The Man Who Invented the Daleks (18 page)

The attempt to identify the secret of the success was, of course, ultimately doomed to failure. That first story worked largely because Nation had intended to do nothing more than spin a yarn – and it is a great piece of story-telling – for a television show that he didn’t think would last more than a couple of months; his task was simply to produce an adventure tale that would entertain an audience for seven 25-minute episodes, and to do it as quickly as possible so that he could get back to writing jokes for a variety show. Had he consciously set out to create an enduring myth for the age of the mass media, it simply wouldn’t have worked.

By the beginning of February 1964, when the final episode aired, his fortunes had been utterly transformed. At the age of thirty-three, his big moment had clearly arrived and he was keen to embrace every opportunity. ‘I was now a hit,’ as he was later to put it. ‘I had a hit show!’ His only real problem was that he had killed off his unexpectedly popular creatures at the end of the serial. ‘And I had to think: in God’s name, we’ve got to get them back.’

W
hen Sydney Newman first saw the Daleks on screen, he was furious. ‘I told you, goddammit, no bug-eyed monsters!’ he shouted at Verity Lambert. But that was before the viewing figures came in and the sacks full of letters began arriving. When they did, he had little option but to concede gracefully. ‘Ironically the series became famous,’ he admitted, ‘because of the Daleks, the BEMs I never wanted.’ Just a few weeks after the final episode of ‘The Daleks’ had seen the monsters wiped out (‘the travellers, in alliance with the Thals, have destroyed the Daleks for good,’ spelt out the
Radio Times
unequivocally), Verity Lambert was having to announce to the press that they would be brought back: ‘We had no intention of doing so originally, but in view of this large demand we have changed our minds.’ A second Daleks story was pencilled in to close the season, so that if the show didn’t get recommissioned, it would at least end on a high note.

Meanwhile, the success of the serial had changed the nature of the programme itself, shifting the balance from educational evocations of the past to futuristic tales set on alien planets. In January 1964 the idea of ‘The Red Fort’, Nation’s story set during the Indian Mutiny, was abandoned, and he was asked instead to produce – at very short notice – a new science fiction piece, to be screened in April. It took just four weeks from commission to approval of the six scripts.

In consultation with David Whitaker, Nation developed ‘The Keys of Marinus’ as an episodic serial, effectively an anthology of four tales, loosely linked through a framing story. It was a format that Nation was to perfect later in his career, particularly in
Blake’s 7
(and there are elements of ‘Marinus’ that he explored more fully in that series), but the tight writing schedule perhaps militated against him on this occasion; although ‘The Daleks’ had also been written quickly, that had been his choice, not a deadline forced upon him. In any event, the resulting story is seldom cited as one of the classic
Doctor Who
serials. Indeed even he was to struggle to recall it in any detail later in life. ‘Were the Keys of Marinus four pieces that come together?’ he wondered. ‘Just that, I think. We did one in the jungle, we did one on ice, and I can’t remember the others.’ Nonetheless, there were plenty of good ideas in ‘The Keys of Marinus’, and some strong indications that, when he wished to, Nation could turn his hand to more subtle science fiction concepts, including the illusory pleasures of consumption, the acceleration of plant metabolism and the depiction of an alternative judicial system.

The story is set on the planet Marinus, where a machine, known as the Conscience of Marinus, was long ago set up to act as a ‘judge and jury that was never wrong’. Subsequent improvements enabled it to control the minds of the planet’s inhabitants, instilling virtues of justice and nonviolence, until a race called the Voords found a way around its influence, to the detriment of everyone else. ‘Our people could not resist because violence is alien to them,’ explains a priest of the machine. Thus far, the whole thing looked like a poor man’s version of ‘The Daleks’, and the Voords were even talked up in the press as potential rivals to their predecessors. ‘They are a willowy six feet tall,’ shuddered the
Daily Express.
‘Their torso resembles a man’s. But they have the heads of enormous beetles and on top of their noses antennae sprout. All in all pretty horrible. Now it remains to be seen whether they will be as popular with children as the Daleks.’ They were nowhere near as popular, partly because they hardly appear in the story, but mostly because they look precisely like the men in monster suits that Nation so disparaged.

Thereafter, the serial improved markedly. The inset stories see the TARDIS crew transported about the planet, using travel bracelets, on a quest to locate the four microcircuit keys that will modify the Conscience of Marinus, and thereby bring the Voords back in line. As Nation correctly remembered, one tale was set in a jungle, featuring a scientist who has discovered a way of speeding up the tempo of nature; he is under threat from rampant vegetation, as the encroachment of the undergrowth, which should take years, happens before our eyes; a second was set in the frozen wastes of the planet, with a key sealed in a block of ice and surrounded by four warriors, who are themselves set in ice – any attempt to defrost the key also brings the guards to life. There is also a courtroom drama, with Ian accused of murder under a system where the defendant is presumed guilty until proven innocent; the Doctor acts as his defence counsel and doubles up as a detective uncovering the real killer. ‘Oh, elementary, elementary,’ he exclaims in approved Sherlockian manner, as he solves a locked room mystery. The episode allowed William Hartnell to deliver one of his most entertaining performances as the Doctor, though its lack of action seems to have lost the attention of some of the younger viewers, causing a drop in audience figures. It also pitched him against ‘a vicious, dangerous woman’ named Kala (Fiona Walker), who dresses entirely in white and whose heartless scheming surely makes her a precursor of Servalan in
Blake’s 7.

Most interesting is ‘The Velvet Web’, the first story of the serial, in which the travellers find themselves in a ‘decadent and sensuous’ city named Morphoton, a sequence reminiscent of the Lotus-Eaters in Homer’s
Odyssey.
They fall prey to the apparently lavish lifestyle they find there, with the exception of Barbara who has escaped the power of suggestion and can see that the luxury is an illusion. Through her agency, the truth is uncovered, that the whole city is a fantasy created by four beings whose ‘brains outgrew our bodies’. These creatures live on in glass jars, enormous brains with eyes growing out on stalks, controlling the actions of their human accomplices through hypnosis. They need external agents, they explain, because ‘the human body is the most flexible instrument in the world. No single mechanical device could reproduce its mobility and dexterity.’ The Daleks had come to different conclusions, but since creating them, Nation had read Isaac Asimov’s
The Caves of Steel
with its similar endorsement of human adaptability. The image of the brains in jars might also suggest that he had read the cheerfully misanthropic story ‘William and Mary’, written in 1954 by Roald Dahl (another writer who grew up in Llandaff) but only published in 1960; there were other versions of disembodied brains, including those in Curt Siodmak’s 1942 novel
Donovan’s Brain
and ‘Hypnotic Sphere’, a 1963 episode of the puppet science fiction series
Fireball XL5
, but Dahl’s had the added detail of the attached eyeball.

All this, however, was little more than a holding operation, keeping the pot bubbling until the return of the Daleks. In March 1964, Nation was commissioned to write ‘The Return of the Daleks’, which became ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’, and in May that year he signed a contract, through a writer and editor named Jack Fishman, with Souvenir Press for a book to be titled
The Daleks Book
, for which he received a £300 advance.

The fact that he was able to do such a deal, without the involvement of the BBC, reflected an anomalous arrangement that was to prove highly beneficial. The corporation had for many years relied on an internal script department which employed writers directly, so that, for example, Nigel Kneale was a salaried employee of the BBC at the time he wrote the original
Quatermass
stories; consequently he didn’t benefit as he might have done when they were remade by Hammer Films, since the copyright didn’t reside with him. But part of Sydney Newman’s reforms included the closing down of the script department in June 1963, with writers henceforth contracted on a self-employed basis. The early script commissions for
Doctor Who
were among the first under this new system, and the rules were not yet set in stone, as Beryl Vertue at Associated London Scripts was to discover. ‘I was a new agent,’ she remembered, ‘I was learning. All these contracts had a copyright clause, and I used to think, well, they’ll never sell this, so it was a clause I used to run a pen through. And I must have done it on Terry’s contract as well.’ The consequence, unintended by the BBC and unexpected by ALS, was that the copyright position of the Daleks was left entirely unresolved.

At the time of the first serial, this seemed of little relevance to anyone; during the run, the BBC even turned down an approach for licensing from an entrepreneur named Walter Tuckwell, on the grounds that the creatures were due to be killed off at the end of the story. But as the Dalek craze took off, and as more and more companies began to turn up on the corporation’s doorstep looking for merchandising rights, it rapidly became clear that some agreement had to be reached. In March 1965 R.J. Marshall, assistant solicitor at the BBC, wrote to BerylVertue stating: ‘My instructions are that the Corporation recognises ALS Management Limited (on behalf of Mr Terry Nation) as having interest in the merchandising proceeds on the grounds not of joint copyright but of goodwill.’ His draft for this letter had specifically referred to ALS having a ‘fifty per cent share in all merchandising proceeds’ and, although this didn’t appear in the version that was sent, it became the basis on which all future deals were made; the Daleks became the
de facto
joint property of the BBC and of Nation. As Nation was later to point out: ‘we were breaking new ground in many ways.’

The Dalek Book
was the first indication of what was to come. Co-credited to David Whitaker and Terry Nation, it was compiled under the guidance of Jack Fishman, with suggestions from the latter’s young son, Paul, who was paid ten shillings for each idea. It comprised prose stories and comic strips, mostly illustrated by Richard Jennings, familiar to many potential purchasers from his work on the
Eagle
comic, together with the kind of factual, educational material common to annuals of the era, though notably with no humorous items or jokes. There were also the first stirrings of the desire to create a Dalek mythology, including an anatomy of one of the monsters, and a Dalek Dictionary. It was an unexpectedly huge success. The screening of the second Dalek story had been postponed when it was learned that
Doctor Who
had secured a recommission, and instead of appearing at the end of the first season, it was held over to the second, running for six episodes in November and December 1964. Even before it was aired, however, the book was being reported in the trade press as ‘one of the fastest selling children’s titles of 1964’, with the prediction that ‘sales are likely to reach stratospheric figures’.

When the series was finally broadcast, it signalled the outbreak of what was swiftly dubbed Dalekmania, in tribute to the Beatlemania that had gripped the nation since the middle of 1963. Indeed so big an event was the start of a new Dalek story that the Beatles themselves were pressed into service by ITV as part of the resistance; they starred in a special edition of the music show
Thank Your Lucky Stars
, screened against
Doctor Who
in an attempt to steal the BBC’s thunder, though the result of the clash only proved how big Nation’s creatures had become. ‘I remember with great pride,’ he said, ‘that the commercial channel was running the Beatles when they were really at their peak, at the same time as a
Doctor Who
episode with the Daleks, and
Doctor Who
got the ratings. I was pretty pleased with that.’

For a few months, the Daleks were the biggest consumer story in the country, and that Christmas the creatures were to be seen everywhere. They appeared on
Blue Peter
and other supportive BBC shows, and were the hit of the Schoolboys and Girls Exhibition at Olympia in London, but they also turned up in a bewildering variety of unexpected guises all over the country: in a Christmas grotto in Belfast, in an amateur pantomime at Springfield Lane Junior School in Ipswich (a production of
Snow White)
, at the circus (Bertram Mills’s Christmas show in London), as part of a road safety campaign in Cwmbran, and in a specially staged Dalek race at a charity fund-raising event in Croydon, with authentic props borrowed from Dr Barnardo’s Homes (to whom a couple of Daleks had been donated by the BBC after the filming of the first story). They could even be seen in church, as the Reverend G. Mountain, rector of St Paul’s Church, York, took a toy Dalek into the pulpit with him for his Christmas Day sermon, in order, he explained, ‘to highlight the contrast between fiction and the real invasion from outer space when Jesus came not to destroy the world, but to save mankind’.

There were a handful of unaccountable exceptions to the craze. The
Aberdeen Evening Express
reported that no toy shops in the city were stocking any Dalek products, apparently due to lack of interest: ‘We would stock them if there was any demand,’ shrugged a spokesperson for one shop. Even here though, a Dalek was appearing in pantomime, and the fact that the newspaper was prepared to report customer indifference was itself a tribute to how big the story had become.