hours to write each episode.

The first problem to be solved was bringing the creatures back from the extinction to which he had consigned them. There had been precedents for such resuscitations, of course, most notably in the case of Sherlock Holmes, who was killed off by Arthur Conan Doyle in the 1893 story ‘The Final Problem’ before making a return in ‘The Empty House’ a decade later. Then too it had been public demand that forced the change of heart, and Doyle dealt with the issue by revealing that Holmes had not actually died in his struggle with Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls, but had gone into hiding for a couple of years. In between those two stories, however, Doyle had published the novel
The Hound of the Baskervilles
(1901), set retrospectively before Holmes’s disappearance, and this was the model that Nation chose to follow. ‘I remembered Conan Doyle’s problem with Sherlock Holmes,’ he later explained, and he wrote in a simple lesson in time travel, delivered by the Doctor: ‘What happened on Skaro was a million years ahead of us in the future. What we’re seeing now is about the middle history of the Daleks.’ It was the first time that one
Doctor Who
storyline had deliberately referenced another, a toe in the water of continuity, even if for Nation at this stage it was simply a neat solution to an immediate problem. Having wrapped that up nicely, he got on with making the creatures even more scary than before by bringing them into our own world.

The story opens under a semi-derelict bridge, on which there is a poster bearing the enigmatic and sinister message: EMERGENCY REGULATIONS: IT IS FORBIDDEN TO DUMP BODIES INTO THE RIVER. A man appears, tearing away in anguish at the helmet encasing his head. He walks down some steps and plunges into the river, apparently committing suicide. It’s an instantly arresting image, topped only by the closing shot of the first episode: we’re back at the same point on the river – which we now know is the Thames – and, as we watch, a Dalek emerges slowly and menacingly from beneath the waters, its weapons pointing directly at the camera.