The Man Who Invented the Daleks (46 page)

For many of its fans, part of the appeal of
Blake’s 7
was precisely that low-budget production, a defiantly British response to American overkill. Some of the design and special effects were as good as anything the BBC had yet produced – particularly the
Liberator
itself, created by Roger Murray-Leach – but the approach to television drama had not essentially changed from the early days of
Doctor Who.
This was still ‘a kind of strange, bastard medium,’ in the words of David Maloney, ‘which lay between the theatre and film’. Maloney, who had earlier directed ‘Planet of the Daleks’ and ‘Genesis of the Daleks’ and who produced the first three seasons of
Blake’s 7
, was another who had come to
Doctor Who
with a background in theatre. As he suggests, there remained a certain staginess to the series.

Within its limitations, however, the first season of
Blake’s 7
was a personal triumph for Nation, whose resolve to write the whole thing had been entirely vindicated. There were weak moments, but he had avoided the problems he encountered on
Survivors
of having his image of the show diluted by others. The volume of work this entailed meant he had even less involvement in the actual production than normal, but he did this time have a sympathetic producer and the result was exactly what he had set out to create: ‘a modern swashbuckler’. In many ways it was the ultimate Terry Nation creation, a variation on the ITC action adventure stories set on the alien planets of
Doctor Who
and with the more subtle characterisation of
Survivors.
There’s also Servalan, a monster almost to rival Davros, there are good jokes, the plot developments and action are relentless and a fight is seldom more than a few minutes away.

Equally characteristic of Nation, there is, running underneath the romping fun, a vein of pure pessimism in its depiction of the future; there’s no sense of hope or progress in this vision of things to come. ‘With its drugged, dejected masses crushed by tyrants,’ noted Shaun Usher, it ‘seemed to picture the future as being much the same as the present, Lord help us, only worse.’ And, while not straying from his wish to entertain the audience, Nation was developing a new sense of moral ambiguity. In
Survivors
he had begun to introduce a little shading to his villains, suggesting that there might be a need in extremis for the authoritarianism of Wormley and Knox; here he left the arch-villains pure at heart in their evil, but created a cast of ‘heroes’ that included a murderer, a thief, a smuggler and an embezzler. Blake may have been framed, but there is no suggestion that any of the others were anything but criminals.

The season ended on a note of negativity that seemed perfectly in tune with the preceding episodes. Blake and his comrades bring the all-seeing computer Orac on to the
Liberator
and find that it’s so powerful and has access to so much information that it can effectively predict the future, extrapolating from the present to see the ensuing chains of events and their ultimate consequences. And, in a wonderful cliff-hanger of an ending, Orac reveals to the crew images from the future of the
Liberator
exploding in space.

T
he experience of the Dalek craze had convinced all parties – Terry Nation, Roger Hancock, the BBC – of the value of merchandising, and approaches were made early on in the development of
Blake’s 7
to more than a dozen companies with ideas for everything from a video game to ice cream, from colouring books to jigsaws. However proud Nation had been of his work on
Survivors
, he was aware of the limited spin-off opportunities involved in that series and was keen to remedy the situation. ‘I knew I wanted to do another science fiction show,’ he said later, ‘because of having had all sorts of ancillary successes with the Daleks and
Doctor Who
, like merchandising and so on.’ Unlike
Doctor Who
, however,
Blake’s 7
was not primarily aimed at children and few such opportunities materialised; many of the licences that were signed were never followed through, foundering on a lack of available imagery at an early enough stage. There was moreover little public appetite for those products that did make it to the shops: jigsaws, a two-inch-long replica of the
Liberator
from Corgi Toys, and the Blake’s 7 Neutron Space Rifle, the latter capable of firing table tennis balls.

More encouraging were sales of related literature. There was now clearly a market for novelisations, as demonstrated not only by Nation’s own
Survivors
, but even more by the success of the
Doctor Who
books published by Target. The first of these had been a reprint of David Whitaker’s version of the first Daleks serial, and a further twenty titles had been added by the time two other Nation stories,
The Genesis of the Daleks
and
The Planet of the Daleks
, appeared in 1976. Nation had no involvement in either – both were written by Terrance Dicks – though of course he benefited from their sales. ‘Basically you get half the money and do none of the work,’ observed Chris Boucher, whose
Doctor Who
serials were also adapted by Dicks; ‘which sounds reasonable enough to me.’ Suitably inspired, Roger Hancock had, by December 1976, negotiated deals for a
Blake’s 7
novelisation, to be published in hardback by Arthur Barker and in paperback by Sphere.

Nation was by now committed to writing all thirteen episodes for the first season and had no time or appetite to add a book to his workload, so instead Sphere turned to an established science fiction writer, Trevor Hoyle, who had just completed his
Q Trilogy
of novels. ‘Terry was happy to have someone take the chore off his hands,’ remembered Hoyle, who worked from draft scripts of the first four episodes, augmented by phone conversations and meetings with Nation, to produce
Blake’s 7.
He followed that with
Project Avalon
, published by Arrow Books, which rounded up a further four first-season scripts, and with
Scorpio Attack
, taken from the fourth season, which came out under the BBC’s own imprint, completing a hat-trick of publishers. There were also three annuals, starting in 1979, from World Distributors, the company responsible for the successful
Doctor Who
annuals, and a monthly magazine from Marvel, that lasted for nearly two years from October 1981.

What was notable about all these publications was that they identified themselves on their covers as being part of ‘Terry Nation’s
Blake’s 7’
, with Nation’s name rendered in a facsimile of his signature. This was even true of
Scorpio Attack
, which contained none of his plots at all. The same styling was not used on screen. Indeed David Maloney rejected a suggestion from Hancock that, from the second season, the credit ‘series created by Terry Nation’ should be changed to ‘series devised by Terry Nation’; after consultations with Chris Boucher, this was felt to give too much recognition to Nation’s continuing contribution. But the trend was evident elsewhere. When, in 1979, Target brought out a cheaply produced paperback about the Daleks, edited by Terrance Dicks (it contained a history of the species, various puzzles and games, and a reprint of the 1974 short story, ‘Daleks: The Secret Invasion’), it was titled
Terry Nation’s Dalek Special
, with his name again in his own handwriting. Similarly World Distributors brought out a series of four Dalek annuals from 1976, and they too were billed as
Terry Nation’s Dalek Annual.

‘People knew about Terry and the Daleks,’ reasoned Dicks, ‘so there was a commercial value to having his name on the books, although he had very little to do with them.’ But there was something more deliberate at work here, a conscious attempt to turn Nation himself into a brand. ‘I had a very good agent and he insisted on it. I wanted to associate the name with the product,’ Nation explained. ‘It was a calculated effort really, selling a product. I was the product.’ It’s hard not to see this as preparatory work in a planned campaign to try again the recurring dream of conquering America; by identifying Nation so overtly with his successful creations of the Daleks and
Blake’s 7
, it was hoped to raise his profile, enabling him to approach the US television industry from a position of strength.

Meanwhile there was a new series to write, and this time Nation was no longer to be responsible for the whole thing. ‘I wanted the weight off me a little,’ he was later to comment. ‘I was tired by that time.’ Instead he was contracted to write five episodes, the remainder being split between Chris Boucher, who also remained the script editor, and a trio of other experienced writers: Allan Prior, Roger Parkes and Robert Holmes. Three scripts were duly delivered, but when it came to what was intended to be the double-part season finale, Nation found he’d simply run out of steam. ‘Terry said that he had made several efforts to write part 12 but was defeated,’ recorded David Maloney in an internal memo, ‘this being his seventeenth script for
Blake’s
7.’ Instead the season finale was written by Boucher, who was now more involved in shaping the series.

Born in 1943, Boucher was – like Nation – an only child who had started his professional career writing jokes, in his case for
Braden’s Week
, the BBC consumer show that spawned Esther Rantzen’s
That’s Life
, and for the comedian Dave Allen, before moving into sitcoms with, among others, a pilot,
Slater’s Day
(1974) for Yorkshire TV, that starred Nation’s old friend John Junkin but didn’t get commissioned as a series. By the time he came to
Blake’s 7
as script editor (after Robert Holmes turned the job down), he had had three serials screened on
Doctor Who
, but his new role was a major step forward in his career and he ended up writing nine episodes as well as remaining on the production team throughout. The pressure on Nation to produce the first season meant that Boucher had a greater involvement in rewriting than was normal for a script editor, but it was a relationship that seemed to work for both men. ‘He didn’t seem hugely protective, but then he was a pro from way back,’ observed Boucher, while Nation was more generous in his praise than he could sometimes be for those who changed his work: ‘Chris Boucher did a splendid job overall. I would not have approved of every change he made, but that was what he was being paid for. I think he did it terribly well.’

Nation did, however, retain considerable influence over the direction of the series, and for the second season Hancock negotiated payments of £240 format royalty for each episode written by anyone else, plus a script consultancy fee of £50 per episode – the result was that of the money Nation received for the season, nearly 40 per cent came from episodes written by others. There was also a payment of £500 for a concept and theme for the season, and Nation produced a document summing up what had been done thus far and outlining what should happen next. ‘
Blake’s 7
is a space
adventure
,’ he emphasised. ‘It is filled with action and adventure. This must be our yardstick by which we judge all future stories.’

The overarching theme for the second season, he said, should be Blake’s attempt to launch ‘a bold and stunning strike against the oppressors. Something that will stiffen the spines of the waverers and give them the courage to join in the fight. One spectacular event that will both damage and humiliate the enemy.’ This would occupy several of the thirteen episodes and would provide the cliff-hanger finale, in which Blake finally locates Star One, the ‘city sized space station’ that is the command centre of the entire Federation, only to discover that it is about to be attacked by an alien empire. ‘The aliens intend to destroy life on all the Federation planets and repopulate with their own kind. Must Blake now save the Federation?’ This, of course, was the two-part storyline that Nation never managed to write, but his idea did form the basis of the season cliff-hanger, ‘Star One’. (Early on, according to Boucher, Nation had tentatively suggested introducing the Daleks at this point: ‘We stamped on that idea very firmly.’)

The other key theme that Nation wanted to run through the second season was the feud between Blake and Travis, who was still seen at this point as being the arch-enemy. Travis was to be dismissed from the service of the Federation but, obsessed by his desire for revenge, was to continue the pursuit of Blake, aided unofficially by Servalan. This storyline was followed, but it suffered from the absence of Stephen Greif, who had made Travis such a splendidly excessive figure. ‘I kept piling it on,’ said Nation of the character and of Greif’s portrayal. ‘I was sending it up slightly but he played it with such panache and reality that it didn’t seem overloaded at all.’ Greif’s decision to leave the show at the end of the first season left a gap that was only partially filled by his replacement, Brian Croucher, who was dealt an almost unplayable hand. It was ‘an unenviable task’, observed Paul Darrow, to have to take on another actor’s character. ‘Poor Brian was on a hiding to nothing.’ The double-act with Servalan was no longer a partnership of equals, and Travis was killed off in the final episode of the season, slain not by Blake but, significantly, by Avon.

For the balance of power was shifting within the series. The rivalry between Blake and Travis was supposed to form the core of the story, personalising Blake’s doomed struggle with the Federation, but both characters were gradually being eclipsed by Avon and Servalan respectively. It was their relationship that came to dominate memories of the series, largely because, as Darrow pointed out, they were the ones who brought an element of sexuality to the screen: ‘Servalan hit on any male that moved and Avon kissed a lot of girls before blowing them away.’ Fifteen years after the series ended, Elizabeth Coldwell, editor of the erotic magazine
Forum
, was still celebrating the sexual subtexts of the show, with the ‘show’s dominant, arrogant anti-hero Avon always dressed in tight black leather’, and Servalan, ‘science fiction’s only prime-time dominatrix’, whose ‘sadistic love of cruelty and ability to wander over any alien landscape in ridiculously high stilettos caused disruption in many an adolescent trouser area’. There was, she pointed out, ‘a scything sexual tension’ between the two.