The Man Who Invented the Daleks (33 page)

Even so, there was confidence in the project at the BBC, an expectation that a series would result. And in many ways it seemed appropriate for a time when nostalgia was very much in the air. The huge success of
The Forsyte Saga
, a series made by the BBC in 1967 from the novels by John Galsworthy, had been followed by several other period dramas at the beginning of the new decade, including
Upstairs Downstairs
and
The Onedin Line.
It wasn’t just on television, for some of the most iconic 1960s brand names were also reaching back into Britain’s past for inspiration: the Biba fashion label, which had done so much to popularise the mini-skirt, was now finding inspiration in Victoriana and art deco, while the quirky products of Portmeirion Pottery were being replaced by images culled from nineteenth-century illustrations to create the Botanic Garden range, one of the great export successes of the time. Laura Ashley was making a name for herself with romantically rustic clothing designs, and the day was not far off when Edith Holden’s
The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady
would become a publishing and marketing phenomenon. The slow death of 1960s idealism was matched by a rise of revivalism in every corner of popular culture, and there was no obvious reason why
Baldick
should not benefit in the retreat from the present.

Nation spent some time negotiating what his position would be in the event that the show took off. Having learnt from his experience with the Daleks where the real money was to be made in television, he was determined to maximise his earnings should opportunity come knocking again. His contract for the show licensed the format and characters to the BBC in return for a fee of £85 for each episode on which he wasn’t the writer, rising to £100 per episode after the first twenty-six had been made. He reserved the film, publishing and merchandising rights (though the BBC would receive a small cut of these), and he insisted on being appointed series consultant, explaining: ‘This position would simply allow me to have the authority to comment on, make suggestions, to be consulted and generally assist in the development of any series that might result from the pilots. This, I assure you, is no lust for power. It is merely to allow me to have a voice in the progress of the series. After all, no one will care more deeply about the shows than I.’ (This was to become a familiar comment.) It was further determined that the words ‘Series created by Terry Nation’ – a credit to which he had aspired for years – would appear as a single caption in the titles, and would be included in the
Radio Times
listing. He even signed a separate book deal with the publishers Weidenfeld & Nicolson, though the failure to secure a series meant that the proposed volume never appeared.

The BBC’s decision not to exercise its option was a major setback for Nation. After a decade of writing for other people’s series, it looked in the first months of 1972 as though he had finally broken through with his own project. He had aspired to that credit — ‘Series created by Terry Nation’ – for years and briefly it had seemed to be within his grasp, before again slipping through his fingers.
Uncle Selwyn
had originally been intended as a pilot, but never got past the single drama stage,
The Daleks
hadn’t even got that far, and now
The Amazing Robert Baldick
had similarly failed. The following year, he received yet another commission that never materialised. He was paid by the BBC to write two episodes of a series to be entitled
No Place Like Home
, set in Ireland with two retired couples, one English and one American. This was talked about as a series of twelve episodes, and the first two scripts – ‘The Accident’ and ‘Everything in the Garden Is Lovely’ – were delivered, sent for rewrites and accepted, before that project too was abandoned.

By then, however, Nation was less concerned, for he was greeted on his return to the BBC fold, nearly seven years on from ‘The Daleks’ Master Plan’, by offers of new work. In April 1972 he was commissioned to produce a
Doctor Who
storyline, which would become ‘Planet of the Daleks’, and the following month the
Beyond Omega
proposal was revived under another title; he was offered £750 to write a pilot script for a potential series to be called
The Survivors.

That latter commission proved to be the last contract he signed under the auspices of Associated London Scripts. In early 1968 ALS had merged itself with the Robert Stigwood Organisation, though two of the founders, Spike Milligan and Eric Sykes, remained behind and kept the offices at Orme Court. Thereafter it began to drift away from the single business of being an agency. Beryl Vertue, who had represented Nation for so long, was becoming involved in production, working on the 1966 film
The Spy with the Cold Nose
, written by Alan Galton and Ray Simpson, and then serving as executive producer on Eric Sykes’s
The Plank
(1967) and the movie version of
Till Death Us Do Part
(1969), all of which were made by a new sister company, Associated London Films. ‘I stopped being an agent, because I wanted to be a producer,’ she explained. ‘Then in the end we decided we wouldn’t have an agency at all.’ At the start of the 1970s, as Vertue’s interests moved elsewhere, it increasingly fell to Pam Gillis to negotiate on behalf of Nation, but in 1972 he left ALS altogether and became instead the client of Roger Hancock, younger brother of Tony, who had by now formed his own agency; he was to remain here for the rest of his life.

‘Roger was a legend,’ remembered the comedy writer Barry Cryer, who had been represented by Hancock since the mid 1960s. ‘He was very tough – his clients were everything. But he had so many friends. I never heard a bad word about him on a personal level.’ It was an opinion shared by others. ‘Off work, he was very charming, very amusing,’ noted Alan Simpson, while
Doctor Who
producer Barry Letts, who encountered Hancock from the other side of the negotiating table, recalled him and Nation as a double-act: ‘They played good guy, bad guy. Roger Hancock was a very fierce agent and made sure he got the best, best deal for Terry.’ And Terrance Dicks, who described Hancock as ‘a Rottweiler’, saw the success of the partnership in this meeting of opposites: ‘I think Terry knew he was so easy-going that he had his agent to protect him.’ As Cryer made clear, Hancock’s relationship with his clients was based on absolute trust; Cryer himself never signed a contract, merely shaking hands on a deal that was based on a simple premise. ‘He said: If you get pissed off with me, you walk away. If I get pissed off with you, I walk away.’ That arrangement lasted until Hancock’s retirement.

The benefits to Nation were soon to be manifest in better contracts with the BBC, but the connection with ALS was not entirely at an end. In 1973 Associated London Films produced a new film, a horror comedy titled
The House in Nightmare Park
, starring Frankie Howerd and co-written by Nation and Clive Exton, the latter also from the ALS stable.

Again, just as the idea for
The Team
had revisited
The Thin Man
, so this new venture was rooted in the Hollywood of Nation’s youth, for it came fairly directly from
The Cat and the Canary
, originally a stage play written by John Willard, but best known as a 1939 film, starring Bob Hope as a wise-cracking, cowardly actor. He and a motley and eccentric collection of family members gather in an old, dark house to hear the reading at midnight of a dead man’s will, and to chase after an inheritance that centres on a fortune in diamonds, hidden on the estate. Over the course of the ensuing night, we discover that there’s a vein of hereditary madness in the family, which might explain why the characters are being killed off one by one. The story had been reworked in 1961 by Robert S. Baker and Monty Berman as
What A Carve Up!
, with Kenneth Connor and Sid James; the source material here was credited as being Frank King’s novel
The Ghoul
, which accounted for the setting of the Yorkshire Moors, but the influence of
The Cat and the Canary
was unmistakable.

So too was it in
The House in Nightmare Park
, which again featured a rambling, eccentric family gathered in a remote mansion in pursuit of a cache of diamonds hidden somewhere on the estate, as they are successively murdered. Into this situation comes Frankie Howerd as a dreadful Edwardian actor, hired – so he believes – to provide entertainment based on his dramatic readings from Dickens, though it transpires that he too is a member of the family and unwittingly holds the key to the location of the diamonds. Despite its creaky and derivative plot, much of the film is very successful, with some classic Howerd lines. ‘Do I play the piano?’ he says indignantly. ‘Does Paganini play the trumpet?’ Asked how he takes his whisky, he requests ‘just a threat’ of soda. And when he finally discovers the truth about the diamonds, he bends over to explore a secret cavity in the floor and is horrified to see a snake rearing up between his legs: ‘Please make it a crusher not a biter,’ he murmurs. Delivered in Howerd’s most fervent voice, it’s a line that works beautifully at the time, even if it defies rational analysis.

The best moment though comes with the revelation that when the family was stationed in India, they used to have a variety act, Henderson’s Human Marionettes, in which the sibling children dressed as, and behaved like, dolls. Now middle-aged adults, they dress up again for a rendition of their party piece, which is genuinely disturbing. At the end of it one of the brothers, Ernest (Kenneth Griffith), is found dead, stabbed in the back while portraying a golliwog. It’s a sequence that could have come straight from
The Avengers
, and indeed the film’s director, Peter Sykes, had worked on a couple of episodes for that series, including Nation’s ‘Noon Doomsday’. As well as Griffith, who hadn’t acted in a Nation script since
Hancock
, the cast included Hugh Burden, Rosalie Crutchley and Ray Milland, who had once been a pupil at the same Cardiff school as Nation. But it was Howerd who dominated the proceedings. It was very much written with Frankie in mind,’ according to Verity Lambert, again the executive producer, while Nation and Exton were credited as the producers. (They even formed a company for the occasion, Extonation, though it did no further business.)

‘I was grateful the film received the first unanimously good press I’d had for a picture in a long, long time,’ remembered Howerd. ‘You expect, naturally, some divergence of opinion, but as I recall it, not one critic panned
The House in Nightmare Park.’
He was right; the movie got tremendous reviews. ‘As good an attempt as anyone has made to employ the elusive gifts of Frankie Howerd,’ said David Robinson in
The Times
; ‘his funniest film role’, agreed the
Daily Mirror
; while ‘for much of the time’ it had Ian Christie of the
Daily Express
‘quite helpless with laughter’. Derek Malcolm in the
Guardian
thought that the creators had ‘obviously tried for more than routine comedy and have, at least in part, succeeded’, and in the
Observer
George Melly declared that it was ‘as British as nailing a kipper to the underside of an unsympathetic seaside landlady’s dining-room table’.

There was perhaps an element of nostalgia in this reception. Howerd had first become a star more than a quarter of a century earlier, with
Variety Bandbox
, and his persona had changed very little in the intervening years, so that he was now a reassuring presence at a time when familiar comforts were much in demand. For Nation, about to embark on some much darker work, it was an unexpected footnote to his career as a comedy writer, his first piece of overt comedy for a decade. It also proved to be his last, but it did earn him some of the best notices of his career.

I
n 1971, as producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks planned the ninth season of
Doctor Who
for the following year, they came to the conclusion that the proposed opening wasn’t quite strong enough. ‘We had a story from Louis Marks about guerrillas from the future, which was good, but we felt didn’t have the “wow” factor that you want for your first show,’ remembered Dicks. ‘And suddenly one of us – I think probably me – had the brilliant idea: let’s put the Daleks in, let’s make the villains behind the villains be the Daleks. Which was fairly easy to do. But incredibly, I forgot that the Daleks were Terry Nation’s copyright.’

In fact it wasn’t the copyright as such that had been forgotten. Letts sent a memo to the copyright department in April 1971 asking them to clear the use of the Daleks in what became ‘Day of the Daleks’, and Nation later signed a contract authorising their appearance (his fee had gone up to £25 per episode by now). To mark the broadcast, Nation also contributed an unfinished story for a
Radio Times
competition; readers were invited to submit an ending as well as illustrations, with the prize being a model Dalek. But Dicks and Letts had perhaps forgotten the arrangement whereby Nation was to be given the first option of writing any story featuring his creations, and they went to Pinewood Studios – where he was working on
The Persuaders!
– to apologise. Over lunch it was agreed that Nation would write a Dalek story for the following season, smoothing over any hurt feelings and resolving the situation to everyone’s satisfaction. ‘He said, “Let’s have a bottle of champagne.” And we thought he was celebrating because the Daleks were coming back,’ remembered Letts. ‘Until he actually came to the studio and we realised he always drank champagne, because the Daleks had made him so rich.’

The Daleks had never quite gone away, of course, even though the last new serial had been in 1967. There was still the occasional cheque for an overseas sale (sometimes very small indeed: in 1971 Nation received £3.12 when ‘The Chase’ was sold to Ethiopian television), and there were still payments for the use of Daleks in other programmes, from the quiz show
What’s the Sense?
through to
Look – Mike Yarwood!
, the BBC’s vehicle for the up-and-coming impressionist. In 1973 Roger Hancock even managed to get a £10 fee for the use of a Dalek voice on Jimmy Savile’s show
Clunk-Click
, an agreement which seemed to lack natural justice since the voice was invented not by Nation but by Brian Hodgson. But by that stage Hancock was rapidly proving that his reputation as a determined agent was well founded. There was a continual barrage of letters to the BBC pointing out uses that hadn’t been cleared and demanding payment; he secured, for example, £75 for an appearance on Savile’s other show,
Jim’ll Fix It
in 1975.