The Man Who Invented the Daleks (51 page)

None of this suggests that Britain would have provided a congenial environment for Terry Nation. He was still offered the opportunity to write new Daleks stories for
Doctor Who
, but consistently declined, though he did insist on script approval and made changes where he felt his creations were in danger of being damaged. ‘My agent and I have guarded the Daleks tremendously,’ he said in 1995. ‘We’ve never allowed them to be used as figures of fun, and we’ve tried always to stop anyone looking inside them.’

In the wake of the cancellation of
Doctor Who
, Nation’s interest in the programme was reawakened. With the backing of Columbia Pictures, he and Gerry Davis, co-creator of the Cybermen and
Doomwatch
, put together a bid to revive it with the idea of targeting the American market. That venture collapsed with Davis’s death in 1991, but there were many other proposals floating around in the early 1990s for a revival of the show, either as a television series or a one-off film. In those discussions, the Daleks and Davros featured heavily, though
Doctor Who
, the television movie that finally resulted in 1996, focused instead on a battle between the Doctor and the renegade Time Lord, the Master. The film starts on Skaro where the Master has been sentenced to death by the Daleks, and the intention had been to employ the creatures in a self-contained prologue, but financial restrictions prompted a rewrite and the Daleks were confined to being voices off screen. Nation, however, didn’t come out of the deal too badly. ‘We were forced to pay Terry $20,000,’ noted executive producer Philip Segal, ‘and as it happened, Universal and Fox made me shorten the Dalek introduction to cut the budget.’ Clearly Roger Hancock’s tenacity remained undiminished. And it was somehow inevitable that the closest Nation came to getting one of his creations back on screen – and in America, to boot – was not with
Survivors
or
Blake’s 7
but with the Daleks.

The cultural climate of British television was to change again, becoming more receptive to Nation’s style of programme, but for some time the flames were kept burning in other media. In 1988 Nation lent his name to
The Official Doctor Who & the Daleks Book
, written by John Peel, a writer whom he then authorised to produce the novelisations of ‘The Chase’ and ‘The Daleks’ Master Plan’, which had long been absent from the list of Target
Doctor Who
novels. It was Peel too who wrote the first of the
New Adventures
novels in 1991, a series of original stories about the Doctor published by Virgin Books.
Blake’s 7
was also attracting new fiction, with Tony Attwood’s novel
Afterlife
published in 1984 and
Avon:
A
Terrible Aspect
(1989), written by Paul Darrow as a prequel to the series exploring his character’s origins. A decade later came two radio plays, written by Barry Letts and broadcast on BBC Radio 4.
Blake’s 7: The Sevenfold Crown
and
Blake’s 7: The Syndeton Experiment
reunited many of the original cast – including Darrow, Jacqueline Pearce and Michael Keating – though they weren’t greeted with a great deal of enthusiasm.

Together with the proliferation of videos and then DVDs and with a continuing high level of fan club and convention activity, particularly in relation to
Doctor Who
, there were times in the 1990s when it seemed – for those who cared – as though the shows associated with Nation had never gone away. But there was still a gap between the hardcore fan community and the mass audiences for whom the programmes had originally been written. All that was to change in 2005 with the revival of
Doctor Who
as a BBC1 series on early Saturday evenings. The new incarnation was an instant ratings-winner, updated to attract a new generation while retaining enough of the original features to satisfy those who remembered it the first time round.

The most significant of those features, for most older viewers, was always going to be the Daleks, but for some time it was unclear if they would be making a return at all. For several months in 2004, after the revival was announced, the media were full of stories about the protracted negotiations between the BBC and the estate of Terry Nation – now represented, since Roger Hancock’s retirement, by his son, Tim – which were said to be foundering on questions of the updating of the creatures and the fees that would be due to the estate. Rumours and counter-rumours spread; there were reports at one stage that a figure of a quarter of a million pounds had been agreed to license the Daleks (leading to complaints about how the BBC was spending its money), before it was abruptly announced that the talks had broken down. The corporation issued a statement that ‘Mr Hancock had demanded unacceptable levels of editorial control’, while Hancock was quoted as protesting: ‘We want to protect the integrity of the brand.’ There was a suggestion that in their new incarnation, the Daleks would be ‘too evil’.

It was a story that gripped both the quality press and the tabloids, though the country’s best-selling paper, the
Sun
, made most of the running. It launched one of its self-proclaimed campaigns, reporting with enthusiasm a protest march in Southampton, staging its own stunts (it had acquired a Dalek prop) and rounding up publicity-hungry politicians to add a quote: ‘
Doctor Who
without Daleks is like fish without chips,’ opined Tim Collins, the Conservative Party’s education spokesperson. And then came the inevitable press release to reveal that the dispute had been resolved and that the creatures would indeed be back on the screen to battle their arch-enemy, the Doctor (‘thanks to the
Sun
’s campaign’). As the
Daily Telegraph
noted, somewhat cynically: ‘Whoever’s in charge of the PR for the new
Doctor Who
series has been doing a knockout job.’

The result of this saga came in the sixth episode, ‘Dalek’, written by Robert Shearman. ‘This was the one we’d all been waiting for,’ wrote Charlie Catchpole in the
Daily Express
, and the story of the Doctor (played by Christopher Eccleston) encountering the last surviving Dalek in the universe, now trapped in a private collection of space artefacts, was generally considered to have been a success, though there were qualifications. ‘For thirty pant-shittingly wonderful minutes, BBC1’s new
Doctor Who
was the best thing on telly. Ever,’ announced Ian Hyland in the
Sunday Mirror.
‘Then they went and spoilt it with a load of symbolic, sentimental, one world, one universe, war-what-is-it-good-for nonsense.’

Certainly the sequence that saw the Dalek infuse itself with the DNA of the Doctor’s companion, Rose (Billie Piper), and thereby experience emotion, as well as the opening up of the casing to reveal the organic creature within, went far beyond anything that Nation himself had ever written. But it wasn’t out of character. ‘Destiny of the Daleks’ had failed to convince because it treated the creatures as simple robots, losing sight of the organic life-form inside the metallic shell; ‘Dalek’ paid due respect to the fact that these were sentient beings, aware of what they had lost in their artificial evolution. Their nature as the embodiment of hate-fuelled evil is enhanced by the possibilities opened up by Shearman’s script, and adds to Nation’s legacy.

There were other elements that also made for happy memories of the past. The Doctor’s description of the Daleks as ‘the ultimate in ethnic cleansing’ was an appropriate updating of Nation’s invocation of the neutron bomb in the first serial: current political imagery had always been part of the story. There was something pleasingly nostalgic too about the way that Mediawatch-UK, the latest incarnation of the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association set up by Mary Whitehouse, objected to the episode even before it was broadcast. And still there was the great mystery of why the Daleks remained so attractively frightening for children. Russell T. Davies, who had earlier written the acclaimed series
Queer as Folk
and who, as overseer of the new series, was instrumental in bringing
Doctor Who
back to the screen, was asked about their appeal and simply shrugged: ‘It’s a bit like asking “why is the dark scary?” I don’t know. It just is.’

As
Doctor Who
went from strength to strength, spawning another great outbreak of merchandising spin-offs for the programme and for the Daleks themselves, attention turned to another of Nation’s creations, and in November 2008 a six-part revival of
Survivors
began airing on BBC1. It wasn’t quite a remake, for the rights had been acquired to Terry Nation’s novel rather than to the original series, but the essence remained the same, merely updated to a world even more dependent on technology than it had been thirty years earlier: this time, the collapse of the mobile phone network causes deep disquiet.

The changes that were made revealed intriguingly how television had adjusted its perception of society over the past two decades. Abby is still in search of her son, Peter, but he’s absent from home not because he’s away at public school, but because he’s on a school field trip; Tom Price is a convicted criminal rather than a comic tramp, for homelessness was now seen in a much more concerned light; Greg Preston is played by a black actor, and two Muslim characters are added. Arthur Wormley has disappeared, since no one would any longer believe in a trade union leader having any political authority, and is replaced by Samantha Willis, a government minister who makes the last official broadcast before the power shuts down, promising a swift restoration – in the characteristic terminology of the New Labour era – of ‘your government’. And Jimmy Garland has changed entirely; he’s still trying to get back in his house, but there’s no aristocratic title, no Boys’ Own celebration of adventure, no glamour; instead he comes across, in the words of Andrew Billen in
The Times
, as ‘a raving, grimacing maniac’.

Created and (mostly) written by Adrian Hodges, the series achieved respectable viewing figures and returned for a second six-week season in early 2010, before being cancelled. By this stage, there was little left resembling Nation’s original work, and nothing that quite matched the high standards set by the first episode of season one – which also happened to be the one that most closely followed Nation’s template.

There was a certain irony that, after all those years of trying to get remakes of his work on to American television, it was Nation’s old employers at the BBC who ended up reviving
Doctor Who
and
Survivors
after his death. But then, even with the controversial management reforms in the early 1990s of John Birt, the director general, and Marmaduke Hussey, chair of the board of governors (the pair of them famously denounced as ‘croak-voiced Daleks’ by playwright Dennis Potter), the corporation remained a more open institution than the American broadcasters, more willing to take the occasional risk.

The truth was that Nation was never temperamentally suited to the world of the American networks. He was in his element when sitting at a typewriter, creating absurdly difficult situations and resolving them. When he tried moving into a more executive role, he required the support of a trusted colleague – Dennis Spooner on
The Baron
, Brian Clemens on
The Avengers
– if he wasn’t to find himself struggling to keep his head above water, as when he was both script editor and associate producer on
The Persuaders!.
And the experience of American television was harder than anything he had encountered in Britain. ‘I’m not sure I want to work at this level,’ he admitted in 1989, ‘because it’s a killer level. I find I look for a little more ease now, I look for a little gentler way of life.’ There was still the same dream – ‘I’d also love, as a Brit, to have a smash-hit American show’ – but he knew that it was becoming increasingly unlikely. ‘I don’t know whether a writer ever retires,’ he reflected in 1995. ‘I’ve not written anything recently, that’s true. If I could just raise the energy level a little, there’s so many things I want to do.’

By now, though, he was ill with emphysema, assumed to be the consequence of his long smoking habit. And although he spoke about wanting to write a
Blake’s 7
novel to continue the story from the end of season four, he knew that it wasn’t going to happen. Just as he wasn’t suited to being an executive, he lacked the single-minded application to write a convincing full-length novel. In any event he was aware that time was running out and, as he said, with self-conscious irony: ‘You can’t live with past triumphs.’

It had been a long, successful and influential career, centring on that fifteen-year period from ‘The Daleks’ to
Blake’s 7.
The move to America had, in professional terms, been a mistake, resulting in an equally long period that proved unproductive and frustrating, but there were, by the end of his life, clear signs that his work was not going to be forgotten. Anyway, he had at least got there, he had made it to the Hollywood that he had dreamed of when he was a child back in South Wales. And he surely would have found something very satisfying about the fact that, just a few hundred yards from the street where he grew up in Llandaff, there now stands Broadcasting House, home of BBC Wales, the company that produces the new incarnation of
Doctor Who
and its associated works. Exactly fifty years after Nation had been obliged to leave Cardiff to seek his fame and fortune in London, the revival of
Doctor Who
ensured that writers and actors, directors and designers would be making the same journey in reverse.

Terry Nation died in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles on 9 March 1997. He was sixty-six years old.

T
he kind of television show that Terry Nation wrote for has never been critically acclaimed. Of the series on which he worked, the only one that is accepted without reservation as a major piece of work, a national institution even, is
Doctor Who
, grown respectable through sheer longevity, part now of the shared childhood experience of the majority of the British population.
Blake’s 7
and
Survivors
have their passionate defenders, but few professional commentators would consider them alongside contemporary television works such as Mike Leigh’s
Abigail’s Party
(1977) or Alan Bleasdale’s
Boys from the Blackstuff
(1982). The only other exception is perhaps
The Avengers
, which narrowly missed making the top fifty when the British Film Institute drew up its list of the best British television shows of the twentieth century. As for the rest of the 1960s action adventure series, they were disparaged by critics at the time and, even when they have in later years come under the gaze of academics specialising in cultural studies and the mass media, they have tended to be regarded as windows on their world, rather than as works in their own right.