The Man Who Invented the Daleks (45 page)

Despite the flawed logic, the conflict between Blake and the double-act of Servalan and Travis provides a focus for the series that drives the narrative forward and provides many of the most effective sequences. In particular, the episode ‘Duel’ finds Nation at his very best. Federation pursuit ships have cornered the
Liberator
in the vicinity of an unknown planet and seem certain this time to kill their quarry, when both Blake and Travis find themselves transported against their will to the surface of the planet. Here they encounter two beings, Sinofar the Guardian (Isla Blair) and Giroc the Keeper (Patsy Smart), the powerful and mysterious survivors of a thousand-year war that has destroyed the planet, whose role now is to teach others about the nature of aggression. ‘You both know how to kill,’ Sinofar tells the two antagonists. ‘But here you must take a life. There will be no machines to make the act unreal. You must touch the life you take.’ Blake and Travis, with just one companion each and armed only with a knife, are sent separately into a forest to track each other down and fight to the death. The conflict ends with Blake triumphant but refusing to kill his enemy, admitting that he would enjoy it too much, and Sinofar returns him to the
Liberator
, apparently satisfied that he has understood the lesson: that the instinct for violence should not be indulged. Travis, of course, learns nothing at all from the experience.

Some of this is familiar ground. ‘With each generation there were fewer of us. The dead vastly outnumbered the living. And still there was no victory for either side,’ explains Sinofar, as she recounts the history of her world. And then the ultimate weapon was created and used. ‘It wasn’t a victory, it was only the end of the war. We were left with a planet made barren by radiation. Our children were monsters, or died, or were never born.’ The resemblance to Skaro is unmistakable, though the phrasing here is both more elegant and elegiac. The concept of the duel had also occurred earlier in Nation’s work; in ‘Invasion of the Earthmen’ in
The Avengers
, two of the cadets were sent out on a night survival exercise, with instructions that they were to hunt each other and that only one could return. There were echoes too of ‘Arena’, a 1967 episode of
Star Trek.
But the power of ‘Duel’ rests elsewhere, in the suggestion that violence is an integral part of human nature and evolution, touching on the theories of scientists like Robert Ardley and Konrad Lorenz, whose work was popular at the time. (Nation had cited Ardley’s 1961 book
African Genesis
in the novel of
Survivors
.)

There were other moments in the first season of
Blake’s 7
that returned to favourite Nation scenarios, perhaps not surprisingly given the pressure of writing all thirteen episodes. ‘It was a hell of a workload for him,’ said Chris Boucher, the script editor of the series, ‘it was a hell of a strain.’ Boucher reworked many of the drafts, with further contributions from producer David Maloney, but there was no doubt that the process pushed Nation harder than any commitment since the days of being script editor on
The Persuaders!.
‘During those thirteen weeks,’ he remembered, ‘I ran entirely out of ideas, and I’d sit around and walk for days, saying, “There are no more ideas, that’s it! I’ve shot it all, and it’s gone.” But then something comes up and you get an opening scene, and then you get the feeling that something’s there.’

Sometimes the borrowings worked rather well. The climax to ‘Project Avalon’ comes when the woman that Blake believes to be Avalon turns out to be a robot replica, armed with a phial containing a deadly virus that will kill the crew of the
Liberator
, a neat blend of Philip K. Dick’s ‘Imposter’ and
Survivors.
Earlier in the episode, as Blake tries to work out a way into the heavily guarded complex where Avalon is being held, his first thought is typical Nation: ‘What about ventilation shafts?’ Such a means of access has proved invaluable in earlier stories, particularly in
Doctor Who
, but it turns out that this planet has an unusual climate and is entering its Long Cold, a winter that lasts for eight and a half Earth years, with massively sub-zero temperatures, and the ventilation shafts are closed off for the duration – one Nation cliché renders another obsolete. In ‘Deliverance’ Avon, Vila and Gan are welcomed on the planet Cephlon as the fulfilment of a long-standing prophecy on a formerly advanced world that has fallen into savagery, and the references to Erich von Däniken from ‘Death to the Daleks’ return. We’re not really gods from the skies, you know,’ protests Gan. ‘We’re just men from a spacecraft.’

On other occasions the influences are less successful. In ‘Bounty’ we meet Sarkoff (T.P. McKenna), the exiled former president of the planet Lindor, who has a fondness for the past to rival that of the Medievalists in
The Caves of Steel.
Some of the details are nicely done – he plays a 78 rpm gramophone record of Tommy Steele’s ‘Singing the Blues’ and murmurs: ‘Echoes of a more civilised age’ – but the effect is rather that of an uninspired, budget episode of
The Avengers
, seeking to be quirky and offbeat and failing. (Nation later explained that some of the plotline was influenced by the Syrian intervention in Lebanon in 1976, though he admitted ‘that 99.9 per cent of people who see that show won’t see any political significance at all’.)

More explicit still are the echoes in ‘The Web’, which revisits the episode ‘The Velvet Web’ in ‘The Keys of Marinus’. Here the consciousnesses of several scientists survive in a single entity called Saymon, who is suspended in a glass tank on a life support system, and who operates by proxy through humanoid assistants. For good measure, the story also throws in elements of Wells’s
The Time Machine
and
The Island of Dr Moreau.
Saymon has been developing techniques of genetic engineering banned elsewhere in the known universe, and has created not only the beautiful assistants, but a race of ugly, stunted creatures called Decimas, a mutant strain of which has evolved, capable of thought and emotion. These mutant Decimas have turned hostile and are attacking the laboratory complex that houses Saymon. In retaliation Saymon wishes to release a lethal dose of radiation into the atmosphere to kill the creatures. But to carry out his plan he needs additional power cells from the
Liberator
, in exchange for which he will release the ship, currently trapped in a massive cosmic web. It’s a moral dilemma reminiscent of that faced by the Doctor in ‘Genesis of the Daleks’: can Blake condemn an entire race to death in order to save himself and his crew? And, as in ‘Genesis of the Daleks’, Nation sidesteps the issue by having the Decimas break into the lab and kill the occupants.

Then there is ‘Mission to Destiny’, a stand-alone episode that is essentially a murder mystery story of a man beaten to death on board a spaceship. There are no witnesses and the only clue is a number, 54124, written by the victim in his own blood as he lay dying. It takes the intelligence of Avon to recognise that what looks like a number is actually a series of letters: SARA, the name of one of the crew members. ‘We wanted to show that we could do an Agatha Christie story in space,’ reflected Nation. ‘It had all the mystery elements in it, and years later I thought, “What a dummy! I could have made a first-class movie out of that.” It would have been the first space murder mystery.’ He might also have mentioned that it bore a strong resemblance to a Leslie Charteris story that he had adapted as ‘The Inescapable Word’ for
The Saint
, which likewise features a murder victim leaving behind a cryptic message written in his own blood, in this instance the letters COP. Suspicion is directed at a former police officer, until Simon Templar learns that the dead man was of Russian origin and deduces that he had in his death throes reverted to his native alphabet. The Russian letters COP translate to the English SOR, thus pointing the finger at a character named Professor Soren. Even that was not strikingly original, being rooted in the first Sherlock Holmes story,
A Study in Scarlet
, in which a dying man scrawls the letters RACHE in blood; the police assume he was trying to implicate a woman named Rachel, until Holmes points out that ‘rache’ is the German word for ‘revenge’.

In the final episode of the season, ‘Orac’, the crew of the
Liberator
triumph over Servalan and Travis in the race to acquire the ultimate computer from its creator. At the age of eighteen Professor Ensor (Derek Farr) invented a component called a Tarial cell, which became an integral part of every computer in the known universe. Now in exile, he has developed a supercomputer named Orac, in a rare outbreak of futurology by Nation. ‘It is a brain, a genius,’ enthuses Ensor. ‘It has a mind that can draw information from every computer containing one of my cells. Orac has access to the sum total of all the knowledge of all the known worlds.’ But Ensor is a dying man, and possession of the computer passes to Blake, who only then discovers that it also has the personality of its creator: a crotchety, impatient old man who has little but contempt for those less intelligent than himself. ‘This wasn’t a polite computer,’ as Nation pointed out. In fact Orac (again voiced by Peter Tuddenham) is not far off being a rebirth of William Hartnell’s Doctor, always Nation’s favourite incarnation of the Time Lord.

If the first season of
Blake’s 7
sometimes feels like a run-through of Terry Nation’s greatest hits, it’s none the worse for that. Since his move from comedy to drama, he had written more than 120 television programmes and his ability to tell a good story had not deserted him. The characters, as rich as those in
Survivors
, included some of his most memorable creations, particularly Servalan and Travis, but also Vila who has a good line in jokes about his own cowardice: ‘I plan to live forever. Or die trying.’ Most intriguing of all is Avon, whose professed lack of concern for anyone else, maintained throughout with a straight face, is steadily undermined by his interactions with the others. He banters with Vila and, although he makes no secret of his desire to take over the
Liberator
, he tends ultimately to defer to Blake, seemingly aware that he is not yet ready for leadership. When, in ‘Deliverance’, Blake asks him what it felt like to be treated as a god on Cephlon, he throws back the question with a tone of studied neutrality: ‘Don’t you know?’ And Blake replies, with some insight: ‘Yes. I don’t like the responsibility either.’

When the BBC conducted an audience research report after the first season, Avon emerged as the most popular character among the
Liberator
crew, followed in order by Blake, Jenna, Vila, Cally and Gan. The same research showed an impressive reaction index rating that averaged at 67, and a definite interest in having the show continue; asked whether they wanted to see a second season, 73 per cent of the sample replied positively. While not a spectacular ratings success, it had been solidly successful, averaging an audience of 9.2 million and reaching the weekly top thirty in the final episode; scheduled against
Coronation Street
on ITV, hardly the most desirable time slot, it had managed steadily to build an audience.

Less impressed were the critics, though this came as no great surprise.
Doctor Who
had become acceptable by virtue of its age, but still popular science fiction was seldom the recipient of critical praise, and Nation’s new show was no exception.
‘Blake’s 7
has turned out to be rather a run of the mill space adventure,’ said the
Daily Express
, while Peter Fiddick in the
Guardian
thought it was ‘a mix of olde-world space jargon, ray guns, Western-style goodies and baddies, and punch-ups straight out of
The Sweeney.
’ Stanley Reynolds in
The Times
was more enthusiastic, though his comments came after just four episodes, before the arrival of Servalan and Travis: ‘Terry Nation’s new series is straight with real villains, and it is nice to hear the youngsters holding their breath in anticipation of a little terror. Television science fiction has got too self-consciously jokey lately.’ And there was one comparison that could not be avoided, whether for good or ill. ‘I suppose the
Star Wars
boom sparked it off,’ reflected Clive James in the
Observer.
‘Suddenly it seemed like a good idea for the Beeb to have its own space opera. Well, here it is. Activate main garbage tubes! Stand by for gunge disposal!’ Or, in the words of Shaun Usher in the
Daily Mail:
‘For all those adults who pretend not to watch
Doctor Who
, and find it a shade too jokey and cliff-hanging,
Blake’s Seven
will have to do. And considering that it has the kind of budget
Star Trek
devoted to coffee breaks and
Star Wars
spent on trailers, it could be a lot worse.’

George Lucas’s film
Star Wars
had been released in Britain the month before
Blake’s 7
debuted, having already been a runaway box-office hit in America. Its huge budget and ground-breaking special effects raised the bar for subsequent screen treatments of science fiction, far beyond a level with which the British film industry, let alone British television, could compete. ‘I enjoyed and admired the film, but came away from the screening green with envy,’ admitted Nation, after attending the press preview. He recognised that his own work had to take a very different tack. ‘When we did
Blake’s 7
we realised we had to have interesting stories because our effects would win us no friends. When the space ship went through a black hole it was someone shaking a piece of black card.’ David Maloney, who went with him to the screening, concluded, ‘Well that’s us finished, we can’t possibly match that, we’re dead.’ The possibility of achieving higher production values had in fact been raised early on, when the American media company Time-Life approached the BBC, seeking to put money into the show in return for world rights, but the option was rejected by Alasdair Milne, later to be become director general of the corporation but then the director of programmes. ‘I do not accept,’ he wrote authoritatively in a memo, the same month
Star Wars
was released, ‘that there is going to be a great surge of interest in science fiction series in America.’