The Man Who Invented the Daleks (50 page)

With the abandonment of that project, Nation turned instead to the idea of trying to revive
Blake’s 7.
The series had finally been screened in America and, like
Doctor Who
, it had acquired a cult following, sufficient to warrant the presence of Nation, Paul Darrow and others at fan conventions. By 1989 Nation was talking about making a series ‘next year’, and outlining his thoughts as to how it would work. This time it was not a remake he had in mind, but a continuation of the story from where it had been left off in ‘Blake’. We hadn’t seen Avon die, so he was to return, a decade or so on from that final episode, exiled on an island on a remote planet, like Napoleon on Elba. He appears to have changed sides, making broadcasts in support of the Federation and against an outlaw called Blake, who may or may not be the real Blake: ‘It may be simply that anybody who leads the fight against the Federation
becomes
Blake; “Blake” has now become a title.’ But in reality Avon is merely awaiting his opportunity to return to the fray, his chance to relive Napoleon’s final campaign in the Hundred Days. ‘That’s the kind of thing I have in mind,’ Nation said. ‘Avon comes out of nowhere and scares everybody to death. Of course, in the end, he cannot win. Like I said, Avon dies.’

This proposal made no progress either, as Nation admitted in a 1992 interview: ‘Nothing has been happening, although I’ll never say never again.’ But it was still in his mind and he was even suggesting that he might bring back Vila as well. More significantly he was now talking about the vague hope that the BBC might take up the idea, as though he had lost any faith in doing anything further on American television. ‘
Points of View
got more letters for
Blake’s 7
than any other series, so there is a demand,’ he argued. ‘I’m ready to go with it, and we’ll give it to them, but I have no idea. The BBC doesn’t talk to me, I don’t talk to them, not for any other motive than we just don’t talk together.’

He was certainly right about the enduring popularity of the programme. In 1983 the BBC had reported that – with the exception of breakfast television, which had been launched that year – the subject that attracted the greatest amount of correspondence from viewers was
Blake’s 7.
More than two thousand letters were received asking for the return of the series. The BBC dismissed the letters as being ‘part of an organised lobby’, which was true, but it was nonetheless a tribute to the enthusiasm that the show continued to inspire. When in 2000 the British Film Institute polled more than 1,500 people in the industry to find the best British television programmes ever made,
Doctor Who
came in third, behind
Fawlty Towers
and ‘Cathy Come Home’ from Sydney Newman’s
The Wednesday Play.
But when the BFI then asked the public to vote for their own favourites,
Doctor Who
rose a place to number two, kept from the top position only by
Blake’s 7.
Admittedly the turnout was very low, the 113 nominations for
Blake’s 7
accounting for nearly twenty-five per cent of the votes cast, but it was testament to the loyalty of fans that such a campaign could still be mounted, a generation on from the ending of the show.

Unusually for a science fiction series, a great deal of this support came from women. ‘When the
Blake’s 7 Magazine
was launched it was hoped it would sell to maturing
Doctor Who
fans,’ noted Paul Darrow. ‘It didn’t. A survey was undertaken and it revealed that most readers were in the twenty-two to thirty range, with a significant number of older people. Ninety per cent were female.’ He observed the same phenomenon when attending his first fan convention in Chicago.

Although the proposals to bring back
Survivors
and
Blake’s 7
continued to fall on stony ground, seeds were still being sown. And it was a tribute to the roles that Nation had created that, in both instances, a good deal of the running was made by the series’ lead actors. Paul Darrow became heavily involved in the attempts to relaunch
Blake’s 7
, while Ian McCulloch developed – with Nation’s approval – a concept for a new series of
Survivors.
Set some fifteen years on from the original, this would show a rudimentary society having evolved but coming under attack from an external power, bent on imperialist domination. He got as far as writing a pilot script and outlines for a further twelve episodes before the idea was rejected by the BBC on the bizarre grounds that it would be racially offensive.

This was, it should be noted, the same corporation that, within very recent memory, had happily broadcast
The Black and White Minstrel Show
, only ending the programme in 1978, around the same time that Bill Cotton had thrown the dance troupe Ruby Flipper off
Top of the Pops
on the grounds that ‘the British public didn’t want to see black men dancing with white women’. By the end of the 1980s, however, the BBC had belatedly become sensitive to multicultural sensibilities in the country, even if it remained unsure of its ground. So when McCulloch explained his suggestion that the raiding parties assaulting Britain came from Africa, the BBC panicked and rejected it out of hand ‘because they thought it was racist’. It was an absurd argument, but McCulloch didn’t entirely lose faith. He returned with a reworked proposal in the mid 1990s, though again without success.

But if all these projects came to naught, and if Nation’s writing career in America was little more than a long series of professional disappointments, there were compensations. The income generated by the Daleks had ensured that he and his family could live comfortably, and the rise in popularity of conventions gave him the sort of personal acclaim that writers seldom enjoy. ‘I retain an enormous affection for the Daleks,’ he wrote in 1988. ‘They have rewarded me in many ways, and not least amongst these benefits have been the opportunities to meet fans all over the world. They are dedicated and wonderful people, and I am extremely grateful to all of them.’ Among those fans, helpfully enough given the celebrity-based hierarchy of Hollywood, were some big names, as Nation’s obituary in
The Times
pointed out: ‘American aficionados of
Doctor Who
, such as Steven Spielberg, made “the Dalek Man” welcome.’ And, according to Kate Nation, the daily working routine was not always disagreeable. ‘He loved it. He loved going out to the studios to his office, getting involved with people, because writing can be very solitary.’ She added, however: ‘He didn’t get a lot on – he didn’t like that part of it.’

Nation wasn’t missing a great deal at home. As an old socialist, who had grown up in the depression of the 1930s in South Wales, he was unlikely to have taken with any enthusiasm to living in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. Nor was British television a particularly happy place in the 1980s for the kind of programmes that he wrote. There had been a brief attempt to pour new wine into old bottles with
The New Avengers
(1976) and
Return of the Saint
(1978), but neither was entirely convincing, and when Brian Clemens found a durable action adventure vehicle in
The Professionals
(1977), it owed more to the grittiness of
The Sweeney
than it did to the fantasies of Steed and Simon Templar.

Science fiction was also struggling. The huge success of
Star Wars
prompted the making of further Hollywood epics with the likes of
Star Trek: The Motion Picture
and
The Black Hole
, both in 1979, and the following year ITV bought in two American series whose high-gloss production values, while not quite on the scale of
Star Wars
, were a long way from the make-do-and-mend approach to which British fans had become accustomed on television.
Battlestar Galactica
was screened on Thursdays, while – in an act of virtual sacrilege –
Buck Rogers in the 25th Century
was broadcast on Saturday evenings, up against
Doctor Who
itself. Worse still, it began to win the ratings war. In response the BBC moved
Doctor Who
in 1982, after eighteen years in the same slot, screening it twice weekly on Mondays and Tuesdays. By 1985 it was back in its proper place at a Saturday teatime, though in its new format it now lasted forty-five minutes rather than its traditional twenty-five.

More importantly, the entire episode had demonstrated the BBC’s loss of faith in the brand. The chief villain emerged as Michael Grade, the nephew of Lew Grade and now the controller of BBC1. He was later to say that he thought the show ‘was rubbish, I thought it was pathetic. I’d seen
Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind
and
E. T.
and then I had to watch these cardboard things clonking across the floor trying to scare kids.’ The option of increasing the budget to keep pace does not seem to have been seriously considered, even though the revenue from merchandising and foreign sales was by now said to be seven times higher than the production costs. Instead, after that 1985 season, the programme disappeared entirely for eighteen months. When it did return it was for a series of much briefer seasons that migrated from Saturdays to Mondays and then to Wednesdays, and attracted ever smaller audiences. The last storyline to be seen by more than seven million viewers was 1985’s ‘Revelation of the Daleks’, written by Eric Saward; by the time of Ben Aaronovitch’s ‘Remembrance of the Daleks’ (1988), which – as part of the show’s silver jubilee season – took the story right back to the junkyard in Totters Lane, the figures were barely scraping past five million and were set to plunge further. The final episode of
Doctor Who
was broadcast in December 1989 and, although there was no formal announcement of the end of the show, it was clearly understood what was happening. ‘We were told to wait and see about a new season,’ remembered the last script editor, Andrew Cartmel, ‘but it was definitely a flavour of “you’ll have to wait a very long time”.’ Having lost both BBC support and its public, the series was finally cancelled, ending an extraordinary 26-year run.

Unable to match the special effects-driven scale of Hollywood, television science fiction in Britain reverted to comedy, following the lead of David Croft and Jeremy Lloyd’s
Come Back Mrs Noah
, Douglas Adams’s
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
and the saga of Captain Kremmen, first heard on the Capital Radio programme of disc jockey Kenny Everett. The two latter eventually made the transition all the way from radio via television to film. Of those that followed,
Red Dwarf
(1988) was clearly in a class of its own, but there was too a host of other British-made science fiction comedies on television, many of them scarcely remembered:
Metal Mickey
(1980),
Kinvig
(1981),
Luna
(1983),
They Came From Somewhere Else
(1984),
The Groovy Fellers
(1989),
Mike & Angelo
(1989),
Kappatoo
(1990),
Watt on Earth
(1991),
Space Vets
(1992) and
WYSIWIG
(1992). One of the few serious attempts to produce a science fiction series, a BBC adaptation of John Christopher’s trilogy
The Tripods
in 1984–5, was cancelled at the end of its second season, a decision again made by Michael Grade, while Chris Boucher’s
Star Cops
(1987) didn’t get beyond a single season.

Many of Nation’s contemporaries were also finding the changed climate of British television less amenable than it used to be. Gerry Anderson launched a new puppet series,
Terrahawks
, which ran for thirty-nine episodes between 1983 and 1986, but failed to inspire in the way that
Thunderbirds
and
Stingray
once had (and would again). Dennis Spooner wrote for
The Professionals
and
Bergerac
though, like Nation, he really yearned for American success; the closest he came, before his untimely death in 1986, was when a story developed by him and Brian Clemens was used for an episode of
Remington Steele.
Clemens himself thrived more than most; an attempt to create an American version of
The Avengers
didn’t work out, but he did find success in the States with episodes of
Darkroom
,
Father Dowling Investigates
and
Perry Mason
, before helping to create the British series
Bugs
(1995) and reviving
The Professionals
as
CI5: The New Professionals
(1999). And Clive Exton co-wrote the much-reviled movie
Red Sonja
(1985), starring Brigitte Nielsen and Arnold Schwarzenegger, before finding mainstream success adapting literary work for series like
The Ruth Rendell Mysteries, Jeeves and Wooster
and
Poirot.

Meanwhile, the luminaries of Associated London Scripts were being made to feel decidedly unwelcome, not by the new generation of comedians – many of whom revered the old masters – but by unimaginative executives who valued birth certificates higher than curricula vitae. When, in 1985, Eric Sykes won a special award at the Festival Rose d’Or in Montreux for his long contribution to comedy, he took the opportunity to pitch some ideas for new programmes to Bill Cotton, only to be told: ‘Your day’s gone Eric. We’re now into alternative comedy.’ Two ALS graduates – Nation’s old writing partner, Dave Freeman, together with John Antrobus – later wrote
Carry On Columbus
(1992), an attempt to revive the old brand with many of the new comedians (Alexei Sayle, Julian Clary, Rik Mayall and others), but it wasn’t a great success.

There was, though, at least one bright spot in 1986, when the BBC finally got around to repeating some classic episodes of
Hancock’s Half Hour
on television and found that it had a top ten hit on its hands all over again. Perhaps unexpectedly, it was Beryl Vertue, who had started out as ALS secretary, who emerged from a quiet decade in the 1980s to be one of the key figures in 1990s television, producing the sitcom
Men Behaving Badly
(1992) and the excellent, if underrated, George Cole comedy
My Good Friend
(1995). Her company, Hartswood Films, was also responsible for the acclaimed series
Coupling
(2000), produced by her daughter, Sue Vertue, and written by her son-in-law Steven Moffat, who would later take over the reins of the revived
Doctor Who.