The Man Who Invented the Daleks (41 page)

At this stage, in late 1975, Nation was still officially part of the team. He withdrew from the role of script consultant, but was pencilled in to write four episodes in the forthcoming season, and was even commissioned to write two of them, with half-fees being paid upfront. And the letters from Dudley continued to arrive, all of them perfectly friendly and courteous, though they remained unanswered. It wasn’t until January 1976, when the delivery dates for the two scripts had passed with no sign of anything having been written, that Dudley allowed himself to express his true feelings in an internal memo. ‘In my judgement Terry Nation can’t give the programme the sort of scripts it needs at present. He is unhappy writing “character” and “atmosphere” which is the requirement,’ he claimed, adding a hint of his own frustrations from their previous collaborations: ‘I don’t want, as in Series One to commission scripts from him that have to be drastically rewritten by me.’ There is little to support such a claim – save that infelicitous resolution to Abby’s quest tacked on to the end of the first season – but it was an indication of how strained the relationship had become. The commissioned episodes were cancelled, with an agreement that the advances already paid were to be recovered from the royalties due to Nation over the coming season.

A further twenty-five episodes of
Survivors
were made over the course of two seasons in 1976 and 1977. Nation had no involvement at all, though he was, of course, still being paid his format fees. (Roger Hancock’s negotiating was paying dividends; when the BBC suggested a payment of £175 per episode for the third season, Hancock held out for and won £200 – even allowing for inflation, this represented an increase of nearly 40 per cent on the first contract.) With both Nation and Clive Exton having left, the only writer to survive was Jack Ronder, his scripts augmented by contributions from Don Shaw, Martin Worth and Roger Parkes – all of whom had worked on
Doomwatch
– as well as an episode apiece from Roger Marshall, a veteran of
The Avengers
, and from Terence Dudley himself, who was unquestionably the most influential figure in the series, the one constant factor running through all three seasons. There were also three scripts by the actor Ian McCulloch, whose character, Greg Preston, emerged as the most powerful figure in the absence of Abby. ‘I was happier with the same format and the same style that Terry Nation did,’ he was later to say. ‘It was an action adventure as far as I was concerned, and when it got into what I consider the feebler plots, the more philosophical plots, I found them drawn out, boring, banal.’ Convinced that the show had lost its way, he was reluctant to return for the third season at all, and only agreed to appear in the two episodes that he scripted, though his presence looms large throughout.

The post-Nation
Survivors
had a very different feel to the original. It opened with a fire that wrote out some of the peripheral characters, and saw Greg and the now-pregnant Jenny set up a new community with Charles Vaughan (Dennis Lill), a former architect who had appeared in one of Jack Ronder’s episodes the previous year. Much of this second season was concerned with the maintenance of their settlement, the practical difficulties of establishing a sustainable technology, and there was noticeably less action than in Nation’s work. But certain episodes, such as ‘The Chosen’ and ‘New Arrivals’, both written by Roger Parkes, continued to explore alternative social structures and the nature of leadership. There was also Ronder’s excellent two-part story ‘Lights of London’, depicting a rat-infested city, where five hundred survivors huddle in the Oval cricket ground and – following the example of
The Day of the Triffids
– plan their escape to the Isle of Wight. They are ruled over by yet another power-hungry leader, Manny (Sydney Tafler), and the blackouts and the scenes set in Tube tunnels evoke the Blitz in a way that even Nation should have appreciated. Manny ends his broadcasts to his people with the catchphrase ‘TTFN’, the sign-off popularised by the charlady Mrs Mopp in Tommy Handley’s
ITMA
, even though his authoritarianism clearly places him on the wrong side of such imagery.

The third season took another turn again. Greg had departed for Norway in a hot air balloon at the end of the previous year, promising to return, and the survivors moved on from the settlement they had so painstakingly established, spending most of the twelve episodes on the road. Again there were some strong and celebrated episodes: Don Shaw’s ‘Mad Dog’ and Ian McCulloch’s ‘The Last Laugh’, in the latter of which Greg becomes infected with smallpox and acts as a kind of suicide bomber, harbouring within himself a biological weapon as he inveigles his way into the camp of yet another warlord. But there was also a certain lack of focus, as well as a not entirely convincing restoration of elements of pre-plague civilisation: steam trains are put back in action, it is discovered that the Scottish Highlands have been largely unaffected by the infection and, in the final episode, the National Grid is switched back on to provide power.

The series did, however, end on a suitably intriguing note as the laird, McAlister (Iain Cuthbertson), sits down to a romantic candlelit dinner with his housekeeper, candles now being once again an optional extra rather than a necessity. The implication is that, after all the discussions on social organisation and all the different structures we have encountered, it is the quasi-feudal society of the pre-plague Highlands that has survived best of all. It was an image not far removed from Nation’s evident attraction to Jimmy Garland’s hereditary claim, but if he recognised it as such, it did nothing to assuage his scorn at the restoration of power with the switching on of the hydro-electric plant. ‘They seemed to think that if you get the electrical systems turned back on, everything would be just hunky,’ he mocked. ‘Which was silly.’

By now the series had departed entirely from Nation’s original vision. Despite his comments about the need to relearn basic technologies, the truth was that he wasn’t much interested in the practicalities of how that would work, but rather in the psychology and human drama of surviving the collapse of civilisation. He toyed with the principles of self-sufficiency without being committed to exploring the implications. Beyond that, his concerns lay in humanity’s instinctive drive to ensure the continuation of the species, as opposed to the survival of individuals. The idea of getting the lights switched back on had no appeal to him, however symbolic it seemed in the mid 1970s, with the power cuts of the Heath years still fresh in the country’s memory. Nation’s model was essentially that of the western, the struggle against nature and the attempt to establish a morality in a lawless land.

His conception of how the story might have developed was hinted at in the novel he wrote based on the first season, which was published in 1976. Not strictly a novelisation, since Nation had no access to the episodes written by Ronder and Exton or to the characters developed therein, it opens with an extended treatment of the first three instalments, before diverging sharply from the television narrative. The core of the book, however, remains the tale of Abby Grant. In this context it should be acknowledged that having Abby as the central figure was an unusual development at the time, a fact of which Nation was justifiably proud. ‘I’m one of the few people who had an adventure show with a woman as the lead,’ he noted in retrospect, ‘because I saw she was mother, she was the future, she was all of those things.’ At the time, perhaps reflecting on his own limited experience of self-sufficiency at Lynsted Park, he argued that the choice of a female protagonist was a simple recognition of reality: ‘Women are better survivors than men. They are tougher than men physically and psychologically.’ Carolyn Seymour shared much the same perspective. ‘I become a matriarch because I’m the only one with a sense of purpose,’ she told the press. ‘It’s very good propaganda for Women’s Lib, and I’m all for that – in a gentle way.’

But while the central characters remain strong, there is in the novel no significant development, despite the extra space available. As a television writer, and as a devotee in childhood of the thriller genre, Nation remains wedded to action and dialogue, allowing little scope for interior depictions of his characters; we seldom know what they think, only what they express in words to others. Perhaps the one exception is Greg, whose reluctance to commit himself is more convincing on the page, and who does emerge as a more believable figure. His detachment, his sense of relief at having unwanted responsibilities lifted from his shoulders by the plague, is more thoroughly fleshed out, but again this tends to be through his own words, with even the smallest changes resonating. ‘I was wrong, Jeannie,’ he says to the dead body of his wife, who has perished in the epidemic. ‘I thought you were the sort of bitch who would survive just to spite me.’ The word ‘bitch’ was not in the television script and adds considerable weight to his comments, even though it remains an unlikely thought to articulate aloud to a corpse.

It is not a wholly successful book. Too episodic, too reliant on dialogue, it largely confirms Nation’s own assessment: ‘I don’t come easily to prose, I don’t find prose an easy form to write in.’ Even in the moments when the writing almost breaks free from its origins to achieve its own identity, there are still traces of the staccato rhythms of a television script:

Some roads had almost vanished, and passage along many was all but impossible. Weeds and saplings and briar buried the land and what stood on it. Only the small pockets of cultivated ground around the communities remained. Like islands in a rising green sea. The survivors found the limits of their worlds at the edges of their small holdings. They ate, and they worked. And they worked to eat. The demands of maintaining that cycle allowed them little else.

Even so, there are good things about the book. The tone throughout is low-key and unsensational, despite the much more pessimistic – or, one might argue, realistic – narrative. Vic Thatcher, left abandoned in the quarry with his legs crushed, dies alone, rather than being found alive months later, while Abby carries out euthanasia on a member of the community with terminal cancer, and other survivors resort to cannibalism: ‘When there was nothing left, some conquered their disgust at eating human flesh and lived on.’ Most shocking of all, Jimmy Garland, whose war with Knox is recounted in the novel (though at a different point in the timeline) doesn’t live long enough to ride in to whisk Abby away, but instead dies of a wound that turns gangrenous. In a way of which Terence Dudley would probably have approved, his death isn’t even depicted directly, but only mentioned in passing by Abby later on. Meanwhile the threat posed by Arthur Wormley’s National Unity Force looms larger than it did on television; the community has to learn to live with the ever-present risk of attack.

This grim note, apart from being closer to Nation’s original concept, is also indicative of a general attempt to make the material more adult, in contrast to the television version, which had been criticised by some as juvenile. (‘It goes down very well indeed with children,’ noted Nancy Banks-Smith in the
Guardian.
) That hadn’t been Nation’s intention, but he had been restricted by the pre-watershed scheduling and by conventions over which he had no control. Most absurdly, the BBC had refused to allow a shot of Abby and Jimmy Garland in bed together, since they weren’t married, reflecting a moralistic attitude that permeated British broadcasting at the time; in 1977 the ITV sitcom
Robin’s Nest
had to get special dispensation from the Independent Broadcasting Authority to show an unmarried couple living together. It was perhaps in retaliation that the novel shows Abby, alone in her bed, masturbating to the image of Garland, though it’s not a very convincing passage.
Survivors
was already Nation’s first serious work to attempt a love interest; venturing into sex scenes was perhaps a step too far.

There is, however, one major exception to the harsh tone, a genuine lightening of the original. Clive Exton’s episode ‘Law and Order’ had depicted the community celebrating May Day with a party, after which the former tramp Tom Price rapes and murders one of the women while he’s drunk. He then frames a simple-minded resident, and the rest of the community try the man in an ad hoc court, find him guilty and execute him, before some of them discover their mistake. It’s a shocking development, coming completely out of the blue and seemingly out of character, and Nation subsequently provided Price with an element of redemption, having him die a heroic death in ‘The Future Hour’. In the novel, without benefit of Exton’s plot, there is no rape, no murder and no need for self-sacrifice. Instead Nation lets Price live on and takes a much more generous view of the character. Far from being a killer, Price is here simply a roguish Welsh fantasist, ‘a man to whom lies came more easily than truth’. He’s always keen to seek refuge in fiction, so that when he reveals his knack for snaring rabbits and wins the praise of the others, he can’t help but spin yarns about having been the head gamekeeper to Lord Glamorgan, with twenty men working under him. And when the group decide to arm themselves, he begins to reminisce ‘about his past campaigns, his heroism and the medals that recognised it’. He remains an outsider in the group, but he is at least tolerated and accepted.

Nation was later to explain that Price was based on a man he knew in his local village, a part-time poacher who did some casual cash-in-hand work, who he thought would find a niche, however catastrophic the situation: ‘this guy had scrounged around, he’d done an odd job here, an odd job there, he’d steal something, and he was a survivor right from the beginning.’ But there were also surely memories of Nation’s own Welsh childhood, his preference for a good tale over prosaic reality, almost as though he were imagining an alternative reality for himself in which he never became successful, never discovered a legitimate outlet for his storytelling. As Price picks up a flash car in the immediate aftermath of the plague, he imagines the response it would have elicited from his old acquaintances. ‘Damn! Look at that! There’s old Pricey in a bloody Rolls-Royce!’ he says aloud with, we are told, ‘his Welsh ancestry strong in his voice’.