The Man Who Invented the Daleks (6 page)

The political mood for change was mirrored, though it was not as immediately apparent, by a determination on the part of the returning servicemen that culturally their voices should be heard, and it was on the radio, and particularly in comedy, that the resulting loose-knit movement was first to make its mark. In Wales it produced the revival of
Welsh Rarebit
, a radio series that had proved more popular in the principality even than Tommy Handley's
ITMA
during the war, and which was reborn in 1949 as an hour-long variety show. With its theme song of ‘We'll Keep a Welcome in the Hillsides' – written by the show's producer, Mai Jones –
Welsh Rarebit
went out on the Light Programme (as the Forces Programme had now been renamed) and became principally known as a showcase for new Welsh comedians including Harry Secombe, Stan Stennett and Wyn Calvin. ‘Up until the advent of radio,' noted the latter, ‘Wales had no reputation for comedy.' That was slightly overstating the case, but certainly the success of
Welsh Rarebit
– it even enjoyed a brief transfer to television in the 1950s – helped fuel the ambitions of those in South Wales with aspirations towards becoming entertainers, among them Terry Nation: ‘I wanted to be a comedian. I wanted to be a stand-up.'

On leaving school Nation had joined his father's furniture business, working – not very well, he was later to admit – as a salesman. One of the few benefits of this position was that he had a justification for fussing over his wardrobe, in which pride of place went to a leather-buttoned, Harris tweed jacket. ‘He was always dressed beautifully,' remembered his friend Harry Greene (who worked as an unpaid assistant on
Welsh Rarebit
). ‘I don't know if it was hand-me-downs from his dad, because Bert was a good dresser as well. I think that was part of his front for selling.' The work meant that he had money in his pocket, but Nation was already preoccupied with dreams of performance. He remained passionate about film, becoming a member of the Cardiff Amateur Cine Society, while engaging in amateur dramatics with the left-wing Unity Theatre, based at the local YMCA, and other groups. He was also a regular visitor to the New Theatre, where Greene sometimes worked backstage and could get him free tickets to shows featuring the cream of British comedy at the time, including Arthur Askey, Nat Jackley and Norman Evans.

Through Greene too, he was to meet the future novelist John Summers, who had similar experiences of the limited horizons offered by a South Wales education. In schools whose ‘job was to turn out more cogs for the industrial machine', wrote Summers in his semi-autobiographical book
The Raging Summer
, a child who showed too much imagination ‘was to be quickly hammered and stamped back into regular shape before he could get out and become dangerously loose in the world'. ‘There was an instant recognition of brotherhood', remembered Greene; the two men ‘had similar interests, were about the same age and got on very well, often walking off into the castle grounds to talk, where we'd lose them for hours'.

Nation became part of the student-dominated social scene that congregated upstairs at the Khardomah café on Saturday mornings, and the fact that he was happily mixing with such a group, many of whom were a significant couple of years older than him and had served in uniform, was an indication both of his ‘affable nature and of the fact that he was the epitome of self-confidence'. Although not a student himself, he participated in many social events, helping to organise the first Cardiff Arts Ball (inspired by the Chelsea Arts Balls) in 1949, and forming part of the team that created a sketch called ‘The Poor Man's Picasso' for the 1948 rag week. The idea for the sketch was that the performers would draw objects on a white flat screen and that the drawings would then become functional, so that a hatstand would be drawn and a coat then hung upon it, a picture of cupboard doors would be opened, and so on. The main practical difficulty was to find a drawing implement big enough to be seen from the back of the theatre, a problem to which Nation, displaying an inventive resourcefulness that would become characteristic of his fictional heroes, found the solution: a condom with a rolled-up piece of carpet stuffed inside and filled with purple ink, the whole thing being bound with elastic bands to form a prototype marker pen. The performance at the Capital Cinema was filmed by members of the Cine Society and eventually reached the attention of a television producer; consequently, in 1955, Harry Greene and another student, Ivor Olsen, appeared on the BBC show
Quite Contrary
under the names Pedro and Pinky with a revived version of the routine, almost certainly the first time that a condom had been seen on British television.

By the end of the 1940s, Nation was also beginning to develop his solo comedy act, which he was to take around the circuit of pubs and social clubs in the area, already home to Stan Stennett and Wyn Calvin and soon to be illuminated by a teenage singing prodigy from Cardiff named Shirley Bassey. The highlight of his routine was a series of funny walks, mostly exploiting his gangly physique, though one variation saw him walking on his knees, with his trousers rolled up and shoes acting as knee-pads, in the manner perfected by José Ferrer when playing Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in the 1952 film
Moulin Rouge.
Again it was an aspect of his early life to which he would return when writing scripts for the 1963
Hancock
series. In the episode ‘The Writer', Tony Hancock tries to convince a professional comedian named Jerry Spring that every comic needs a funny walk, and proceeds to do an impression of Groucho Marx's stooping prowl and Stan Laurel's loose-limbed lollop, before giving his own suggestion that Spring should imitate a penguin. Similarly, one of the jokes that Hancock tries to foist upon Spring has all the hallmarks of coming from the repertoire of an inexperienced stand-up in South Wales. A man walks into a cottage in the Rhondda Valley, covered head to foot in coal dust, and when his wife exclaims at the state of him, he asks why, after twenty years of him coming home from work every day in this condition, she's still surprised. ‘Well, after all, Dai,' she replies, ‘you
are
a milkman!'

‘I thought myself a rather good comedian at the time, and used to get laughs around the pub,' reflected Nation in later life. ‘But if you're paying for the drinks, people will laugh.' More significant, in terms of his later career, was his discovery that other comedians, particularly those who were starting to find broadcast work, would pay for jokes. ‘I used to be a member of the Overseas Club, in Park Place, right next to the BBC, in those days. I actually sold my very first scripts to an up-and-coming young comic I met there – Stan Stennett.' Stennett, who was beginning to make his name on radio shows including
Variety Bandbox
and
Workers' Playtime
as well as
Welsh Rarebit
, needed a supply of fresh material; although such work was entirely uncredited and none is known to have survived, it was at least a suggestion of an alternative future. It also gave Nation a chance to work with his first partner, another Cardiff-born writer, Dick Barry, and to try to put into practice the American style of gag-telling that he had heard on AFN. ‘Terry was doing the more upbeat, up-to-date, quick-fire sort of comedy,' remembered Stennett.

By the early 1950s, however, the Khardomah set that Nation had been part of was starting to break up. In recent years, South Wales had been able to boast a number of famous sons, pursuing a wide range of cultural occupations, from the novelist Howard Spring and the poet Dylan Thomas, through Ray Milland, winner of the 1946 Best Actor Oscar for his role in
The Lost Weekend
, to the boxer Tommy Farr, who came desperately close to taking the world heavyweight title off Joe Louis in 1937. But all had had to leave home to achieve their success. The truth was that South Wales was still a place of origin rather than a land of opportunity. For those who were troubled by ambition, curiosity or simple impatience, it was primarily somewhere to look back upon from what was then called the refreshment car of the London train.

So it was to prove again. Among Nation's friends and acquaintances, Harry Greene joined Joan Littlewood's travelling theatre company as an actor, set designer and general handyman, ending up at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East before embarking on a television career, while John Summers worked his passage around the world, with spells in Canada and Australia, before making his way to Fleet Street. Nation himself was a little way behind them, but in January 1955 he bought a one-way ticket to London, and he too took his leave of Cardiff.

I
n later life, Terry Nation was often to tell the tale of his early months in London, the doomed struggle to make it as either a comedian or an actor. ‘I auditioned as a stand-up comic, and I failed time and time again. Somebody told me, “The jokes are very good; it’s you who’s not funny.” That was hurtful, but then I figured I had to make a living.’ So he concentrated on writing, and was still getting nowhere when his fairy godmother appeared in the improbable guise of a Goon, as detailed by the
Guardian
in a 1966 interview: ‘His first break was an interview with Spike Milligan. He arrived so worn and woebegone that Milligan said, “You look terrible!” wrote out a cheque for £10, and told him to go away and try to write a script for
The Goon Show.
He did. Some of it, at least, was used on the air, and Milligan took him on as a writer.’

Although there is no evidence of Nation’s work ever being used in a broadcast edition of
The Goon Show
, much of the rest of this was true, insofar as it went. Harry Greene remembered him turning up backstage at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, in January 1955 during a famous production of
Richard II
with Harry H. Corbett in the title role (Greene was playing Bushey): ‘He told me he was writing comedy scripts and trying to work as an actor and comedian, but wasn’t having much luck.’ But Greene also remembered earlier forays to London, reconnaissance trips that Nation made in 1954, but which didn’t form part of his personal mythology. Also missing from most of Nation’s versions of those early days was the fact that it was the BBC who sent him to see Spike Milligan in the first place.

Milligan and Eric Sykes, both established comedy writers but neither with full-time representation, had decided to form their own agency in the summer of 1954, bringing in the younger team of Ray Galton and Alan Simpson to create Associated London Scripts (ALS). Sykes and Milligan already shared an office above a greengrocer’s shop in Shepherd’s Bush, West London, and this was to become the home of ALS, one of the most influential institutions in the cultural life of post-war Britain. ‘The intention was to encourage new writers,’ explained Beryl Vertue, then the secretary at ALS, though later to become a successful television producer in her own right. ‘And this was a bit of a godsend for the BBC, because when they found comedy writers, they’d often say: Why don’t you go down and see those people in Shepherd’s Bush. And so Terry would have arrived as part of that.’

Nation had indeed already been to the BBC, having had a meeting with the script editor and producer Gale Pedrick in March 1955, and it was from there that he was sent to see Milligan at ALS. But an even more significant oversight in Nation’s later accounts was the failure to mention his partner, Dick Barry, who accompanied him to that meeting. The earliest press coverage Nation ever received came in a
South Wales Echo
article in May 1955, which saluted ‘the tenacity, initiative and guts’ of ‘two young men from Cardiff’, and made it clear that those early months of struggle were not endured alone: ‘Terry Nation was a furniture salesman and Dick Barry an accounts clerk until early this year. They had started to write scripts for their own amusement some months before, but in January they threw up their steady jobs. Off they went to London like Dick Whittington to seek some fortune.’ The two men went together to see Pedrick, and the meeting appears to have been cordial enough, for Nation wrote to thank him for his ‘encouragement and advice’ and promised to ‘submit some [scripts] to you as soon as possible’. In the event, however, they had no further dealings with him, seemingly finding no need once they had been referred to Shepherd’s Bush and found themselves taken under Milligan’s wing.

Their timing was impeccable. They were not the first recruits to the agency, for a handful of others (notably Johnny Speight, later to create Alf Garnett) had already become part of ALS, but these were still early days in a venture that was to transform the role of writers on radio and television. Indeed they were still relatively early days for the concept of comedy scriptwriters at all.

In the days when comedians had been solely concerned with live performance, it had always been assumed by audiences that they wrote their own material. ‘Obviously there had always been many a humorist scripting patter and sketches for comedians,’ remarked Eric Sykes, ‘but the names of these backroom stalwarts were a closely guarded secret. They were in a backroom under a forty-watt bulb.’ As
The Times
later put it, with a wistful touch of nostalgia: ‘We never heard the names of scriptwriters when Little Tich or Harry Tate were around.’ When comedians did start being broadcast by the radio, they were still able to rely on their existing material, since their appearances were for the most part short, sporadic and unheralded items in the midst of a variety show (often with a voice-over to cover the more visual gags).

It was not until 1938, with the arrival of
Band Waggon
, starring ‘Big Hearted’ Arthur Askey and Richard Stinker’ Murdoch, that a regular comedy series made its debut on the BBC and things began to change. ‘An idea, novel in every respect to broadcasting in this country was approved by the BBC Programme Board today,’ the
Daily Mail
informed its readers, and the fact that it had to explain how this was going to work indicated just how new it all was: ‘The programmes will be in serial form to the extent that the same artists and characters will be retained, but each episode will be complete in itself.’
Band Waggon
was also one of the first entertainment shows to be broadcast each week at a fixed time on the same day; the idea of regular schedules did not become standard until the paper shortages of the Second World War meant that listeners could not be guaranteed to receive their copy of the listing magazine
Radio Times
and therefore needed some certainty of what to expect.