The Man Who Invented the Daleks (23 page)

Having established the concept of the piece, the script editor’s function was to make such changes, or recommendations for changes, as were deemed necessary to ensure continuity within the series and to allow the translation to film. ‘It’s an odd sort of balance,’ reflected Terrance Dicks, the most influential of the
Doctor Who
script editors in the 1970s. ‘You want a writer with clear ideas, who defends them, but you don’t want a writer who says this is holy writ and you mustn’t change a word. There’s a middle ground in between, in which the writer accepts that in the end it’s going to be done the way the script editor and the producer want it.’ From his perspective, he concluded, ‘Terry was, perhaps, if anything, a little too easy-going.’ Beyond this link with the writer, there were further responsibilities. ‘As story editor,’ noted Spooner, ‘you’ve got to liaise with make-up, costume and all the other departments. You’ve got to look after your producer. You’ve got to take the director in hand.’

The role of the script editor at ITC was less central than at
Doctor Who
but it was still a new experience for Nation. As a writer, he had been almost entirely removed from the production process and was seldom seen on set. He did go to one rehearsal of ‘The Daleks’, but as far as the director, Christopher Barry, was concerned, that was all: ‘I only met Nation once. He seemed to have as little time for me – or the programme – as I came to have for him.’ John Gorrie, who directed ‘The Keys of Marinus’, had even less contact: ‘He was never around. I never saw him.’ Actors had the same tale of absence to tell; whether it were Tony Tanner, star of
Uncle Selwyn
, Peter Purves, who appeared in two of his Daleks stories, or David Gooderson, who portrayed Davros, they never met Nation. He admitted himself that this was his reputation: ‘They say: Nation never appeared. Nobody ever saw him, and he didn’t do anything.’ In this context, the value to him of Spooner, who had just spent a year as the script editor of
Doctor Who
and who had considerably more experience of television production, was obvious.

Even so, when filming began in July 1965, it became clear that this was a different world to that of the Doctor. To start with, an increased scale of resources was available at ITC: an episode of
The Saint
had a budget of £30,000, ten times larger than an episode of
Doctor Who
(though, of course, they were twice as long, running at around fifty minutes). But there was also a different philosophy of programme-making, rooted in the social differences between the two channels – the Oxbridge BBC and the working-class ITV – and manifest in a division between the stage and the movies. The BBC, despite the changes made by Sydney Newman, still essentially saw television drama as an offshoot of the theatre, and recruited accordingly, so that many of the key figures in the early Daleks stories came from a theatrical background: director Richard Martin, designer Raymond P. Cusick, costume designer Daphne Dare among others. So too did most of the actors, and there was some nervousness about whether appearing on television was a wise career move. ‘As a theatre actor,’ reflected William Russell, ‘you thought: I wonder if I should?’

Over on ITV, on the other hand, the perception was that television drama was most closely related not to theatre but to cinema. Baker and Berman had both come from the movies, as had many of the other senior production crew. Charles Crichton had directed Ealing classics like
The Lavender Hill Mob
(1951) and
The Titfield Thunderbolt
(1953) before moving on to episodes of
Danger Man
and
The Avengers
; Jeremy Summers directed Tony Hancock’s
The Punch and Judy Man
and then
The Saint
; while Roy Ward Baker – who worked on
The Avengers
and
The Baron
– had learnt his trade as Alfred Hitchcock’s assistant in the 1930s. Gil Taylor was the cinematographer on
Ice Cold in Alex
(1958), and received a BAFTA nomination for his work on Roman Polanski’s
Repulsion
(1965) during the course of filming
The Baron.
And Brian Clemens’s colleague Albert Fennell, who produced
The Avengers
, had earlier been associate producer on Michael Powell’s
Peeping Tom
(1960). As Clemens said: ‘All the credits are great filmmakers.’

This divergence of approach was reflected in the end products. Although
Doctor Who
was not broadcast live, it was recorded almost as though it were, on a multiple-camera setup, with as few breaks in filming as possible and with retakes strictly discouraged. Just as in live theatre, things sometimes went a little wrong, actors occasionally bumped into the scenery or fluffed their lines – most frequently William Hartnell, who on one memorable occasion referred to ‘anti-radiation drugs’ ‘as anti-radiation gloves’ before correcting himself. The BBC considered such mistakes to be perfectly acceptable in a performance that was only expected to be viewed once; these were not works intended to be preserved for posterity, and indeed many of them haven’t survived at all, wiped from the record in order that the expensive videotape might be reused and not incur the cost of storage.

Lew Grade, on the other hand, with his eyes fixed firmly on selling his shows around the world, insisted that they be shot on 35mm film and approached as though they were movies, using a single-camera mode of production. ‘Our shows were, in fact, seen and treated as mini-films,’ pointed out Roger Moore. And although a great deal of stock footage was used – establishing shots of Paris or London or Monte Carlo – as well as a single street set at Elstree that was re-dressed and reused in episode after episode, these elements were blended in well with the indoor scenes to give the impression of a much larger production. Other elements were borrowed from movies being made elsewhere in the studios. ‘You’d walk onto a Hammer set, for instance,’ remembered Nation, ‘and they’d been doing some big mountain-climbing thing, and I’d say, “Can we save this set for another two weeks?” And I’d write an episode to fit it.’ Consequently, the ITC shows, even without a great deal of location shooting, look almost epic in comparison with their contemporary equivalents on
Doctor Who.
Viewed in the light of later television, the limitations are a little obvious, but that wasn’t the impression of either viewers or critics at the ‘time: if Associated Television doesn’t take
The Saint
on location,’ wrote
Variety
, ‘it sure seems that way.’

The key, as ever with Grade, was America, and in 1965 he proudly announced that he had sold a new extended version of
Danger Man
(US title:
Secret Agent
), together with
The Saint
and
The Baron
, to the American networks CBS, NBC and ABC respectively. The first two of these turned out to be the company’s big hits of the decade, notching up 86 and 118 episodes respectively and winning big US audiences. They also sold everywhere else –
The Saint
, boasted Grade in 1965, was ‘number one in Finland’ – with Moore and McGoohan purveying an international image of the English gentleman (even though Moore was the son of a South London policeman and McGoohan was an Irishman born in New York). Moore’s Templar, in particular, was one of the symbols of the age in the same way that James Bond was proving to be. Driving an exotic car – albeit a Volvo P1800, as opposed to the fictional Furillac or Hirondel of the Charteris tales – and flitting between his London mews house and his New York apartment, he was the ultimate swinging bachelor, hanging out in clubs, bars and restaurants with a succession of young women, upholding standards of justice and decency while having a thoroughly good time. He epitomised a decade that seemed enthralled by the emergence of an international jet set. If consumerism was the new faith of the post-war western world, then Simon Templar was one of its high priests. (Though this metaphor probably wasn’t what Lew Grade had in mind when he responded to a criticism that ATV didn’t produce enough religious programming: ‘We put out
The Saint.
What more do they want?’)

The Baron
was much less successful than those two series, losing its American network slot during its thirty-episode run and failing to get a recommission, but it sold well around the world, from Poland to Nigeria, and it still made a contribution to ITC’s $10 million of foreign earnings in 1965, a figure that grew to $15 million the following year. In 1967 and again in 1969, ITC’s parent company ATV won the Queen’s Award to Industry for exports, while Grade himself was knighted at the end of the decade. (‘I have sold everything we produce, except the weather forecast and the Epilogue,’ he boasted in 1967.) As Dennis Spooner was to point out: ‘ITC was basically an exporting company. We were earning foreign currency.’ He added, in answer to the charge from Howard Thomas at the rival ABC franchise, that Grade seemed to be straying from his Midlands audience, focusing more on Birmingham, Alabama than Birmingham, England: ‘It’s no good trying to sell a locomotive in America if you insist on building it for the gauge of track that’s relevant in Britain. I don’t see why people get upset when you do the same thing in television.’ But perhaps it was by making too many concessions to transatlantic taste that
The Baron
fell down; perhaps it simply wasn’t English enough, failing to play to the American perception of Britain, however distorted that might be.

As originally conceived by John Creasey, the character of John Mannering was firmly in the mould of E.W. Hornung’s late-Victorian hero, Raffles, who had spent his days as a gentleman cricketer and his nights as a jewel thief. A ‘Mayfair bachelor and man-about-town’, Mannering’s easy passage through elevated social circles conceals a less respectable alter ego, for he is also a celebrated burglar and jewel thief, known to the police and to a mostly admiring public only as the Baron. Mannering was never as fully rounded a figure as Raffles, nor so subversive – the Wildean subtext of Hornung’s stories, for example, is absent – but he was exciting enough, displaying a physical prowess of which even that amateur boxer Sherlock Holmes would have approved: cornered by a pair of savage Alsatian guard dogs, he’s capable of rendering them unconscious with his fists. So although he was neither Creasey’s best-known hero (that was the Toff), nor his most critically acclaimed (Gideon of Scotland Yard), he was certainly popular, appearing in nearly fifty books, and he had loyal fans, among them the French poet Jean Cocteau, who was heard to murmur that the Baron was his favourite character in all crime fiction.

Mannering’s first appearance came in
Meet the Baron
(1935, US title:
The Man in the Blue Mask
), a 75,000-word novel written in just six days to meet the deadline for a competition being run by the publisher George G. Harrap. It took the £1,000 first prize, a huge sum at a time when publishers paid an average of just £50 for a thriller novel, and, published under the pseudonym Andrew Morton, it set the struggling Creasey off on a most extraordinary literary career. Over the next four decades, he produced more than six hundred books, using a couple of dozen different pen names, and at the time of his death in 1973, some four hundred titles were estimated still to be in print. The exploits of the Baron ran right through that career (indeed the last two books in the series were published posthumously), though the character calmed down a little as the years went by. He got married and strayed from the path of crime, setting himself up as an antique dealer with a shop in Mayfair, from where he assisted the police and even his own customers, when they found themselves caught up in jewel robberies and the like. Still charismatic, he was now seen in more conventional terms as ‘Ronald Colman, Rex Harrison and Greg Peck rolled into one’. In truth, it was not such a big step for Mannering, for he had never really been criminally minded. Even when robbing country houses, he had been primarily motivated by concern for the downtrodden, particularly if they were attractive young women or distressed members of the gentry; like the Saint, he saw himself as something of a Robin Hood for the modern age and ‘he used the profit more for other people than himself’.

By the time ITC turned to the Baron as a vehicle for a new show, Creasey’s work had already been raided for the series
Gideon’s Way
(1964, US title:
Gideon CID
), produced by Baker and Berman. It came with one huge attraction for a producer: where Leslie Charteris had insisted on retaining storyline approval for
The Saint
, no such restrictions were imposed by Creasey. The results were immediately apparent when the first episode of
The Baron
was broadcast in September 1966. To begin with, the entire history of the character, his disreputable early career as a jewel thief, had been dropped, while the name of his antique dealership (now an international chain of shops) had changed from Quinns to the more literal John Mannering. More startlingly, he was now American, a former cattle-rancher from Texas – hence, apparently, his nickname – who had served in the war, tracking down artworks stolen by the Nazis. (Old comrades tend to refer to him as Captain Mannering, which sounded less incongruous in the days before
Dad’s Army
.)

As portrayed by the American actor Steve Forrest, this Baron was courteous, good-natured and likeable; tall, broad, handsome and well-dressed. Unfortunately he was also utterly lacking in sex appeal, and despite being furnished with a decorative sidekick in the form of Cordelia Winfield (Sue Lloyd), whom he first meets while she’s taking a bath in his hotel room, he managed to avoid any hint of flirtation whatsoever. Even the 1930s original was more explicit in its acceptance that Mannering might have a sex life; after all, he had first taken up crime when his marriage proposal was spurned, and much of his early law breaking was an attempt to protect the woman he loved from the blackmailing demands of her estranged husband. Also lacking in the 1960s incarnation was the division that had once existed between the character’s two guises. When engaged in an escapade as the Baron, we were told, he used to undergo ‘a psychological change’, effectively ceasing to be John Mannering as he put on his trademark blue mask, almost as though he were one of the emerging host of superheroes. Not only the alter ego, but also the mask, were absent from the television version, who remained resolutely Mannering throughout, with only the occasional passing mention of his nickname to remind us of the show’s title.