The Man Who Invented the Daleks (15 page)

The delays in the writing process meant that ‘The Fox and the Forest’ didn’t appear in
Story Parade
, as originally intended. Instead it formed part of the first series in 1965 of
Out of the Unknown
, a new BBC2 project, again helmed by Irene Shubik, which was explicitly based in science fiction and was essentially an extension of
Out of this World.
The play was finally broadcast in November 1965, appropriately enough on the second anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination, and it received some critical praise; it was ‘one of the most convincing produced plays in the series’, according to
Television Today
, and Mary Crozier in the
Guardian
wrote that the ‘feeling of remorseless pursuit was steadily instilled with a nightmarish intensity’. But Shubik herself was unhappy with the final product, and the audience too was unimpressed: the piece received a reaction index of just 52, the lowest for any of the twelve episodes in the season. It never received a repeat screening.

By this stage, however, its success or failure made little difference to Nation. For by now he was one of the most successful television writers in the country, fully occupied on a variety of projects, many of which were concerned with the creatures that had finally catapulted him out of the ranks of the unknown.

I
n July 1963 Tony Hancock again ventured out on a string of stage performances, this time one-week engagements in Nottingham and in Manchester in preparation for a six-week residency at the Talk of the Town in London, and again he was accompanied by Terry Nation. In the event, however, Hancock’s confidence, already fragile following the failure of the television series, was further dented by poor ticket sales, and he cancelled the London booking. His state of mind was not improved when, during the first week, he finally split with Nation; having previously parted from Ray Galton and Alan Simpson, and then from Philip Oakes, he was clearly struggling to keep hold of his writers.

It was while they were in Nottingham that Nation was contacted by his agent with an offer of work: ‘The BBC are planning a new children’s science fiction show, would you like to do it?’ His immediate response, as someone who had never written for children, was entirely negative: ‘How dare they? I don’t do things like that.’ Hancock demonstrated supportive outrage, resorting to a catchphrase from his early days on the radio show
Educating Archie:
‘A writer of your calibre, writing for flippin’ kids!’ Then came the falling out: yet another argument about Hancock’s reluctance to use new material, a feeling on Nation’s part that he was being underused and undervalued, a blazing row and a storming out. Only on the train back to London did Nation calm down enough to realise that he was now out of work, with no income to speak of and with considerable domestic expenditure looming (he had committed himself to the installation of central heating in the three-roomed Hampstead flat where he and Kate lived). There was only one offer on the table. Fortunately it was still available and, having retracted his refusal, he was duly sent the writer’s guide for the new series, which he learned was to be entitled
Doctor Who.

There was, however, one further contribution from Hancock, at least in his own mind. During those all-night conversations with Nation, the two men had ranged freely over a large number of subjects, including an idea for a film about Earth after the final death of humanity, a planet populated entirely by robots. Hancock’s concept of how these androids might look was said to be ‘an inverted cone, covered in ping pong balls and with a sink plunger sticking out of its head’.

The concept of the new series came, as did so much at this time, from Sydney Newman. There was an awkward gap in the BBC television schedules around teatime on Saturdays, falling between two firmly established presences: the four-hour sports show
Grandstand
, which ended at five o’clock once the football results had been broadcast, and the BBC’s token pop show, which had occupied the slot just after six o’clock ever since Jack Good’s ground-breaking
Six-Five Special
had been launched in 1957 (it was now the home of
Juke Box Jury
)
.
Thereafter the evening programmes for adult audiences began in earnest, with the likes of
Dixon of Dock Green
and
The Rag Trade.
Some of that difficult hour was filled with the news, but there was, felt Newman, a need for a regular drama show that would primarily appeal to children, but wouldn’t alienate the adult audience left over from
Grandstand
, a transition programme suitable for family viewing. ‘It was never intended to be simply a children’s programme,’ he insisted in later years, ‘but something that would appeal to people who were in a rather child-like frame of mind.’ And he concluded that what was needed was a science fiction series.

It was not an entirely novel concept. Apart from encouraging Irene Shubik’s ventures into science fiction, Newman had, while he was at ABC, brought to the screen
Target Luna
and its spin-off
Pathfinders in Space
, which itself spawned other
Pathfinders
series. Written by Malcolm Hulke and Eric Paice – who had earlier written for a television series of Gert and Daisy – these were straightforward children’s shows, but there were elements that would reappear in the broader-based
Doctor Who
, particularly the use of cliff-hanger endings to episodes, with the protagonists left in a situation of danger.

Newman shared Shubik’s distaste for the bug-eyed monster tradition of science fiction, and the new concept was intended to avoid this, revolving around a ‘senile old man’ in a machine that was capable of travelling through space and time. Since he couldn’t quite control the ship (later named the TARDIS, standing for Time and Relative Dimension in Space), it repeatedly plunged him and his companions into adventures that would be both entertaining and educational. Sketchy as it necessarily was at this stage, the idea already had the one key element that was to make it so distinctive. The central figure was not a blue-eyed, square-jawed space ace, as a generation used to the likes of Dan Dare might expect; rather he was to be an eccentric scientist, the kind of man you would normally expect to see shuffling around his laboratory, mumbling to himself, but now let loose in the universe. As an outsider, Newman appeared to have a slightly disparaging view of Britain’s potential for space exploration: bumbling rather than barnstorming, hesitant rather than heroic.

The format that emerged was largely shaped by Verity Lambert, who had worked as Newman’s assistant on
Armchair Theatre
and was now promoted to be producer of the new series, and by David Whitaker, the script editor. The central character, known at this stage as Doctor Who, was to be accompanied by his granddaughter, to allow the young audience a figure with whom to identify, and by two of her teachers; since they taught science and history, these latter would be able to expound upon the futuristic and historical situations in which they found themselves. They were to carry no weaponry and were to be reliant only on their ingenuity and initiative to escape any dangers they might encounter. (The addition of the teachers indicated the would-be educational element of the show, augmenting the traditional combination of scientist and young woman common in science fiction since it was first borrowed from Prospero and Miranda in Shakespeare’s
The Tempest.)
A first script was commissioned from Anthony Coburn, and Whitaker then approached a number of writers who he thought might be able to provide stories in four to six episodes for a series that was scheduled to run for fifty-two unbroken weeks. ‘They were all friends or friends of friends,’ he later explained. ‘People I knew I could trust not only to produce a good story within the restrictions we had, but also to work to a tight deadline.’

Among them was Terry Nation, whose work on
Out of this World
qualified him for embarking on a science fiction project, and who knew Whitaker from the days when they had worked together on
The Ted Ray Show.
He was not, however, impressed by the writer’s guide he received. ‘When I first read the brochure the BBC had prepared for writers and producers,’ he would say in later years, ‘I was absolutely convinced it couldn’t last but four weeks. I thought it was dreadful.’ Deb Boultwood remembered him visiting her father, Nation’s old writing partner Dave Freeman, at the time and being no more enthusiastic: ‘Terry came round and Dad asked, “What are you doing?” And he said: “I’ve got a series; it’s children’s TV but it brings in the money.” And that was the Daleks.’

For the remainder of his life, Nation was to be asked about the act of creation that brought the Daleks into being, and he was never able to provide an answer that satisfied his inquisitors. ‘I suppose they were born in a flash of inspiration,’ he commented once, ‘except that makes it sound altogether too poetic. I was sitting at a typewriter, doing a job of work for money, and I needed a monster. And that’s when they were born.’ Similarly the name, notwithstanding his story about the encyclopaedias, had no obvious spur: ‘Basically I wanted a two-syllable word that had a mechanical sound about it,’ he recalled, though its rhythm clearly echoes that of ‘robot’, a term introduced in Karel Capek’s 1920 play
R.U.R. – Rossum’s Universal Robots
and derived from the Czech word for ‘serf labour’. Dalek too proved to be a real word, meaning ‘remote’ or even ‘alien’ in Croatian, though this was no more than a happy accident, and came as a surprise to Nation when he subsequently learned of it; as he pointed out: ‘I don’t have many friends who speak Serbo-Croat.’ He was, despite his misgivings, sufficiently excited by his inspiration that he enthusiastically broke the news to his wife, Kate. ‘I’ve had this brilliant idea for some baddies. I’m going to call them Daleks,’ he enthused. To which she replied, ‘Drink your tea while it’s hot.’

He submitted a storyline, titled ‘The Survivors’. A fully developed and impressive piece of work, it was considerably more detailed than expected (twenty-two pages rather than the recommended three or four), and contained virtually all the elements that would turn up in the final version. By the time it was accepted, however, and he was commissioned to produce a full script on 31 July 1963, he had received a far more attractive offer to write material for Eric Sykes, who was signed up to host a variety show,
Wish You Were Here
, in a joint production by the BBC and a Swedish television channel. Although the
Doctor Who
script was not due for delivery until 30 September, the Sykes programme was scheduled for 7 September and required Nation’s earlier presence for rehearsals. Short of time, and seeing the
Doctor Who
story as the lesser of the two commitments, he finished the script within a week (writing an episode a day, for each of which he was paid £262), delivered it to Lambert and Whitaker and left for Sweden.

The serial went through various titles, including ‘Beyond the Sun’, before ending up as ‘The Mutants’, though in retrospect it has come to be known simply as ‘The Daleks’, in tribute to its central villains. Set on the fictional planet Skaro, the story features two races, the Daleks and the Thals, who long ago fought a devastating centuries-long war, ending with the detonation of a neutron bomb that has left the planet scarred by radiation. The surviving Daleks have retreated into an underground network beneath their chief city and taken refuge inside individual protective shells, while a handful of Thals keep themselves alive on the surface of Skaro with anti-radiation drugs. There has been no contact since between the two races, who are each unaware of the other’s continued existence, but this is to change with the arrival of the TARDIS, bringing the Doctor (as Doctor Who had now become known) and his companions: his granddaughter, Susan, and her teachers, Ian and Barbara. Landing in the midst of a petrified forest, the travellers discover in the distance the Dalek city, and the Doctor tricks the others into exploring the place by pretending that he’s in search of mercury to refill the fluid link (a vital component in the workings of the TARDIS). They are captured by the Daleks, from whom they learn something of Skaro’s past, but manage to escape and join up with the Thals. Together they stage an attack on the city to regain possession of the fluid link, and the story ends with the defeat and death of the Daleks and the departure of the TARDIS crew, leaving the planet in the hands of the Thals.

It was a simple story that drew rather more deeply on Nation’s childhood reading than on the modern science fiction he had adapted for
Out of this World.
In particular there is a clear debt to H.G. Wells, whose 1895 novel
The Time Machine
had foreseen an Earth inhabited by the subterranean Morlocks and the surface-dwelling Eloi, twin races not far removed from the hideous, violent Daleks living underground and the beautiful, peaceful Thals. Wells’s later book
The War of the Worlds
(1898) had centred on a race of aliens who could only operate on Earth if they were inside machines of their own construction, and this combination of an organic life-form within a robotic casing is evoked in the nature of the Dalek: a ‘frog-like animal’, according to Nation’s original storyline, who lives inside a metallic travelling machine. ‘They are invulnerable, they are pitiless,’ a character remarks of the Martians in Wells’s novel. Then there are traces of Jules Verne’s
Journey to the Centre of the Earth
(1864) as Ian, Barbara and a group of Thals travel through swamps full of mutated creatures and caves fraught with danger to attack the city from the rear. One might even see, in the depiction of the Doctor and Ian as the man of science and the adventure hero (for it is Ian who tends to lead the action elements of the story), something resembling the relationship between Professor Challenger and Lord John Roxton in Arthur Conan Doyle’s
The Lost World
and its sequels.

None of this, it should be noted, was out of kilter with the original conception of the series. Sydney Newman had talked about the concept of the TARDIS being based ‘on the style of an H.G. Wells time-space machine’, while the first adventure, Anthony Coburn’s ‘100,000 BC’, had carried echoes of another Wells tale, ‘A Story of the Stone Age’, published in 1897.