The Man Who Invented the Daleks (7 page)

The sheer quantity of material required for a weekly show was of a different order to anything anyone had experienced while touring the music hall circuit. Ted Kavanagh, who wrote the wartime hit series
ITMA
, calculated that ‘every half-hour show contained eighteen and a half minutes of dialogue, in which there were supposed to be one hundred gags or one every eleven seconds’. Such a discipline meant an abandonment of the established practice whereby a comedian could retain the same act for years on end, perhaps for an entire career. Even Tommy Handley, who, as the linchpin of
ITMA
, was probably the biggest radio star Britain has ever known, came out of this tradition; he played his sketch ‘The Disorderly Room’ around the music halls for twenty years, right up until 1941, when he finally switched his entire attention to broadcasting. Now, it seemed, the voracious demand for new material meant that a policy of hiring writers specifically for radio work would have to be adopted. But there was no rush to publicise this development. Vernon Harris was responsible for much of
Band Waggon
, but his contribution was unacknowledged: ‘I never got a credit it was the policy of the BBC that they wanted the public to believe that Arthur and Dickie made it up on the spot! It was as ingenuous as that, so they would
not
give me a credit.’

It was Kavanagh who was most responsible for remedying this lack of public recognition. The unprecedented success of
ITMA
during the war years eventually pushed his name forward and, when Tommy Handley died suddenly in 1949, thus forcing a premature end to the series, he was big enough that Radio Luxembourg (back on the air after the war) signed him up for
The Ted Kavanagh Show
, the first time on British radio that a writer had stepped into the spotlight. He had by then formed his own agency to promote the role of writers, and had struck gold when he signed up a new team in the shape of Frank Muir and Denis Norden, who were always keen to pay tribute to their mentor. ‘Pre-Ted Kavanagh and
ITMA,’
wrote Muir, ‘scriptwriters simply did not exist in the public mind.’

Muir and Norden were the first to benefit from the new acceptance of celebrity writers. In 1948 their most influential show,
Take It From Here
, was shown in the
Guardian’s
radio listings with their names but with no indication at all that it starred Jimmy Edwards and Dick Bentley. By the early 1950s they were famous enough to be appearing on the panel games that proliferated in the early days of television, shows like
What’s Your Story
and
The Name’s the Same.
They became the yardstick of success, so that the
South Wales Echo
article in 1955 said of Nation and Barry that ‘their ambition is to follow in the steps of Frank Muir and Denis Norden as top script writers for BBC variety shows’.

It was into this new world that Associated London Scripts was launched by Milligan, Sykes, Galton and Simpson. Their timing was fortuitous, for the imminent launch of ITV meant that opportunities were about to increase dramatically. ‘When Ray and I started,’ said Alan Simpson, ‘there were just enough writers to service the BBC. But when ITV started, immediately you had double the requirement, so more writers came in to supply the demand. Which coincided with when the agency started.’ As Sykes put it: ‘With the advent of television comedy, writers were emerging like weeds through a crack in the pavement.’

The material that flowed from the founders of the agency, let alone from their subsequent recruits, represented an impressive diversity, from the anarchic alternative world of Spike Milligan, through the extended comic stories of Eric Sykes, to the pinpoint observations of human nature and behaviour perfected by Galton and Simpson. To some extent, this was the result of their very different lives thus far – their ages at the start of ALS ranged from twenty-four (Galton) to thirty-six (Milligan), and there was a division between those who had served in the war and those who had not – but they also had key characteristics in common.

None, for example, had a university education; unlike the satire boom that was to occupy so many column inches in a few years’ time, the comedy revolutions that came from ALS were not shaped by student revue. It was a trait characteristic of the era, for the leading writers among the Angry Young Men – John Osborne, Colin Wilson, Alan Sillitoe, John Braine – were similarly from working-class and lower-middle-class backgrounds and had received no formal education after leaving school. Those authors, however, were trying to break into established and reputable fields of work, whereas the members of ALS were embarked on a career path that had yet to be fully explored; they were writing comedy at a time when such a profession was practised by very few people indeed, which forged a certain sense of unity. Perhaps, too, there was the fact that they were all working in a very British tradition, largely unaffected by the American comedians on the American Forces Network. This was particularly true of Milligan, the one of the four for whom Nation had the greatest respect and admiration; his work showed no point of contact with American comedy, and his countervailing Englishness had a strong influence on the young writer.

ALS was described by Alan Simpson as ‘a mutual protection society’. Though this perhaps glossed over the business side of the company – it was still an agency that charged its clients the usual agency commission ‘often per cent’ and rented them office space – there was an enormous benefit to be derived from working in an office adjacent to those occupied by some of the country’s leading writers. ‘If you got stuck with an idea, you could walk down and knock on Eric’s door,’ recalled John Junkin, who joined the agency in 1955. ‘And he’d help. They were all like that. Eric, Galton and Simpson, Spike – they were always very, very helpful, and not in the least bit condescending to the new chaps.’ Beryl Vertue too noted the assistance offered by the founding partners: ‘In an altruistic manner, they were very helpful to the boys and when they had series, they would often encourage them to come and work on them. It was a tremendous opportunity for the new ones.’ The other significant advantage to being on the books of ALS was the access it gave to the BBC, as Junkin explained: ‘This was obviously the great value of the agency: they had the contacts.’

This was to be of considerable benefit to Terry Nation and Dick Barry. Just two months after that meeting with Gale Pedrick at the BBC, they were commissioned to write a 13-week radio series for Kitty Bluett, an Australian comedienne who was already a familiar voice on the highly popular show
Ray’s a Laugh
, playing the assertive wife of comedian Ted Ray. On the strength of that performance, which had been running since 1949, the decision was made in 1955 to spin off a new series based on her, to be called
All My Eye and Kitty Bluett.
Even with a strong supporting cast that included Stanley Baxter, Terry Scott and Patricia Hayes, however, and with musical interludes provided by the cabaret star Leslie ‘Hutch’ Hutchinson, the show was not a success; it failed to receive a recommission, and Bluett rejoined
Ray’s a Laugh
for the following series in 1956 after her year’s absence. Nation was later to describe it as ‘a rotten show, a terrible show’. He also admitted that it was a huge step to have taken, from writing the occasional short sketch to being jointly responsible for thirteen half-hour shows, and he talked about coming through a real ordeal by fire, getting something out there every week, getting it prepared, ‘whether it was funny or not’.

Despite the challenges of writing
All My Eye
, and despite its failure to win the affection of the audience, Nation and Barry hadn’t blotted their copybook entirely with the show’s producer Alastair Scott Johnston, for he was to employ them later in 1955 as contributors to
The Frankie Howerd Show.
(‘Everybody wrote for Frankie Howerd,’ noted Alan Simpson.) In fact the amenable Johnston was to emerge as one of Nation’s chief supporters at the BBC in the early days, seeing something in the young writer that was worth nurturing. ‘He was supportive of people,’ remembered Beryl Vertue of Johnston. ‘He was very double-barrelled all the way down the line. He always wore a blazer. Very BBC, very nice, not pushy. He was good at his job, but he was not what you would imagine a typical producer to be.’ Ray Galton had similarly fond memories, though shaded with a significant qualification: ‘He was a lovely man, a man you could trust, a man you’d go into the jungle with. But not a man you’d want to produce your programmes.’ Others evidently came to the same conclusion, for although Johnston went on the BBC course to become a television producer, he never did make that leap, as so many of his colleagues did; instead he had to content himself with bringing to the radio its longest-running comedy series,
The Navy Lark
, which debuted in 1959 and lasted for over eighteen years, helping to establish the reputation of its stars Leslie Phillips and Jon Pertwee.

The partnership of Nation and Barry was not destined to last long. They were, by all accounts, an oddly assorted team. Ray Galton remembered
them arriving at ALS ‘all hairy tweeds and walking sticks’, but the image appears to have been determined more by Nation than by Barry. ‘Terry tried to be extremely well dressed,’ recalled Alan Simpson, and the same memory struck Beryl Vertue: ‘He was always well dressed, liked nice things.’ A slightly more sardonic take was offered by Ray Galton: ‘He came down here with a cane. He was looking like an upper-class guy with a stately home somewhere, and he was acting a part of being amongst the peasants. He did try to look like a country gentleman. We all used to take the piss out of him.’ Though, as Simpson pointed out: ‘He must have got away with it with people who didn’t know him.’ Dick Barry, on the other hand, was remembered primarily for being self-effacing, in stark contrast to his more extrovert colleague. ‘He was a nice bloke, you knew straight away he was a nice guy,’ commented Galton, while Vertue added: ‘He was a very quiet person in the place, very quietly spoken.’ Simpson concluded: ‘Dick was much more diffident. He was very quiet. They were as different as chalk and cheese, apart from their accent.’

Perhaps the differences proved too much, or perhaps it was the need to break from their background and reinvent themselves, but by the end of 1955 the partnership had split. Barry teamed up instead with Johnny Speight, and made immediate progress. Over the next eighteen months or so, they wrote BBC television shows for both Frankie Howerd and Norman Evans, as well as providing the independent channel with
That’s Life, Says Max Wall
and
The Dickie Valentine Show
, in which Britain’s first true pop star was joined somewhat incongruously by Peter Sellers. Their biggest hit was the ATV variety show
Get Happy
, which made a household name of the comedian Arthur Haynes, though when he got his own long-running series,
The Arthur Haynes Show
, it was written by Speight alone, fast emerging as the most plausible rival in ALS to the four founding fathers. Soon afterwards, Barry was to emigrate to Australia, where he continued to find work writing for television.

Meanwhile Nation, rather than striking out on his own, had formed a new partnership. (‘None of them were fully fledged writers, so they gravitated towards each other,’ noted Beryl Vertue.) This time it was with two of the newer arrivals at ALS: John Junkin and Dave Freeman. Of the trio, Freeman was significantly the senior. Born in London in 1922, he worked as an electrician before enlisting in the Royal Naval Fleet Air Arm on the outbreak of war. On being demobbed, he had joined the Metropolitan Police, spending some time in the Special Branch, before becoming a security officer at the American Officers’ Club in Regent’s Park. Throughout this period, he had harboured ambitions of writing, submitting stories to
Lilliput
magazine as early as 1941, while still serving in the Pacific. But it was at the Officers’ Club that he found his true calling, involving himself in the booking of entertainment acts and striking up friendships with new comedians, most significantly with Benny Hill. By 1953 he was selling gags to Frank Muir, who provided him with the encouragement to continue, and in September 1955, having contributed material to Hill’s television series and to the Terry Scott and Bill Maynard vehicle
Great Scott – It’s Maynard
, he abandoned his existing career path and joined ALS as a full-time writer. ‘He was quite gentle,’ recalled Ray Galton, ‘a tall fellow, big bloke.’

So too was Junkin, who like Nation and Freeman was well over six foot tall. Born in 1930, the son of a London policeman, Junkin had spent three years as a teacher in an East End primary school, though his career in education ended with an incident when he saw a boy in the back row chewing gum. Calling the child to the front, he issued the familiar instruction, ‘In the bin!’, and was horrified at the extent of his own power when the boy misunderstood and climbed into the bin, looking humiliated, resentful and hurt. Concluding that he ‘was not cut out for the teaching profession’, Junkin took up dead-end jobs to allow him time to try writing. Following the same path claimed by Nation, he wrote a script for
The Goon Show
and submitted it to Spike Milligan. Milligan’s response was sufficiently favourable – ‘I think you can write and I think you should’ – that Junkin too ended up on the agency’s books.

In January 1956 the new team of Nation, Junkin and Freeman had a meeting with Alastair Scott Johnston at the BBC to pitch an idea for a radio comedy they had devised, to be titled
The Fixers.
The stories would centre on a trio of characters: Colonel Harry Lashington, his cockney manservant Herbert Cooper (or perhaps Collins, the proposal gives both names) and a fiercely patriotic Welshman named David Owen Glendower, who ‘is intensely proud of his family tree, which he can trace back as far as his parents’. Together, they seek to right wrongs, motivated by ‘a strong sense of moral justice’, though ‘unfortunately they have more enthusiasm than good judgement’ and are liable to ‘insist on helping their fellow men whether their help is wanted or not’. The suggested storylines included the rebuilding of a house for an old lady who can’t get her landlord to do any repairs (though they get the wrong house), and the rescuing of a Victorian music hall comedian who was lost in the Amazonian jungle in 1901 (and doesn’t want rescuing); they return him to civilisation, ‘well, not quite civilisation, but show business’.