The Man Who Invented the Daleks (37 page)

B
ack in December 1971, when Terry Nation had met Andrew Osborn to discuss potential programme ideas, it had been
The Amazing Robert Baldick
that had first found favour, perhaps because of the nascent nostalgia boom that came to dominate so much of the decade. But other currents running through popular culture, following the upheavals of the late 1960s, were to make his other proposal that day, originally entitled
Beyond Omega
, a more viable proposition.

There was, in the first instance, a trend away from industrialisation and towards ruralism, a movement initially manifested in the world of youth culture, and in the growing appeal of hippy communes, particularly in the West Country and Wales. The example was followed, in a milder form, by rock musicians. Previously the first objective of a new band had been to rehearse a live set and get out on the road as swiftly as possible, but when in 1967 Stevie Winwood left the Spencer Davis Group to co-found Traffic, the group’s initial move was instead to a cottage in a small Berkshire village, where they spent some months jamming and writing, before releasing the fruits of their labour on vinyl. By 1970, when Led Zeppelin retreated to a remote Welsh cottage to write their largely acoustic third album (there was no electricity in the place), the idea of serious musicians seeking inspiration far from the urban centres of the music industry was becoming one of the great clichés of the time. And gradually the same tendency became visible in the country more generally, beyond the bounds of music and youth culture.

In 1975 the BBC launched
The Good Life
, one of the most popular sitcoms of the era, celebrating a suburban expression of the instinct to get away from the rat-race in favour of a more natural lifestyle. The same year the pop artist Peter Blake and his wife, Jann Haworth, moved to Somerset to found, with several others, the Brotherhood of Ruralists, seeking to reconnect to an older tradition of art rooted in the English landscape. It wasn’t a huge success. ‘The critics were very much against it,’ Blake explained later, ‘and other artists thought we were kind of sentimental and silly.’ But it was another symptom of a feeling that modern culture, with its emphasis on city-based life, had lost its way. Given that this was the high point of the brutalist concrete housing estates, from the Barbican in the City of London to Broadwater Farm in Tottenham, the appeal of an escape to Arcadia was self-evident, even if there were cultural suggestions – including
And Soon the Darkness
– that all was not quite as lovely in the country garden as it might look to a city-dweller.

Allied to this trend was the rise of environmentalism, which found official expression in the declaration of 1970 as European Conservation Year, and which concerned itself at this stage with issues such as those outlined by Prince Philip: ‘Problems of overpopulation, environmental pollution, depletion of finite resources and the threat of widespread starvation.’ Effectively this was the flip-side of ruralism: underpinning the optimism of the move to the country with a sense of potential catastrophe arising from contemporary life, and with both tendencies expressing a rejection of modernism. The boom in ecological campaigning did not last long, withering in the cold winds that blew through the economy in the late 1970s and early 1980s – though the arguments survived to re-emerge later in the century – but for a brief period environmentalism was taken very seriously. And, as ever with such issues, the BBC was very keen to demonstrate relevance by responding to new social concerns; the most celebrated early result was
Doomwatch
(1970), a drama series concerning environmental and technological problems that was created by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis, who had earlier invented the Cybermen for
Doctor Who.
(A 1972 film of
Doomwatch
was scripted by Clive Exton and directed by Peter Sasdy.)

Some of this thinking was undoubtedly behind the BBC’s commissioning in May 1972 of a pilot episode for the post-apocalyptic
Beyond Omega
project, now retitled
The Survivors
and ultimately to be made as simply
Survivors.
Nation had a great deal of other work on at the time – ‘Planet of the Daleks’ had just been commissioned, followed by ‘Death to the Daleks’, there were episodes of
The Protectors
to write,
The Amazing Robert Baldick
was in pre-production and
The House in Nightmare Park
was also in the pipeline – and it wasn’t until October of the following year that he received the second half of his payment, due on delivery of the pilot script. Thereafter things moved considerably faster. The pilot was accepted and the project expanded into a series, expected to run for ten episodes in mid 1975, with the theme succinctly identified as: ‘Bubonic plague sweeps the world, killing all but a handful of people who escape to the country with absolutely nothing and who start civilisation again from scratch.’ Contract negotiations were concluded by January 1974, with Nation receiving a fee of £850 per script, plus £50 per episode as the creator (£100 for each episode written by someone else) and an additional £50 per episode as script consultant. He also retained the film and merchandising rights and signed separately a publishing contract for a novel based on the series.

At the heart of Nation’s thinking about this new series was a sense of the fragility of civilisation. He had researched the Black Death, the pandemic that killed around half the population of Europe in the fourteenth century, but had concluded that the modern world was even more vulnerable. ‘In those days, the Death travelled through Europe and Asia at the speed of a man on a horse because that was the fastest means of locomotion,’ he noted, but today it would ‘travel at the speed of a jet plane. In twenty-four hours it would be in every major city in the world.’

Bringing this potential defencelessness into focus was the epochal moment in 1969 when human beings first set foot on the Moon, an achievement which was at least partially responsible for the growth of environmentalism. The images sent back of Earth as seen from its nearest neighbour revealed our planet to be a much more delicate entity than it had previously appeared, while the barrenness of the Moon itself served to emphasise the precious rarity of life. Nation, however, drew another lesson from the episode: the huge gap that space exploration illustrated between the scientific possibilities of humanity as a species, and the technological ignorance of the individuals within that species. We were the first known beings to have consciously escaped from their own planet, and yet the complexities of modern life had alienated most people in the developed world not merely from the intricate technologies that we now took for granted, but from the most basic skills that had allowed the emergence of society in the first place. The interdependence of humanity, the division of expertise, meant that no one individual – nor even a small group of individuals – could live a genuinely self-sufficient life in any form that would be recognisable to contemporary culture. The premise of the series, a cataclysmic event that produces the near-extinction of humanity, was intended to illustrate this gap between individual and society; it was summed up in the
Radio Times
listing for the first episode, using the words of one of the characters: ‘Incredible, isn’t it? We are of the generation that landed a man on the moon and the best we can do is talk of making tools from stone.’

There was also a personal dimension to this concern. However impressive Lynsted Park might be as a house, there were also problems. ‘We are at the end of the electricity and water mains,’ Nation told the
Daily Mirror
in 1964. ‘If somebody in the village uses extra electricity, our lights go out.’ In later interviews he was to cite this as part of the motivation for
Survivors: ‘
We had a big house in the country at the time and I was becoming more and more aware of the difficulties in just surviving in a big house with running water, electricity and all that. I was also aware of how little I knew. I didn’t know how to preserve food, I didn’t know how to make anything, and I suddenly realised that I and my whole generation were virtual victims of a tremendous industry.’

With this in mind, he attempted to introduce a note of self-sufficiency to Lynsted Park, though, as he happily acknowledged, his contribution to the experiment was in directing, rather than running, the project, the burden of which fell squarely on his wife, Kate. ‘We had geese, chicken, sheep,’ he remembered. ‘I would say, “Why don’t we get some goats?” and before I knew it there were goats up there, trying to knock us down every time we moved. She tried baking bread, but the truth was if you needed it, you would go down to the store and get it, but I was just fascinated, seeing it done.’ He was attracted to the ideas contained in John and Sally Seymour’s influential book
Self-Sufficiency
(1970), even if he lacked the commitment to follow them through too far. ‘My wife was exhausted,’ he admitted. ‘This poor woman was living this
Survivors
thing while I was sitting up in this room. I’d come down and say, “God, what a day I had today!” and she’d say, “
You
had a day?”’ With a daughter, Rebecca, and an infant son, Joel (born in 1973), to look after, it’s a tribute to Kate’s supportive nature that she went along with the idea at all. ‘She slaved through the years of that, and afterwards she said, “You know, I want your next show to be about this couple who live on a yacht in the south of France, and they’ve got servants, and they’re terribly rich.” She’d had enough of surviving.’

If this was the starting point for
Survivors
, Nation also discovered during the writing process that he was revisiting a key theme that had run through much of his previous work. ‘It is only since I started work on this new series,’ he said, ‘that I have realised my writing has previously been dominated by the business of survival: the people in those other series survived because of their extreme cleverness, wit or ability.’ In an interview with the
Daily Express
, promoting the show, he stressed the same point: ‘I’ve been thinking about this for twenty years. I’ve written
The Saint
and
The Persuaders!
– people always against the odds.’

Perhaps these weren’t the best examples that Nation could have chosen from his previous work, for the ITC series featured resourcefulness in very specific situations; when John Mannering or Simon Templar improvise their way out of danger, it demonstrates quick thinking in a moment of high stress, not the long-term methodical planning required in a society that has collapsed completely. But there were certainly precedents in his work, starting with the title of the show itself. It harked back to the original storyline for ‘The Daleks’, which had been called ‘The Survivors’ (as broadcast, the second episode of the serial bore that title), and had also been set in the aftermath of an apocalypse that destroyed almost all civilisation on the planet. Indeed the theme of a largely depopulated planet was a regular one, from the neutron bomb in ‘The Daleks’ to the solium radiation device yet to come in the
Blake’s 7
episode ‘Countdown’. And there are perhaps echoes of other plagues in ‘Planet of the Daleks’ and ‘Death to the Daleks’.

More directly, the original script for ‘The Daleks’ Master Plan’ had included discussion of ‘sending planets back in time to a primitive past.’ ‘The Earth can start again,’ Mavic Chen was to have reflected, ‘but without the shackles of infantile philosophies like democracy. It will be a new and virgin land which can be shaped.’ Similarly in the original scripts for ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’, one of the characters recounts how the invasion was prefaced by the dropping of bacteria bombs, killing most of humanity with a deadly virus; when there were insufficient numbers of humans left to carry the disease, it faded away, and those who were left grouped themselves into small communities, working the land and fighting off attacks from marauding gangs. The arrival of the Daleks has interrupted this process, but as the possibility of defeating the invaders becomes a reality, attention turns again to the rebuilding of society. David, one of the resistance fighters, emphasises that agriculture is the way forward: ‘It’s the land that matters, isn’t it? The world’s saturated itself with science.’ He later talks of soil as ‘The most valuable thing we have, the basis of all life.’ Little of this made it into the televised version of the serial, but there were definite resonances to be heard in
Survivors.
Even in the minor details of ‘Invasion’ there were elements that would recur in the later series; we were to be told of radio hams linking some of the groups of survivors together, while Susan’s response when she learns that humans are fighting each other for food and supplies tersely summarises one of Nation’s chief concerns: ‘Survival at all costs.’ The timing was not far removed either; the first draft of ‘Invasion’ set the action in 2041, with the Doctor calculating that Earth must have succumbed to the Daleks in the 1970s.

But if Nation drew on elements of his earlier work for
Survivors
, they were to be transformed into something much more convincing here. Perhaps buoyed by the new-found critical respectability of the Daleks and the unusually good notices for
The House in Nightmare Park
, Nation began to enjoy something of a purple patch, writing – in addition to ‘Genesis of the Daleks’ – seven episodes of what turned out to be the thirteen-week series of
Survivors
, among them some of his best work. In particular the opening three episodes, which link together into a continuous narrative, are hugely effective, a sustained two-and-a-half-hour tale that for the first time allowed him the leisure to develop character, as well as to explore his favourite concerns in some depth. In the absence of the cliff-hanger endings that were demanded every twenty minutes or so in
Doctor Who
, the pacing is less forced, and the moments of action and high drama emerge more naturally from the narrative. This was new territory for a writer who had come from comedy into children’s science fiction and action adventure stories, and there was nothing in his list of credits to guarantee that it would work, but it was a challenge to which Nation proved himself more than capable of responding.