The Man Who Invented the Daleks (28 page)

The same year also saw the suicide of Tony Hancock. The comedian had never recovered his position after that ATV series and, alone in Australia, with his second marriage having ended as catastrophically as his first, he took an overdose of pills, washed down with vodka.

The days of Swinging London were receding fast and Nation, who had benefited from that era but whose work had never sat entirely comfortably in it, was ultimately to find fertile ground for his darker visions. For now, however, the only opportunities that presented themselves were essentially more of the same, returning him to the position he had been in before the
Daleks
project: successful, wealthy and writing scripts for ITC.

A new season of
The Saint
was in preparation – the second to be filmed in colour and the last of the Roger Moore incarnation – and Nation contributed four episodes. This time they were original stories, since the back catalogue of Leslie Charteris’s tales had by now been heavily depleted. ‘Television is a monster, like a great big garbage disposal,’ noted Charteris, ‘and it can eat up a lifetime’s output in a matter of seasons.’ It was a lesson that the music hall comedians had learned a long time back, but the stockpile was not entirely used up, and there is a suspicion that the switch to newly commissioned stories was also made in the hope of ending Charteris’s complaints about the liberties he saw being taken with his work. He was supposed to have a degree of script approval, but it didn’t always work out in the way he wished, and he tended to make his displeasure known. ‘I always saw the scripts and made my comments and criticisms, but they were not always necessarily followed,’ he recalled later. ‘I had no veto and I can’t say I was always pleased with what I saw on the screen.’

Unfortunately he was to be no happier with the new material. And perhaps he was right not to be, for there was little discernible change between the adaptations and the new stories; after more than seventy episodes, the production line was running with such efficiency that the format and the style continued smoothly through the transition. Nation’s scripts were not among his best work, though there were some good moments. In the episode ‘The Desperate Diplomat’ a British representative, Jason Douglas (John Robinson), is stationed in a newly independent country and keen to expose the abuse of international aid to Africa: ‘When independence came, I went to work for the new regime. The new leader started with good intentions. Then corruption set in. Aid from America, from Britain was used to furnish palaces, buy cars, jewels. Government officials lived in luxury while the people starved.’

Even before this, Nation had already written a couple of episodes for a new ITC series,
The Champions
, filmed in 1967 and bought by NBC in America soon thereafter, though it was not screened in Britain until the autumn of 1968. Developed by Dennis Spooner and produced by Monty Berman,
The Champions
focused on three agents working for an international organisation called Nemesis, based in Geneva; in the first episode, their plane crashes in Tibet, they are rescued by mysterious monk-like figures and, as part of their recovery, are imbued with superhuman powers of telepathy, enhanced senses and phenomenal strength. This shameless borrowing from James Hilton’s
Lost Horizon
(1933) was, somewhat perversely, intended to bring a sense of believability back to the ITC genre. ‘Action dramas have reached the stage when the principal characters are achieving the impossible in their exploits, fights, cunning and unbelievable physical stamina,’ argued Spooner. ‘No one can believe that any mortal could achieve what the present day heroes manage to do and survive. But
The Champions
makes it all logical because the three characters have these out-of-the-ordinary powers.’ It was a neat, counter-intuitive defence of the show’s premise, but it didn’t make any more comfortable the marriage of the two traditions of secret agent and superhero. More importantly, the casting was far from impressive; the three stars were less than charismatic, and none of them made much impression on the audience.

For Nation, the heroes’ super-powers didn’t particularly suit his preferred theme: the ability of ordinary people to rise above difficult situations by exercising ingenuity and creative improvisation. But his scripts worked well enough. In ‘The Body Snatchers’ the villain has seized control of a research laboratory in North Wales that has developed cryogenic freezing; having stolen the body of a recently deceased American general, he’s hoping to bring the man back to life and thus acquire crucial defence secrets. (The Welsh setting allows for a rare sighting on 1960s television of a character speaking Welsh, as well as a brief, uncredited appearance by Talfryn Thomas, formerly of
Uncle Selwyn
and later to return to Nation’s work.)

Stronger than that was ‘The Fanatics’, in which several prominent politicians have been assassinated in a spate of suicide terrorist attacks. One of our heroes, Richard Barrett (William Gaunt), infiltrates the organisation responsible for the attacks, posing as a disaffected British soldier who has been selling secrets to an enemy state on the grounds that: ‘No country has a moral right to exclusive knowledge on weapons of mass destruction.’ The episode is lifted by a guest appearance from Gerald Harper as Croft, the evil mastermind behind the plan: ‘The meek will inherit the earth? Oh no, it’s the strong who’ll survive, the men of courage and ideas. The mass elects a leader, yes, but the mass is a mindless organism. It destroys true progress.’ ‘Well, that’s been the platform of every dictator,’ shrugs Barrett, under-cutting one of the most hallowed traditions of the action hero, that his enemy must always deliver a bragging speech about power. The interruption doesn’t stop Croft, of course: ‘When you’ve been with me a little longer, you’ll know the feeling of power, real power, life and death. It’s like a drug, you taste it and you want more, and you’ll kill for it. You’ll even die for it.’ It’s all good crazed stuff, though it doesn’t get us any closer to an explanation of the suicide element of the operation; it’s clear what Croft wants, but not what his self-sacrificing minions get out of the deal. Possibly there was a brainwashing story that got lost in the final cut, but it does leave on a slightly confused note.

The Champions
is fondly remembered in some quarters, but at the time it failed to win over the critics. ‘The enormous advantage that Sir Lew Grade has over his rivals among the network,’ wrote Peter Black in the
Daily Mail,
‘is not that he knows better than they do what the public wants. It is that he doesn’t mind.’ He added, in reference to one of Spooner’s scripts: ‘I felt that a dog could have written it if he had wanted dollars more than dog biscuits. There wasn’t a moment to stimulate even the simplest of minds. And this is peak-time television in one of the greatest cities in the world.’ The audience, at least in America, appeared to agree and, like
The Baron
, the series was dropped from its network slot during the screening of the one season that was made. Its success or otherwise in Britain was more difficult to judge, since it was shown at different times in different regions. This was often the case with the ITC series, but was particularly exaggerated with
The Champions
; Peter Black’s review was written in November 1969, when the show finally arrived in London, more than a year after it had first been screened elsewhere on the ITV network, an indication that Grade was not throwing his whole weight behind it.

Presumably, however, it was not a complete commercial failure, for Spooner and Berman immediately bounced back with two new series that were produced in tandem in order to save money:
Department S
and
Randall and Hopkirk
(
Deceased
). Nation wrote two of the first three episodes to be filmed of the former and was scheduled to write more before other opportunities presented themselves.

If
The Champions
suffered from a lack of magnetism among its stars,
Department S
perhaps veered too far in the other direction. Two of the characters, Stewart Sullivan (Joel Fabiani) and Annabelle Hurst (Rosemary Nicols), were solid, unexceptional figures who could have come from any thriller series of the era, but they were entirely overshadowed by the third member of the trio, Jason King, as played by Peter Wyngarde. The original idea was that the team would be completed by a retired Oxford don named Robert Cullingford, who was also a writer of detective stories and would thus view the cases from unexpected angles. Kenneth More’s name was touted for the role, but instead Berman choose Wyngarde, and the nature of the series changed entirely.

One of the great television actors of the period, Wyngarde had already appeared in various series to which Nation had contributed – including
The Baron, The Saint
and
The Champions
– though never in one of his scripts. Wyngarde rejected the proposed character of Cullingford, keeping only the concept of being a writer, though now it was of paperback thrillers centring on an agent named Mark Caine. The character himself was renamed Jason King, and Wyngarde created an enduring image of the 1960s playboy bachelor taken to a superbly self-parodying extreme. His camp excesses, complete with elegantly drooping moustache, coiffured hair and exquisite velvet suits and kaftans, were balanced by a Lothario image that made him an irresistible, unattainable fantasy figure for millions of female viewers. He couldn’t pass a mirror without admiring his own vulpine good looks, his catchphrase was a drawled ‘Fancy!’ and his voice sounded like it had been aged in a cask of Amontillado. So self-assured was Wyngarde’s performance that, most unusually for an action hero, he seldom won a fight – and it didn’t matter.

In the scripts that Nation wrote for
Department S
, he approached the character by explicitly evoking the shade of Oscar Wilde. ‘Do you have anything to declare, Mr King?’ asks Stewart, and Jason replies, ‘Nothing, except my genius.’ On another occasion, Annabelle says, ‘We still have to find the actual room,’ and Jason murmurs, ‘We will, Oscar, we will.’ Nation’s own witticisms kept up the same faux-decadent atmosphere. As Jason comes round from being knocked unconscious yet again by a villain, and complains of a headache, Annabelle suggests he take a couple of aspirin. He shudders: ‘I couldn’t bear the noise I’d make swallowing them.’ And, inspired by King’s habit of drawing the cuffs of his frilly shirts back over his jacket sleeves, Nation couldn’t resist revisiting a gag from
The Saint
; Jason explains that the hero of his thrillers carries a knife up his sleeve, but that’s just for fiction: ‘I never carry a weapon, let alone a knife. It would fray my cuffs.’ Other details are equally irresistible; of all the attempts to parody the girls in the James Bond films, none have bettered the heroine of the Mark Caine novel
Epilogue to Hong Kong
, the perfectly named Hussy Abundant. The only jarring note comes in a scene in ‘A Cellar Full of Silence’, which sees King, dressed entirely in black leather, dismounting from a motorbike and saying, ‘I haven’t been on a bike since I was a teenage rocker.’ The idea that Jason King might have been a rocker rather than a mod is hard to take, though his subsequent reference to ‘leather queens’ may shed further light on the question.

The plots of the two episodes that Nation wrote are less relevant than details such as these, but then that was true of the entire programme; the whole of
Department S
was a magnificent triumph of style over content. The concept for the show was inspired by the mystery that had been solved by Nation in ‘The Chase’, on which Spooner had been script editor. ‘If the
Marie Celeste
were to happen today, no one knows who would investigate it,’ Spooner reasoned. ‘
Department S
always started like that. The “hook” was always the
Marie Celeste
sort of situation – a totally, absolutely inexplicable mystery.’ Unfortunately, thanks to the structure, the ensuing fifty minutes tended to be something of a let-down, a rational solution to an intriguing conundrum, and viewers, quite understandably, found themselves less interested in the narrative than in the figure of Jason King. He was so obviously in a different league to his colleagues that a second season of the show never materialised; it was replaced by a new programme,
Jason King
, in which Wyngarde took centre stage. And what had been a superb role in the context of a team proved to be a bit too baroque and flowery to carry an entire show. By that stage, however, Nation had already flown the ITC nest, having been recruited to the staff of the biggest of all the secret agent series.

The Avengers
, initiated by Sydney Newman back when he was responsible for drama at ABC, had grown out of an earlier Newman commission,
Police Surgeon
(1960) starring Ian Hendry. When that failed to get the ratings figures for which he’d hoped, Newman suggested a new series for Hendry to be titled
The Avengers
, ‘an action adventure-thriller with a sense of humour’, though, according to Brian Clemens, beyond the title he had few ideas of what the show might be: ‘He came in and said, “I want to do a series called
The Avengers.
I don’t know what it means, but it’s a hell of a good title.” ’ The star was teamed with Patrick Macnee, playing a character named John Steed, but it was not until Hendry himself departed, to be replaced by a young female companion for the cheerful but crusty-looking Steed, that the series began to acquire its distinctive identity. First with Cathy Gale (Honor Blackman, 1962–4) and then with Emma Peel (Diana Rigg, 1965–8),
The Avengers
became not merely a national but an international institution, purveying an increasingly kitsch concept of England in which all the conventions of the spy thriller were gleefully ridiculed, and in which elements from science fiction and comic book traditions were equally welcome. Roger Moore could undercut a plotline in
The Saint
with a single sardonically raised eyebrow, but
The Avengers
at its peak – which for most critics meant the Diana Rigg seasons – was so fixated on fun that the whole show seemed determined to subvert genre expectations. There was plenty of action but it was the stuff of pure fantasy.