The Man Who Invented the Daleks (49 page)

B
y the end of the 1970s Nation was reaching a critical point in his career. Now in his late forties, he was a major figure in popular television in Britain, coming off two successful series of his own devising, and with the Daleks confirmed as a continuing, integral part of
Doctor Who.
Like Ray Galton and Alan Simpson and Johnny Speight, his erstwhile colleagues at Associated London Scripts, he had become a name in his own right, even if this was partially achieved in spite of the BBC; they might have refused to put his name above the titles, but the merchandising of
Blake’s 7
and the Daleks was doing its best to redress the balance. Within his field, there was little more that Nation could achieve on television at home.

For someone in his position twenty years earlier, the logical next step would have been into the movies, but the British film industry was now at its lowest ebb, with even the established box-office brands failing. Hammer had made its last horror film,
To the Devil a Daughter
, in 1976, while the Carry On series had petered out with the substandard
Carry On England
(1976) and
Carry On Emmanuelle
(1978). Lew Grade, obliged to retire from his television empire at the age of seventy, had moved instead into film-making, but ITC’s touch was less sure when it came to the cinema and the company came a cropper with the hugely expensive flop
Raise the Titanic
(1980). Less celebrated companies were also struggling: Amicus had a three-year gap before its final production,
The Monster Club
(1980), and Associated London Films, ALS’s sister company, had made its last big-screen picture with
Steptoe and Son Ride Again
in 1973.

Nation did try to develop a film project in 1978, to be titled
Bedouin.
‘It’s a marvellous adventure story to be shot in the desert,’ he explained at the time. ‘I think twelfth century – the Crusaders.’ There was to be a strong vein of fantasy running through it, going back to an earlier theme of ancient wisdom: ‘The von Däniken kind of thinking. I disapprove of him entirely, but is there a wisdom somewhere that could have been from another source?’ Discussions were held with a production company in Geneva, but it came to nothing.

The opportunities for new challenges in Britain seemed slight, and if he was ever going to make a serious attempt to break America, clearly it had to be soon, before age caught up with him. There was some encouragement that the tide might be turning in favour of his style of writing. In 1977
Doctor Who
had finally found a home in the States on the Public Broadcasting Service, and even on some commercial channels, and by the end of the decade it had begun to build a cult following. By 1984 it had become established enough to warrant coverage in
Time
magazine.

And so, in 1980, Nation and his family moved to Los Angeles for what was initially intended to be a two-month trial. He celebrated his fiftieth birthday in Hollywood.

In his absence, the unexpected commissioning of a fourth season of
Blake’s 7
resulted in a very tight production schedule, complicated further by the departure of producer David Maloney, to be replaced by Vere Lorrimer, who had already directed a dozen episodes of the series. There was too a change in the cast. Jan Chappell, who played Cally, decided not to return, so was killed off-screen in the first episode, leaving just two of the original crew members – Avon and Vila – on board a new ship, the much less impressive
Scorpio
, joined by a new comrade, Soolin (Glynis Barber). Jacqueline Pearce, on the other hand, whose involvement was initially doubtful, did return, via a somewhat tortuous plotline that meant Servalan was posing for some time under the alias Sleer to no discernible dramatic advantage.

Lorrimer visited Nation in Los Angeles to discuss the direction of the fourth season, but it was more a matter of courtesy than of serious consultation, and Nation was far from impressed with the results: ‘I didn’t have anything to do with the last [series], which I hated. I’ve seen some of them and I think, again, that they missed it.’ There was, he argued, an inherent problem with other writers taking over his characters: ‘I believe that I wrote
Blake’s 7
(and
Survivors
and the Daleks) better than anybody else, simply because I invented them. I knew them deeply and more intimately than anybody else. I knew what I was trying to achieve.’ It was a complaint that he had made repeatedly when others had taken on his creations, though it was hard to see how it could be avoided, given the collaborative medium in which he worked.

Even Nation, however, could not help but admire the last episode of season four. Written by Chris Boucher and broadcast in the Christmas week of 1981, ‘Blake’ was a great piece of television. Again Avon has discovered that Roj Blake is still alive, this time on an obscure, lawless planet named Gauda Prime, raising hopes that he might return as the unifying figurehead for the resistance. And this time the reports are true. Blake is indeed alive, but Avon, mistakenly believing that he has betrayed the rebel cause and gone over to the Federation, shoots him. Federation guards arrive, kill all the others – Dayna, Vila, Soolin, Tarrant – and surround Avon, who stands astride the corpse of Blake and raises his gun to shoot, as he breaks into a smile. The image freezes, and as the credits roll, we hear the sound of a gun battle on the soundtrack.

Few series have ever dared go out on such a triumphantly negative note. But then few series have been prepared to sacrifice characters in the way that
Blake’s 7
had. The ending was entirely in keeping with what had gone before; indeed its conclusion echoed its start four years earlier with a Federation massacre of rebels. Blake had now been killed off for the third and final time, on this occasion – it appeared – with every other member of the cast. The only missing element was Servalan herself, a fact which reportedly upset Jacqueline Pearce, though dramatically it was a wise decision not to include her in the episode: this was a tale of grim fatalism, no place for her brand of warped glamour.

‘I did admire enormously the dramatic moments of Avon standing over Blake’s body and raising the weapon and starting to smile,’ admitted Nation, ‘which I think was sensational but dumb.’ He also claimed that the production team ‘purposely did not let me know what was happening’, calculating that he would have disapproved of this radical gesture, this slaughter of so many characters, in contradiction of ‘my old axiom: Never kill anything off.’ But when his initial anger at what had been done faded, he reasoned that at least we hadn’t definitively seen Avon die. There was no reason why he couldn’t make a return, if the possibility for further episodes arose. Boucher made the same point: ‘It was an ending in itself, but it wasn’t necessarily the end of the programme. If
Blake’s 7
had returned for a fifth series, then the episode would now be regarded as a cliff-hanger, following in the tradition previously laid down by Terry Nation.’ For now, however, there was no doubt that it was the end of
Blake’s 7
– this time there was no last-minute reprieve from a BBC executive. Viewing figures had fallen (the season averaged 8.5 million viewers, down from 9.5 million the previous year) and no one appeared to have an appetite to continue.

Meanwhile, back in Hollywood, Nation appeared to have fallen on his feet. He became involved in a proposed series titled
The Young Arthur
and discovered the delights of the development deal, an entirely unknown concept in British television. ‘They paid me a lot of money, gave me an office and a secretary and paid my expenses,’ he explained. ‘The idea was that I was to come up with episode and series ideas for television.’ The contract, with Columbia Television, was followed by similar deals with 20th Century Fox, MGM and Paramount. But
The Young Arthur
never got made, nor did anything else, and gradually the joy of receiving a regular wage began to pale. ‘I was very frustrated by it,’ he admitted. ‘I just didn’t want to work at the studios anymore, so I quit and waited for people to say, “Good God, he’s available!” But nobody did.’

In fact very little of Nation’s later writing ever appeared on American television. There was work to be done doctoring other people’s scripts, but it was not until 1985, when he contributed to a new series titled
MacGyver
, that he got an on-screen credit at all. He was listed as producer for three episodes and also wrote the pre-title sequence for three, supplying five-minute stories that had no connection with the main plot of the following episode. MacGyver, played by Richard Dean Anderson, was a secret agent who relied more on his wits than on weaponry, allowing Nation a chance to indulge his love of an action hero making use of everyday objects; in prelude to the episode ‘Target MacGyver’, our man rescues a kidnapped general using only a collection of saucepans, a bag of ice, some cooking oil and a garden hose. It was all perfectly agreeable and the show was, eventually, a huge success, running to 139 episodes over seven seasons, but it was no match for the wit and style of ITC in the 1960s. And Nation’s contributions were all made within the first ten episodes, before it really took off.

He was now inhabiting a very different world to that of the BBC, where he could wander into the office of his friend, Ronnie Marsh, pitch an idea for
Blake’s 7
and walk out with a commission for a pilot that evolved into a series. ‘What is difficult in the United States is that you work for twenty-seven masters each time,’ he complained. ‘You have several producers, you have the studio, you have the actors, and all of them seem to be asking for something different. It drives you insane.’ But the stakes were so much higher, and the rewards so much greater, that the temptation to continue playing the game was almost irresistible. ‘If you make a smash-hit here –
had
Blake’s 7
been made here and had the same level of success – I would be a multi-multi-millionaire,’ he said. ‘These are the glittering prizes in the United States. It’s not just the fact that you have a good audience out there, it’s the fact that you are making vast amounts of money, and people kill for less.’ As MacGyver once observed: ‘Typical! Just when you’re getting ahead, somebody always changes the odds.’

The idea of a two-month trial period had long since been overtaken by events, and in 1983 the Nations burnt their bridges with the sale of Lynsted Park. The family was now settled in Los Angeles and it would remain his home until his death, however unsatisfying it was in creative terms.

By the end of the decade he had notched up just two more screen credits. One was an episode of the short-lived series
A Fine Romance
, also known as
Ticket to Ride
and not to be confused with the British sitcom starring Michael Williams and Judi Dench. Titled ‘The Tomas Crown Affair’, it was, unsurprisingly, a parody of the 1968 movie
The Thomas Crown Affair
and featured a dentist (played by David Rappaport) concealing a smuggled diamond inside the tooth of Michael Trent (Christopher Cazenove). Nation, in an interview conducted at the time of writing, described it as ‘a kamikaze episode. You know it’s going to go down and nobody’s going to watch it – not even me!’

On a slightly happier note, there was
A Masterpiece of Murder
, a television movie screened in 1986 that he co-wrote with Andrew J. Fenady. It told the story of an ageing private detective and an equally ageing crook teaming up in pursuit of an art thief, and while it may not have set many pulses racing, it was notable for teaming up the veteran actor Don Ameche with Bob Hope, the comedian to whom Nation had listened so avidly on the American Forces Network as a child during the war. Nation didn’t originate the storyline, and he never cited the piece in interviews as any kind of achievement, but if, thirty-five years earlier when he was trying to establish himself as a stand-up in South Wales, he’d been shown a vision of his future self, living in Hollywood and writing for Bob Hope, he would surely have considered it the wildest, most fantastic success story. ‘He absolutely loved that,’ remembered Kate Nation. ‘These were idols to him. He was just like a kid with a new toy.’ Unfortunately, the reality was not as impressive as the dream. ‘Hope is game, but painfully past his prime’, noted one review, adding that ‘the script is never more than mediocre.’

Apart from working on other people’s scripts, Nation also spent time trying to bring his own work to the screen. In the mid 1980s this primarily meant a remake of
Survivors
, which he wished to relocate to America. The new Abby would be living in the north-east of the country, with her son, Peter, in Los Angeles. The story would thus come closer to his original concept of a trek across vast distances, with a makeshift convoy of ‘strange vehicles crossing empty America, where there are little pockets of survivors here and there, all doing different things’. There had always been a strong element of the frontier western in his episodes of the BBC original and in his novel; this new version would emphasise the theme still further, tapping into ‘the American ethos of the wagon train – there’s always that great urge to push west for the Americans’.

It was an inspired idea, and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t have worked, at least commercially. One suspects that, had it been made, it would have ended up a more cheerful affair than Nation might have wished, but revisiting America’s greatest myth could have fitted well into the more bullish cultural climate of the country in the 1980s, during the years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. There were, however, other changes in the culture of the times that made the idea of a post-plague drama less appealing to executives. ‘We were so close to getting it on one occasion,’ remembered Nation, ‘and then AIDS reared its head, and everyone was terrified to do anything with it. They didn’t want to be associated with it.’ That, at least, was his explanation, though there were plenty of other factors militating against him: neither he nor the series itself had any real track record in the States, and it was asking a lot of US television executives to put their money on an outsider when he was touting what appeared at first sight to be such a depressing concept. The made-for-television nuclear disaster movie,
The Day After
, may have achieved record audience figures when it was aired in 1983, but it didn’t spark any enthusiasm for other similarly downbeat dramas.