The Man Who Invented the Daleks (17 page)

The first episode of
Doctor Who
was broadcast on 23 November 1963, the day after John F. Kennedy was shot dead in Dallas (the cast and crew heard the news of the assassination just as they were about to start filming the second episode of ‘The Daleks’). The regular cast comprised Carole Ann Ford as Susan, and William Russell and Jacqueline Hill as her teachers, with William Hartnell – star of the film
And the Same to You
, partially written by Terry Nation and John Junk in – as the Doctor. The fact that the lead character was an alien from another time, and perhaps another planet, was a major departure for televised science fiction, and the first episode, ‘An Unearthly Child’, went out of its way to locate the show in a recognisable portrayal of Britain, to counterpoint the strangeness encountered later. It opens with a bobby on the beat wandering by as though he had strayed out of
Dixon of Dock Green
, while the TARDIS takes the (then) familiar shape of a police telephone box, and is initially located in a scrapyard in Totters Lane – ‘totting’ being a slang reference to the rag-and-bone trade that could hardly fail to evoke images of
Steptoe and Son
, whose own yard was in Oil Drum Lane. Susan may have been an alien adolescent, but she is presented as sharing the concerns of human teenagers; when we first see her, she is dancing, transistor radio in hand, to the sounds of a fictional band named John Smith and the Common Men. This gentle introduction ends when the TARDIS, carrying the Doctor, Susan and their two unwilling companions, is plunged back for the first proper adventure to the Stone Age at a time when the art of making fire is being discovered.

Viewing figures for that first four-part story were respectable but hardly startling; they reached a peak of seven million, but tailed off for the final episode and averaged just six million over the course of the serial. Many at the BBC were unimpressed with the show, and even at this early stage there were suggestions that the 52-week run might be truncated to just thirteen weeks. The arrival of ‘The Daleks’, which started on 21 December, ended all such talk. By the end of the story, the audience was well over ten million, and the average across the seven episodes was nine million, a success that ensured the survival of the series. As Verity Lambert was later to acknowledge of Nation’s monsters: ‘They put
Doctor Who
on the map.’

What made the difference was simply the appearance of the Daleks themselves. The first episode of the story ends with Barbara flattening herself against a wall and screaming as she looks straight into the camera at something that we cannot see; all that is visible to us in the foreground of the shot is an out-of-focus stick, with a black blob at its end, as though it’s a weapon. We subsequently discover that this is the arm of a Dalek, but at this point it is impossible to identify what it is that’s terrorising Barbara. The cliff-hanger is simply her fear and our uncertainty as to what is causing it. The effect was reminiscent of the already classic shower sequence in Alfred Hitchcock’s film
Psycho
(1960), with Janet Leigh attacked by a foregrounded knife, stabbing downwards at her.

The second episode reprised that ending, but then cut to the Doctor and Ian squabbling over the radiation levels on the planet, over the Doctor’s deceit in pretending that he needed mercury to repair the TARDIS’s fluid link, and over their next step – whether to look for Barbara or simply to get out. When they finally decide to go searching for Barbara, they step out of the room and immediately find themselves surrounded by a swarm of Daleks. It’s our first sighting of the creatures, and it comes as something of a shock. The arguments between the Doctor and Ian have largely driven from our minds the horror that Barbara has witnessed, and their sudden appearance is the more effective for having had no forewarning and no fanfare.

The impact of the Daleks was immediate, as Nation himself remembered: ‘After that first episode, my phone started to ring, with friends calling to say, “What the fuck was that?” Then the following week the Dalek appeared and it was an instant hit. I had had a few small successes by then, and maybe once in a while, a fan letter. But then I started getting mail addressed to “the Dalek Man, London” and the Post Office was bringing it! First they came with a bag full, and then there were vans coming – truly, vans full.’

The BBC too was inundated with letters from viewers, most requesting photographs and autographs, though others were more hopeful. ‘I would be very grateful if you would send me a Dalek,’ wrote one boy from Manchester. ‘I thought you might have just one that you don’t want and could send it to me please.’ Another fan from High Wycombe invited the human cast to a birthday party, adding a note that the Daleks would also be welcome, and that there would be ‘nuts and bolts stewed oil drink’ for them. Typical was a letter from a young viewer in Welwyn Garden City after the story had ended: ‘In the series Dr Who the Darleks have been destroyed and evrybody will forget about them. I think Dr Who is the best seriel ever put on BBC television and I don’t want to forget them so could you send me a photo of one of the Darleks so I can remember them for a long time after the seriel is finished.’ A little surprising was the range of ages evidenced by the letters. At one extreme a woman from St Helens wrote to say that her four-year-old son loves those Daleks which have been appearing on the BBC serial Dr Who. ‘He talks about them all the time and he can hardly wait for Saturdays to come so that he can watch them again. He was heartbroken last Saturday when they were all killed off.’ Then there were three teenage girls from Worthing who displayed scant interest in the Daleks, but were much taken by their blond, muscular rivals on Skaro; Sydney Newman had dismissed the Thals as ‘blond faeries’, but the girls knew better and wanted the
Radio Times
to print a picture of ‘those fabulous handsome Thals Alydon and Ganatus. I am sure that any picture will be joyfully received by many girls.’

There were also some observant viewers who, while appreciating the Daleks, were concerned at inconsistencies in the programme: ‘The neutron bombs which the darleks explode are supposed to petrify everything,’ noted a ten-year-old from Oxford. ‘Why do they petrify the forest and not the grass and trees by the swamp? I would appreciate an explanation.’ And even at this early stage an eight-year-old from Sheffield had spotted a crucial design flaw: ‘I have watched your programme Dr Who, and would like to know how the Daleks get up and down the steps please.’ A note on the letter, written by someone at the BBC, wondered: ‘Do we know?’

The instant popularity of the Daleks took everyone by surprise, not least Nation himself who, having returned in September 1963 from his Swedish engagement with Eric Sykes, had managed to join the roster of writers on the ITV adventure series
The Saint.
He was asked to provide another set of scripts for
Doctor Who
– an historical tale set during the Indian Mutiny of 1857 – but, as the year neared its end, he still saw the show as being some way down his list of priorities. The public response to the Daleks changed his life, but he was as baffled as everyone else by their appeal. ‘They’re amoral – there’s no goodness about them,’ he said in 1964. ‘I can’t understand why children like them.’ Suggestions were offered by others, ranging from the Freudian interpretation that the Doctor represented a father figure and that children therefore identified with the creatures who wished to destroy him, to that of television critic Nancy Banks-Smith, a keen cyclist, who saw them as symbols of motor cars: ‘those metal bodies, that determination to exterminate’. She even put the idea to Nation: ‘But he couldn’t see it. I was very sad really, so I didn’t explain to him that the TARDIS was, in fact, a television set.’

The remorseless, unrelieved viciousness was clearly part of the attraction, both for children – used to seeing the world in stark black-and-white terms – and for their parents, who could pick up on the Nazi references. As Nation put it: ‘Adults can see the Daleks as absolute mindless bureaucracy and children can see them as nice, frightening, anti-teddy bear figures.’ Perhaps, too, the imagery tapped into a deeper resonance, a longstanding human fascination with the collective consciousness of hive communities. This was to become more apparent in later storylines, as a Dalek hierarchy emerged, but the sensation was there from the outset that these creatures resembled nothing so much as hive insects.

In the heyday of the British Empire, when the virtues of order and discipline were seen as desirable attributes, the idea of the hive had been much celebrated, the insect of choice normally being the bee. Rudyard Kipling’s parable ‘The Mother Hive’ (1909) told the cautionary tale of a wax-moth stirring up discontent among the worker bees and destroying the stability of the social order, while Robert Baden-Powell’s endorsement of the insects in
Scouting for Boys
(1908) was even more forthright: ‘They are quite a model community, for they respect their queen and kill those who won’t work.’ With the rise of totalitarian regimes across Europe, however, such notions were rapidly replaced by a much more negative portrayal. In ‘The Man Who Liked Ants’ (1933), one of Leslie Charteris’s stranger stories about the Saint, a scientist named Dr Sardon concludes that the ant is the destined ruler of the earth. ‘Can you imagine a state of society in which there was no idleness, no poverty, no unemployment, no unrest? We humans would say that it was an unattainable Utopia; and yet it was in existence among the ants when man was a hairy savage scarcely distinguishable from an ape.’ All that’s holding the ants back, argues Sardon, is their physical size, so he works to speed up evolution, using selective breeding and radiation to create monstrously huge creatures, ‘to give them their rightful place a million years before Time would have opened the door to them’.

More recent work continued the same theme. The insect image was to occur in John Wyndham’s
The Day of the Triffids
, a novel that also borrowed from Wells’s
The Time Machine
and which influenced some of Nation’s other work, including his second Daleks story. ‘It seems to me that the triffids have something in common with some kinds of insects,’ reflects one character of the carnivorous, mobile plants that are stalking Britain. ‘They sort of work together for a purpose the way ants or bees do.’ Nigel Kneale’s
Quatermass and the Pit
(1958) suggested that the ancestors of humanity had been taken to Mars by a species that the professor compares to ‘termites and wasps’, and Robert A. Heinlein’s novel
Starship Troopers
(1959) – written as a riposte to the anti-nuclear movement – had taken the next logical step when envisaging an Earth under attack from insectoid aliens: humanity itself creates a proto-fascist society resembling a hive in order to fight the menace. Nation doesn’t go this far, though his reluctant acceptance that the Daleks must be fought could be seen as a step towards the philosophy of Heinlein’s world, that violence ‘has settled more issues in history than any other factor’. The depiction of a peaceful people stirred into action to defeat a hive culture would have been immediately recognisable to an adult viewing public: anyone now old enough to be the parent of a seven-year-old child would have personal memories of the Second World War. More immediately, there were also associations with the rise of China, commonly seen in similar terms, as in Bernard Newman’s novel of the near-future,
The Blue Ants
(1963), which concerns the Sino-Soviet war of 1970.

But the central appeal was to children, as evidenced in the rapid spread of Dalek imitations across the playgrounds of the country. Here the key factor was surely that they were so easy to mimic: it was simply a question of tucking one’s elbows into the sides of one’s ribcage, sticking the forearms forward and moving in a jerky way, while uttering the catchphrase ‘exterminate’ again and again in an approximation of the Dalek voice. ‘Things come together fortuitously, and they work,’ reflected
Doctor Who
writer Terrance Dicks. ‘The design, the story, the voices, everything just happened to work at that time for those monsters and they became a craze.’ He also suspected that there was an empowering element for children: ‘Inside the Dalek is a small, vulnerable, helpless creature, and I think for a kid the idea of getting inside a Dalek and then going down to school and blasting all the teachers, or blowing up the school bully, is immensely appealing.’

Nation himself was to try to replicate the formula with further creations for
Doctor Who
, including the Voords and the Mechanoids, and others were also keen to emulate his success. ‘Every writer had that ambition,’ said Dicks; ‘to do it again with his monster.’ None ever impacted on the culture of the nation in the same way. Cybermen, Ice Warriors and Sea Devils all had their fans, and all made repeated visits to
Doctor Who
over the years, but they failed to establish an existence beyond the limits of the series. The Daleks, on the other hand, like Dracula or Frankenstein or Jekyll and Hyde, became recognisable to those who had never encountered them in their original habitat, transformed by the public imagination into something that approached mythical status. ‘They were slightly magical, because you didn’t know what the elements were that made them work,’ admitted Nation. ‘I wish I could tell you what quality they have, because I’ve tried to analyse it myself many times; obviously if I knew, I’d do it again.’

The closest he came was to attribute them to his subconscious. ‘The one recurring dream I have,’ he explained in 1979, ‘is that I’m driving a car very quickly and the windscreen is a bit murky. The sun comes onto it and it becomes totally opaque. I’m still hurtling forward at incredible speed and there’s nothing I can see or do and I can’t stop the car.’ The inability to escape, he argued, was the motivating force for the Daleks: ‘However much you plead with someone to save you from this situation, everybody you turn to turns out to be one of “Them”. The Daleks are all of “Them”, and they represent for so many people so many different things, but they all see them as government, as officialdom, as that unhearing, unthinking, blanked-out face of authority that will destroy you because it
wants
to destroy you.’