The Man Who Invented the Daleks (9 page)

As a further sign of his confidence, Johnston recommended that the two writers should, on the basis of their work thus far, be given a long-term contract by the BBC. It took nine months for the suggestion to be fully considered, but in June 1958 they were signed up to a year’s contract, with an option to renew, guaranteeing them a minimum payment of 2,000 guineas, their actual fee being calculated at 85 guineas for each half-hour show. (This put them marginally above the average annual salary of nonmanual male workers.) In the meantime, Nation and Junkin had scripted a new series of
Fine Goings On
, the show that had given Frankie Howerd his first headlining role when broadcast back in 1951. Then it had been written by Eric Sykes, Howerd’s first and finest collaborator, but the 1958 series was less impressive (a typical gag ran: ‘We can’t go to the Costa Brava.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Because of the costa living!’) and certainly less well received, with the
Observer’s
Paul Ferris – the only radio critic on a national newspaper who paid any attention to such shows – again unimpressed by the writing: ‘His script would disgrace a small pier on a wet Monday.’

Nation and Junkin’s BBC contracts were not renewed when they lapsed at the end of May 1959, and – although they contributed some material for a new young comic, Harry Worth – there had been a sense during that twelve-month period that there was a shortage of projects for the two writers to work on; among other attempts, Beryl Vertue tried to get them a job on the Terry-Thomas radio series
London Lights
, but made no progress.

In fact there was to be just one more radio show to come from Nation and Junkin. The 1961 series
It’s a Fair Cop
starred Eric Sykes as a police constable at the rural Blossom Hill station, with Hattie Jacques playing his sister – the same combination that had just completed the fourth series of the highly acclaimed television sitcom
Sykes and a .. .
They were joined by Deryck Guyler as the sergeant and by Dick Emery as an habitual prisoner who, like Harry Grout in the 1970s series
Porridge
, has made himself fully at home. ‘He has been in and out for a long time,’ noted the
Radio Times’s
preview of the show, ‘and so has learnt to make himself comfortable with the armchair and television set provided by his solicitous gaolers.’ The same article did the series no favours by claiming that it would appeal to fans of
Dixon of Dock Green:
‘It may be pure coincidence, but the setting for Eric’s radio series bears a striking resemblance to Dock Green.’

Yet again, Paul Ferris was less than enthusiastic: ‘There is funny Ealing-film-type music going oompah-oompah, and the script says things like “You’re late.” – “That’s no reason for putting my sausages in the cornflakes.” In desperation the writers use an astonishing number of tiny scenes, each barely supported by the basic competence of actors, ‘certainly not by the jokes.’ He was a little harsh in not recognising the acting talent of Jacques at least, who provided a splendidly inhospitable landlady: ‘I want you to treat it like it was your own ’ome. No cooking in the room, no pets, no musical instruments, no visitors after six in the evening.’ She exits with a parting shot at her new guests: ‘I’ll leave you to settle in. If there’s anything you want – get it yourself!’

The fact that Nation and Junkin were producing material for Sykes, who was not only a founder of ALS but one of the very best writers in the business, was clearly occasioned by him being overstretched with his commitments to the television series. ‘Because of the voracious appetite of radio and television,’ he later noted, ‘once accepted as a reliable writer you were forever swimming, with no time to tread water.’ The invitation to work for him was nonetheless to be seen as a compliment, and Junkin’s memory of the series was a positive one: ‘It did okay. It got a nice, warm reaction and pretty decent ratings, and I think we would probably have done more than one series had Eric’s TV series not been such a big hit so quickly.’

By this stage, the pair had effectively turned their backs on radio and – a little way behind Nation’s former co-writers, Dick Barry and Dave Freeman – were focused now on television work, where the prospects were greater and the money was better. The shift in power in the broadcast media was already clear, but in case anyone was in any doubt about who now called the shots, there had been a symbolic changing of the guard in February 1957 when the
Radio Times
was redesigned so that instead of the radio schedule preceding that of the television, the order was reversed. Four years later a further, more subtle change made the same point. The magazine had previously run from Sunday to Monday, giving primacy to the Sabbath, the observance of which had been so important to John Reith; now it capitulated to television’s love of the weekend, and started its listings on Saturday. The effect of the rise of television on the other dominant form in popular culture was still more devastating. In 1950 there were 1,400 million cinema admissions in Britain; ten years later that total had collapsed to just 500 million. During the same period, the number of television licences increased by ten million, while those for radio (the radio licence was not abandoned until 1970) fell dramatically. Television, clearly, was the medium of the future.

The first breakthrough for Nation and Junkin – excluding their contributions to
The Idiot’s Weekly, Price 2d
– came in December 1957 with the one-off show
Friday the 13th
, starring Ted Ray, with whom they had just worked on
Variety Playhouse.
When he returned with his regular television series,
The Ted Ray Show
, the following year, they were retained as writers, and were primarily responsible for seven hour-long editions, though three sketches were contributed separately by Dave Freeman. Another involved in the series was a BBC staffer named David Whitaker; then a light entertainment script editor, he would later emerge as a significant figure in Nation’s story. As well as script editing, Whitaker contributed lyrics to some of the songs used in the show. Audience research carried out by the BBC on 22 November 1958 indicated that the series was proving popular. The reaction index gave it a score of 74, some way above the average of 67 that was expected of a Saturday night light entertainment show, and the report noted: ‘The script, too, was commended as being witty and topical.’

The series was produced by George Inns, who was also responsible for a couple of one-off programmes by the Scottish comedian Jimmy Logan, then the biggest live draw in Glasgow. When the comic was given his own twelve-part series by the BBC in 1959, Inns brought in Nation and Junkin to write the shows, since Logan had already exhausted his existing stock of material. As with
Calling the Stars
, however, a change in producer was to cause problems. Inns became fully occupied with
The Black and White Minstrel Show
, which he had brought to the screen and which had become an unlikely success story (Stan Stennett was one of the resident comedians), and he passed over production duties on Logan’s series to Bryan Sears, the man behind Morecambe and Wise’s notoriously disastrous show
Running Wild
five years earlier.

The Jimmy Logan Show
was to fare little better, at least if its star was to be believed. Logan was deeply unhappy with the change in personnel, and came to see the producer as an enemy and saboteur: ‘He didn’t like me, so he had decided to do his best to make my show as bad as possible.’ Nor was he overly impressed with the material he was offered. ‘They made me sick because every single one was terrible, and obviously terrible,’ he commented of the first batch of scripts. ‘A good comedian can make good comedy out of a bad situation, but these scripts were way beyond salvage.’ For the last four editions, new writers were brought in, though with the benefit of hindsight, Logan’s biggest regret over the whole affair was that he didn’t walk out halfway through filming the series, as his misery deepened. The consequence was, he claimed, ‘that it took me at least two years to reestablish my credibility outside Scotland.’ Nonetheless, he returned to BBC television in October 1961 with a one-off 45-minute special. Although there was a new producer, the script was again by Nation and Junkin.

These ventures into television had been a moderate success and had provided an income, but they had hardly set the country alight. Nor had they provided much creative satisfaction for their writers. As an alternative, in the summer of 1960, Nation, Junkin and Johnny Speight approached the BBC with a new proposal for a series to be titled
Comedy Playhouse
, an anthology strand which would feature one-off sitcoms from a variety of writers and starring actors rather than comedians. The suggestion did eventually materialise, some eighteen months later, but in a modified form that dispensed with the multiple authors —instead the sixteen episodes that comprised the first two seasons of
Comedy Playhouse
were all written by Ray Galton and Alan Simpson (and included ‘The Offer’, which became
Steptoe and Son).
Like
The Fixers
, it was an idea ahead of its time, and clearly one that the BBC felt couldn’t be entrusted to unknown writers.

Meanwhile, in the absence of more substantial sustenance, Nation’s partnership with John Junkin was withering away. Junkin had already made some appearances as an actor at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East, and in the autumn of 1960 he opened there in a new play,
Sparrers Can’t Sing
, opposite Barbara Windsor; he was still in the production when it transferred to the West End. There were a couple of collaborations with Nation yet to come
(It’s a Fair Cop
, the special of
The Jimmy Logan Show)
, but from now on Junkin was to see his career as being centred on performance and acting as much as it was on writing. He became a regular fixture on British television over the next forty years, playing in both comedy and drama and appearing as himself on game shows.

Meanwhile Nation too was becoming disillusioned with the way his career was failing to make significant advances. On a personal level, he was now happily married to Kathleen Grant, more commonly known as Kate, a classical pianist and the daughter of a Yorkshire miner, whom he had wed in March 1958; their marriage was to last for the remainder of his life. But professionally there was no comparable progress. As the new decade dawned, he could reasonably claim to have paid his dues since coming to London, with over a hundred episodes of radio series and more than a dozen television shows to his name (albeit in partnership with others). And yet he had failed to find an individual voice of his own or a stable vehicle for his talent. The positions of Spike Milligan, Eric Sykes, Ray Galton and Alan Simpson at the top of the ALS tree might have seemed too remote to challenge, but others who had joined the agency around the same time as him were making much greater strides: Johnny Speight with
The Arthur Haynes Show
, Eric Merriman and Barry Took with the hit radio series
Beyond Our Ken
, which would later evolve into
Round the Horne
, and Dave Freeman with television series for Benny Hill and Charlie Drake. Meanwhile Maurice Wiltshire, Lew Schwarz and (until his untimely death in 1959) Larry Stephens were all busily supplying scripts for
The Army Game
, the most popular comedy on ITV.

The failed proposal for
The Fixers
had suggested that Nation was keen to create an original and distinctive show. Instead he was writing for Ted Ray, a man who shared his fondness for Jack Benny and American patter, and who was an engaging and amiable comedian, but one who had no great need for material that would set him apart from his rivals. Ray was essentially a teller of gags, and there was nothing much to separate his jokes from those of other comedians. The BBC contract had not been renewed, and Nation’s partners had moved on to other projects. Things weren’t going the way he had hoped.

‘I was getting into a very depressed state with the feeling that comedy wasn’t going the right way – not progressing,’ he remembered some years later. ‘I felt I’d like to go into drama, and after a heart-searching evening with my wife, I decided to write a television play. I’d finished it in two weeks – a comedy set in Wales called
Uncle Selwyn.’

W
hile Terry Nation and John Junkin had been toiling in what was still essentially the variety tradition of light entertainment, there had been a substantial shift in the relative status of the founding members of Associated London Scripts. At the time that Nation joined the agency, there was no doubt that Spike Milligan was the biggest name, writing and starring in Britain’s most celebrated comedy,
The Goon Show.
But as the decade wore on, Milligan became increasingly frustrated with the format and with the limitations imposed on him by the BBC: ‘I’m the most progressive comedy writer in the country,’ he told the press in 1958, ‘but they don’t want ideas.’ And, he added, ‘I resent being called a Goon.’ Rumours of the demise of
The Goon Show
were already circulating and, although they were a little premature, the programme did finally end in January 1960, with the tenth, rather perfunctory, series. Milligan had until now failed to hit upon a format that would allow him to translate his surreal fantasies into visual expression – despite the brief flourishes of
The Idiot Weekly, Price 2d
and its television sequels, A
Show Called Fred
and
Son of Fred
– and it was unclear where his future path lay.

In the same period, however, the stock of Ray Galton and Alan Simpson had enjoyed a spectacular rise, thanks to their work with Tony Hancock, a comedian who came with a reputation for being extremely demanding of his writers. Back in 1952, when he was still trying to make his mark, Hancock was co-hosting the radio series
Calling All Forces
when he decided that the script, by Bob Monkhouse and Denis Goodwin, was below par. Monkhouse remembered him breaking up the read-through as he stormed out shouting: ‘This is shit! And it’s written on shit paper so I’ll take it away and have a shit and wipe my arse with it!’ Shortly afterwards, Monkhouse and Goodwin were replaced by Galton and Simpson, beginning an association with Hancock that would transform the careers of all three men, and in the process change the face of British comedy.