The Man Who Invented the Daleks (3 page)

‘Tall, handsome, relaxed,’ observed the
Guardian
at the height of his fame in 1966, ‘Mr Nation looks like a Welsh James Bond.’ Coming from a lower-middle-class background in South Wales, his success enabled him to acquire a taste for good living, and he did so with great gusto, developing a fondness for fine wines, indulging his love of clothes and delighting in his purchase of a mansion in the country. In the early 1970s, remembered Terrance Dicks, he and Nation had come out of a meeting and were walking down Piccadilly when Nation remarked there were a couple of things he needed to talk about further and that there was no time like the present: ‘“Look, we’re just about to pass the Ritz, let’s go and have a champagne cocktail and discuss it.” And I said, “I like working with you, Terry. You’ve got style.” And he just beamed. He really enjoyed himself. He enjoyed his success, and rightly so.’

‘Terry was larger than life,’ recalled Deb Boultwood, whose father, Dave Freeman, had been one of Nation’s first co-writers back in 1956. ‘He walked into a room and you knew Terry was there.’ Again there are traces of the celebrity authors of the 1920s and 1930s. Breathless newspaper reports of the day revelled in the eccentricities of Edgar Wallace, who was so lazy he would always take a taxi rather than walk, no matter how short the journey, and who wrote inside a large glass box, constructed in his study to keep out draughts, while wearing a silk dressing-gown and chain-smoking through an absurdly long cigarette-holder.

Nation’s own writing methods were less flamboyant, but shared the same devil-may-care nonchalance, the same casual professionalism, that has always been cherished by lovers of popular fiction. He may not have been able to match Wallace’s boast of having once written an 80,000 word novel in a weekend, or thriller writer John Creasey’s claim to have written two novels in a week (‘and on the Saturday afternoon, I played cricket’), but he prided himself on – and was valued by others for – the rapidity with which he could produce a script. It was a facility that came partly from his reluctance to redraft or rewrite. ‘I work directly on to the typewriter,’ Nation explained in 1989, ‘and because I’m a bad typist I would seldom go back. It really bothered me to have to rewrite things. So if I’d written myself into a corner, I’d write myself out rather than go back and redo it.’ For some of those with whom he worked, this was undoubtedly an asset. ‘Terry’s first drafts often ended up as his final drafts,’ noted Philip Hinchcliffe, a
Doctor Who
producer, with approval. ‘He was a very professional writer. The construction of his stories and the fast-paced movement of the action – it all added up, and you got a thoroughly professional set of scripts when they landed on your desk.’

It was not, however, an attitude that won universal approval from his fellow writers. ‘I’ve known him to write a script in five days,’ remembered Chris Boucher, script editor of
Blake’s 7.
‘He simply roared through it, and I have to say when you write that fast, it does from time to time show.’ Terrance Dicks agreed: ‘He had a habit of falling into patterns. There were a lot of recurrent themes: people planting bombs, and being chased and spraining an ankle. In Terry’s scripts, people were always spraining their ankles at moments of crisis.’ There were times, he suggested, when Nation didn’t seem to put in as much effort as he should: ‘Given his successful career, he was obviously a very good writer, but he needed the occasional bit of prodding.’ Brian Clemens, who worked with Nation on series like
The Avengers
and
The Persuaders!
, and who co-wrote
And Soon the Darkness
with him, was more forthright: ‘Terry had talent, a lot of talent. If he’d concentrated more, he’d have more of a track record. He was a lovely guy and a fine writer, but he was bloody lazy.’

The charge of laziness, of not trying hard enough, was made in reference to Nation’s occasional lack of creative engagement with a script, rather than to his work rate, which was undeniably impressive. ‘Terry was very ambitious really, but in a nice way,’ reflected his long-time agent, Beryl Vertue. ‘He really wanted to get on and he liked nice things. He wanted to achieve.’ Even at the height of the Daleks’ success – when his creations were rivalled only by the Beatles in terms of media coverage and merchandising revenue – he continued to write at an intense pace, driven both by a work ethic that reflected his South Wales upbringing and by a feeling of frustration that he hadn’t yet realised his visions. ‘I have never ever sat and watched something I’ve written without a sense of embarrassment and a sense of failed achievements,’ he said in 1972. ‘It happens to be up there on the screen, but it was never the way I intended it, it was never as successful as I hoped it would be.’

The prodigious scale of the output that resulted was not unique. Nation was part of a tight little group of writers that shaped much British television of the 1960s and 1970s, a group that also included the likes of Brian Clemens, Philip Broadley, Dennis Spooner, Harry W. Junkin, Clive Exton and Donald James. Here too there were echoes of an earlier time, when the thriller-writing boom of the 1930s was dominated by a handful of authors – John Creasey, Sydney Horler, Edwy Searles Brooks and others – all capable of turning out a dozen or more novels a year, often using pseudonyms to cover their tracks for different publishers. ‘Between the mid-sixties and the early seventies all the episodic film series in this country were being written by about eight writers,’ said Clemens. ‘We tended to lean on each other.’

It was a reasonable expectation that if a viewer tuned into a popular British drama of the time, one or other of these names would appear in the credits, in the capacity either of writer or of script editor (the latter function also known as story editor, or sometimes story consultant). And the two roles were closely interlinked. As script editors on various series, they would commission each other because, as Nation remembered: ‘We all faced the same problem, a daily problem, that there weren’t many people who could do scripts. We would tend to rewrite and write for each other. Clemens had done a couple for me, and I had done some things for him.’ And, reciprocating the (mostly) friendly rivalry that existed between them, he added: ‘Clemens was the fastest writer I had ever come across. He was a little facile, but by God he could turn them out!’

Many of these men came from similar backgrounds. They were not so much a generation, as a tiny slither of a generation. Nation, Exton, Clemens, James and Spooner were born within twenty-eight months of each other; all of them were formed in childhood by the early days of radio and by the glory years of Hollywood; all were slightly too young to have served in the Second World War; and all embarked on their careers just as British television began to take off. Typically they came from unprivileged backgrounds and were not university-educated. ‘We all shared the same social experiences and listened to the same radio programmes and so on,’ reflected Clemens.

Within a couple of years either side of Nation were also to be found the likes of Leon Griffiths, Tony Barwick, Richard Harris and Troy Kennedy Martin, who worked on the same series that provided him with regular work, whether it were
Out of the Unknown, The Saint
or
The Persuaders!.
Between them, these writers were responsible for bringing to the small screen everything from
Z-Cars, Captain Scarlet
and
Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased)
to
Poirot, Minder, The Professionals
and
Shoestring
, as well as Nation’s own contributions. Without them, British television would have looked very different indeed. And – in slightly different fields – there were comedy writers including John Junkin and the team of Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, as well as programme-makers like Gerry Anderson and Verity Lambert, all born in the same few years and all of whose paths were to intersect with Nation’s career.

For his story is, to some extent, shared by these others, rooted in the same experiences that moulded the country in the decades that followed the war, as it made its uncertain transition from Austerity Britain to Swinging London and beyond into the uncertainties of the 1970s and 1980s.

T
erry Nation moved to London in January 1955 at the age of twenty-four, intending, in his words, ‘to be an actor or comedian or something – I wasn't very sure what'. The city that he found was just emerging, somewhat to its own surprise, into the dawn of an extraordinary period in British cultural history. The previous July had seen the celebration of Derationing Day, when bacon and meat finally came off the ration, marking an end to all wartime restrictions on food and other goods. Although the city was still pockmarked with bombsites left over from the Blitz, even in such affluent areas as Oxford Street, there was a sense of having left behind the long, wearying struggle of the Second World War and the ensuing period of Austerity.

In their place came the first stirrings of a new consumer-based society. The year of Nation's arrival was to see key events that would transform the country's identity: the launch of independent television, providing a second channel to break the BBC's previous monopoly; the opening of Mary Quant's Bazaar, the first of the London boutiques that would become world famous over the next decade; and the arrival from America of rock and roll in the shape of the hit single ‘Rock Around the Clock' by Bill Haley and his Comets, together with the British response, Lonnie Donegan's ‘Rock Island Line', the record that launched the skiffle craze. The following year built on these foundations, with the emergence of Elvis Presley and the coming of the Angry Young Men, the latter announcing themselves in the shape of John Osborne's play
Look Back in Anger
and Colin Wilson's book
The Outsider.
There was also the first sighting of pop art in the exhibition
This Is Tomorrow
, featuring Richard Hamilton's collage ‘Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?', a celebration of the American dream as revealed through advertising.

Meanwhile the world of comedy, in which Nation hoped to make his mark, was in the grip of the revolutionary radio series
The Goon Show
, though a newly launched radio sitcom,
Hancock's Half Hour
, was fast emerging as an even more influential and popular rival.

But if it were bliss to be alive in those days, no one had told the establishment, which remained largely unaware of this groundswell of innovation, these early manifestations of a youth culture that would soon sweep the country and then much of the rest of the world. The radicalism of the late 1940s had faded from British political life, and when Nation arrived in London, the prime minister was still 80-year-old Winston Churchill, kept in power more by sentiment than sense. Although he was soon to be replaced by the comparatively youthful Anthony Eden (born as recently as 1897), the opposition leaders in the 1955 General Election – Clement Attlee of Labour and Clement Davies of the Liberals – were both in their seventies.

Even these staid circles, however, were soon to be disrupted, first by the humiliation of the Suez Crisis, when it became apparent that British foreign policy could no longer be determined without reference to the USA, and then by the noisy arrival of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, bringing a sense that a younger generation wanted to have a say in building a new country. In the meantime, hopeful young men and women flocked to London from the provinces, determined – like Nation – to make their mark, to embrace the new cultural opportunities that were opening up.

Terence Joseph Nation was born in Llandaff, Cardiff in 1930, the only child of Bert and Sue, as Gilbert Joseph Nation and Susan Nation (née Norris) were generally known. It was not an auspicious time or place. Cardiff was the largest city in Wales, with a population of just over a quarter of a million, but it was already in serious decline, the splendour of its civic buildings looking back to past glories in the late nineteenth century, with little sense of hope for the future. In its heyday it had provided the focal point for the South Wales collieries in the valleys that stretched northwards and westwards from the city; its docks shipped coal to all corners of the world, and attracted labour from similarly far-flung places. Continuing expansion had seemed inevitable and inexorable in the years up to the First World War, but in the 1920s demand for coal began to fall. Shipping turned increasingly to oil for its primary fuel, the international markets struggled to recover from the post-war slump, and production costs rose, the more accessible seams having been worked out. Further losses were sustained as British industry went into recession at the end of the decade; coal production fell to half its level at the turn of the century and, in the words of one contemporary account, ‘unemployment descended on the valleys like a deadly and malignant disease'. More than a third of miners in the South Wales coalfields were out of work by the early 1930s and Cardiff, so dependent on that industry, was registering unemployment levels of over twenty per cent.

In the midst of the decline came the events of 1926, when miners throughout the country went on strike, resisting the mine-owners' attempt to protect profits by cutting wages and increasing working hours. Under the slogan ‘not a penny off the pay, not a minute on the day', the conflict dragged on for several months, despite a general strike that was called in solidarity but collapsed after just nine days. It was – in terms of working days lost – the most severe industrial dispute Britain had ever witnessed, and it ended with complete victory for the employers. Memories of the bitterness of the time remained for years to come, exacerbated by the ensuing depression and by the desperation of the miners' hunger march that left Cardiff in 1931, the year that annual coal production in Britain fell below a thousand million tons for the first time in the century. Decades later, when the novelist John Summers, who had known Terry Nation in Cardiff, wrote his classic
Edge of Violence
, a thinly fictionalised retelling of the 1966 Aberfan disaster, he placed that tragedy in the context of a long history of neglect and oppression, looking back to the 1930s when ‘foraging parties of starved miners started raiding the farms over the mountain to dig up hardening beets and swedes out of the ground and bring them home to their children small-faced with hunger'. Born in Rhymney in 1928, Summers remembered his childhood ‘as a time of soup made from a single slice of bacon and water and salt and an onion'.