‘I was, for that short time, the most famous writer on television.’ Terry Nation’s assessment of his position as 1965 dawned was perfectly accurate. He was being invited to appear on the prestigious BBC2 discussion show, Late Night Line-Up, he was the subject of admiring profiles in serious newspapers, his stories were appearing on an almost fortnightly basis on The Saint and he was still the ‘Dalek-man’, recipient of sacks full of fan mail. Dalekmania showed no sign of abating, and he formed a company, Dalek Productions (the other directors were Kate Nation and Beryl Vertue), to deal with the continuing expansion: this year the monsters were to be seen again on television and in books, and were to make their debut in comics, on record, on stage and in the movies. The conquest of Britain was virtually complete, but for someone of Nation’s generation, raised on fantasies of Hollywood and on comic books from GIs, there remained the ultimate allure of America.
The image of America dominated British culture in the post-war years. That it was possible for British creativity to make it big in the States had been demonstrated by a handful of success stories, including those of Leslie Charteris, Alfred Hitchcock, David Niven and Dylan Thomas, but these had been isolated cases, and Tony Hancock was just one of many who had tried and failed. Meanwhile Britain’s evolving relationship with its former colony was captured by artists like Richard Hamilton, Peter Blake and Eduardo Paolozzi, the early practitioners of pop art: a fascination with the movies, magazines and mass culture that came across the Atlantic, a craving for jazz, both ancient and modern, an infatuation with the cult of stardom that worshipped ready-made icons in Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley and Popeye. There was sometimes a note of detached irony in pop art, but that was mostly overridden by an unmistakable sense of celebration, a revelling in the industrial production of entertainment. At a time when much of the left was loftily dismissing American imports as ‘culture poured out over a defenceless people by the millionaires’, pop artists as well as early British rock and roll stars were embracing precisely the same material. And crucial to all of it was that this was culture consumed at one remove from the real thing, for few had ever experienced America at first hand.
At the turn of the 1960s this began to change, as the isolated successes began to mount up into something resembling a trend. A number of photographers (David Bailey, Terence Donovan, Brian Duffy) began to make names for themselves in the fashion industry. The new wave of British cinema was exporting successfully, with Oscar nominations for Laurence Harvey in Room at the Top (1959) and Laurence Olivier in The Entertainer (1960), while Peter Sellers made a successful move to Hollywood. In New York satirists from Beyond the Fringe and from Peter Cook’s Establishment Club both enjoyed successful theatre runs in 1962, as did Harold Pinter’s play The Caretaker and Anthony Newley’s musical Stop the World – I Want to Get Off, swiftly followed by Lionel Bart’s Oliver!. All were unmistakably British works, and critics began to talk about the ‘British domination of Broadway’. There was also James Bond; already a hit in America via the novels of Ian Fleming (Bond was said to be John F. Kennedy’s ‘favourite fictional hero’), he broke through to a mass audience when the film of Dr No was released in 1963, a year later than in Britain.
And then came the Beatles. Having dominated the British music industry in 1963, the group released ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ in America in January 1964, visited the country the following month and, by the end of March, held all top five places in the US singles charts, accounting for 60 per cent of all record sales. In a society still reeling from the shock of President Kennedy’s assassination, their cheerful simplicity swept all before them. In their wake came a host of other bands, from Herman’s Hermits to the Rolling Stones, and where the previous year just one British record (‘Telstar’ by the Tornados) had made the American top ten, the figure rose to thirty-four in 1964. So big were the Beatles that when they made their record-breaking appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show, attracting 74 million viewers, their slipstream was powerful enough to launch the Cardiff-born music hall star ‘Two Ton’ Tessie O’Shea on a successful American career, simply because she also appeared on the programme. And into the breach opened up by the Beatles came British television, both programmes – The Avengers, The Saint, The Baron – and individuals in the shape of David Frost and Jack Good. As John Mortimer was to put it in Paradise Postponed, his 1985 novel of post-war Britain, for a brief moment ‘life in England was thought to be interesting to the American public’. Ironically, one of the few failures of the era was a 1963 exhibition in New York of British pop art.
Terry Nation experienced some of this excitement as a writer on the ITC series, but those were other people’s shows. What he really dreamt of was making it in his own right, and in August 1965 the Sun confidently reported that he was ‘negotiating with American TV companies for the rights of what they want to call The Dalek Show’.
By now the Daleks were acquiring a life of their own, far beyond the confines of Doctor Who. The success of The Dalek Book, and particularly the comic strips illustrated by Richard Jennings, was extended in January 1965 when the same artist provided a strip for the first issue of the magazine TV Century 21, launched by Gerry Anderson to promote his Supermarionation puppet shows, Stingray and Fireball XL5. ‘I suppose the thing that attracted me to the Daleks,’ reflected Anderson, in explanation of why he included a rival show in his magazine, ‘was jealousy.’ The series ran for 104 instalments over two years, with Jennings’s Eagle-derived artwork replaced by the more contemporary style of Ron Turner halfway through. It focused entirely on the Daleks, with no sign at all of the Doctor, gradually building an entire alternative mythology, expanding substantially on the television stories. Officially credited to Nation, the writing was actually the responsibility of David Whitaker, who had already written a novelisation of ‘The Daleks’ (as Doctor Who in an Exciting Adventure with the Daleks, published in 1964), and who was fast becoming Nation’s understudy in all things related to the planet Skaro. The TV Century 21 strip attracted its own loyal following, but for Nation it was primarily of significance in establishing that stories about the Daleks could potentially work even when removed from their original context: it could be seen as something between a storyboard and a calling card.
The same was not quite true of the 1965 film Dr Who and the Daleks, since it was based on the scripts for the first television serial, but it was notable that the monsters got equal billing in the title and completely dominated the posters. Directed by Gordon Flemyng, the movie featured Peter Cushing in the lead role, in the hope of attracting attention in America, where he was already well known as an actor. For the benefit of an American audience who were new to the concept, the nature of the central figure was also fundamentally changed; the Doctor was here known as Dr Who and, no longer an alien time traveller, was an amiably eccentric human inventor of apparently Edwardian vintage. Ian too was unrecognisable; played by Roy Castle, his function was to provide comic relief rather than to lead the action.
As a consequence, the film has not always been warmly embraced by many followers of Doctor Who, but viewed in its own right, it works perfectly well as a quirky little fantasy movie for kids. With a reported budget of £180,000 – a long way removed from the average of around £2,500 per episode for the first season of the television version – and with the benefit of being in colour rather than black-and-white, it has a sense of scale that was lacking in ‘The Daleks’. It may still look tied to its sets, but those sets are much more impressive and, on occasion, it displays a grandeur that television simply couldn’t match, particularly in the advance on the Dalek city. As Barbara, Ian and the Thals make their way across a deadly swamp, over mountains and through rocky tunnels, accompanied by an heroic orchestral score from Malcolm Lockyer, the sequence acquires something of the majesty of an H. Rider Haggard adventure. And there are some nice details, starting with the opening shot, a slow pan around a living room that reveals first Susan reading Eric M. Rogers’s Physics for the Inquiring Mind, then Barbara reading a book titled The Science of Science, and finally Dr Who himself, absorbed in a copy of The Eagle with Dan Dare on the cover. There was also a telling addition to the script, with the Thal leader Alydon (here played by Barrie Ingham) explaining that ‘There were many mutations after the final war. Most of them perished. But this form – two hands, two eyes – has always been best for survival.’
In terms of the Daleks themselves, the biggest change came simply from them being in colour, which enabled distinctions to be made between those with different functions and ranks. ‘I was trying to make them into a full-grown culture with levels,’ reflected Nation. His own involvement in the film, however, was minimal. The screenplay adaptation of his scripts was the work of Milton Subotsky, the creative talent behind Amicus, the film company responsible. Subotsky once claimed that his love of horror movies stemmed from the fact that ‘it was the only kind of cinema where you could avoid sex and violence’, and the reviews of Dr Who and the Daleks largely agreed that he’d lived up to his ambitions. ‘One of the few modern films to have a nubile heroine who never so much as touches her boyfriend,’ noted the Guardian, concluding that it was ‘not likely to do more harm to childish minds than many other modern weapons of the communications industry’. ‘Shoddy,’ was the verdict of the Observer, ‘but the children might like it.’
Despite the criticisms, the film was as successful as everything featuring the Daleks that year and it reached the box office top ten. ‘The money came in so fast,’ claimed Nation, ‘they were in profit within the year, and they actually had to pay me, which was wonderful.’ Even before its release, a sequel was planned, which emerged in 1966 as Daleks – Invasion Earth 2150 A.D., an adaptation of the second television story that removed the Doctor entirely from the title. The central characters were much the same – though Bernard Cribbins replaced Roy Castle as the comic relief and Barbara was dropped in favour of Dr Who’s niece, Louise – and there were again some improvements on the original version, thanks to the shorter running time; the Slyther, thankfully, was absent altogether, though an even more risible scene was added of Cribbins and the Robomen engaging in a choreographed comedy routine. By now, however, Dalekmania was on the wane, and the film not only got the expected poor reviews (‘Grown-ups may enjoy it,’ sniffed The Times, ‘but most children have more sense’), but also failed to emulate the takings of the first venture. Plans for a third movie, based on the third Dalek serial, ‘The Chase’ (screened on television in 1965), were quietly shelved, and some of the Daleks used in the films were given to Nation, who kept them in the house at Lynsted Park.
The absence of a film of ‘The Chase’ was something of a missed opportunity, since the television scripts – the last that Nation would write alone for seven years – were full of excellent ideas that were either rejected or toned down, while those that did make it to the screen suffered heavily from the show’s low budget. The director was again Richard Martin, who was unconvinced by the idea of returning to the monsters, but was talked into it by Verity Lambert: ‘We’re in a stick, the rest of the scripts for the next series aren’t ready. I’ve talked with Terry Nation and he thinks we can do one more thing with the Daleks.’ Returning to the anthology format of ‘The Keys of Marinus’, Nation had the Daleks in their own time machine, pursuing the TARDIS through space and time, and he crammed into the six episodes a total of five alien life-forms, three planets, three separate stories set on Earth in the past, present and future, two Doctors and two time machines, as well as finding room for appearances by Dracula, Frankenstein’s monster, the Beatles, William Shakespeare and Abraham Lincoln. As one of contributors to the BBC’s audience research report pointed out, ‘All we need now is Yogi Bear and we’ve had the lot.’
It also provided a solution to the mystery of the ghost ship the Mary Celeste, discovered in 1872 floating in the Atlantic, its crew having vanished with no indication of what had happened to them. Eighty years after Arthur Conan Doyle had written a fictionalised explanation of the crew’s disappearance (renaming the vessel the Marie Celeste), Nation finally revealed the truth: the Daleks materialised on the ship and the crew threw themselves overboard in fear.
A sense of playful imagination runs through much of the serial, but not as much as there was in the original script. In the first episode, the crew of the TARDIS enjoy themselves with a Time-Space ‘Visualiser,’ a sort of time television’ that enables them to view moments from history. Barbara chooses to see William Shakespeare, Francis Bacon and Queen Elizabeth I, though the encounter is a not very inspired account of a royal command to write The Merry Wives of Windsor. As originally intended, however, the scene ended with the two writers bemoaning the dwindling numbers attending the theatre, and saw Bacon giving Shakespeare a manuscript for a new play titled Hamlet. Back on the TARDIS, the Doctor was then to have revealed that Shakespeare had told him this was simply a publicity stunt: expecting to be overheard, the two men hoped to whip up controversy about the authorship of the play with the aim of boosting the box office. In what remained of this idea, Bacon merely suggests to Shakespeare that the story of Hamlet would make a fine subject for a play; if anything, this played into the hands of those who subscribed to the Baconian authorship of the works, rather than mocking the claim.
It was not simply the wit that got lost. The first tale in the serial was set on the planet Aridius, once covered by a vast ocean beneath which lay the city of the Aridians. (There were shades here of H.G. Wells’s 1896 story ‘In the Abyss’, which also told of humanoid life-forms at the bottom of the ocean.) But then the seas dried up, killing all life save two species, the Aridians and the Mire Beasts, each of which – as is clear from the original script – sees the other as its primary food source, so that both are simultaneously predator and prey. It’s a lovely, teasing detail, but it disappeared from the final version, while Nation’s visualisation of the Aridians was also jettisoned. ‘These are tiny men with vast humped backs,’ he had written. ‘They are incredibly ugly facially, their mouths distorted and a secondary set of eyes on their foreheads. Thick black hair hangs lankly, framing their faces. Their hands have only four fingers each. They are perhaps twice as long as human fingers. Arms appear to trail the ground, whilst the legs seem foreshortened.’ To which Verity Lambert objected strongly: ‘I think Terry has gone too far in making the Aridians unpleasant looking,’ she wrote to Richard Martin. ‘It seems to me that this is just presenting unpleasantness for the sake of it.’ The resulting creatures looked instead like a cross between the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz and a merman with cauliflower ears, and not even an early appearance by the actor Hywel Bennett could save them from ridicule.
Most severely affected was the brief sequence set in a haunted house, familiar from the Universal horror films of the 1930s and their imitators, complete with bats, skeletons, ghosts and suits of armour. According to Nation’s original conception, it represented a manifestation of the fears of millions, preconditioned by horror stories to imagine that this was what nightmares looked like. (The Doctor was to cite the work of Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, Edgar Allan Poe and W.W. Jacobs as examples.) The house exists, argues the Doctor, ‘in the dark recesses of the human mind. Millions of minds secretly believing that this place really exists. The immense power of those minds, combined together, have made this place a reality. It’s a classic house of horrors.’ The Doctor challenges Ian to predict what will happen next, and event follows description, as Ian says a door will creak open and a man will appear saying … And Baron Frankenstein, who has indeed appeared, duly speaks. This playing with narrative was not far removed from some of the ideas in the fourth series of The Avengers, broadcast later in the same year, and prefigured the strand of post-modernist horror films that started with Wes Craven’s New Nightmare (1994) and Scream (1996). It also, somewhat cheekily, elevated the Daleks, busily charging round the haunted house, to the level of classic horror figures like Dracula and Frankenstein’s monster.
The whole sequence, the blurring of the lines of reality, was an intriguing concept, and was possibly suggested by Nation’s recent reading. The first two of his Leslie Charteris Saint adaptations to be broadcast (‘Lida’ and ‘Jeannine’) came from the 1949 book Saint Errant, which ends with a tale even stranger than ‘The Man Who Liked Ants’. In ‘Dawn’ Simon Templar finds himself, as a real person, apparently caught up in the dream of a bank clerk whom he has never met, but who is addicted to thrillers. A cast of other characters turn up, all of them clichéd figures from the thriller repertoire, leaving Templar to wonder whether this is reality or whether he truly is trapped in a second-hand dream world, and he reflects that the whole thing ‘sounds like one of those stories that fellow Charteris might write’. The climax is reached when a fat man – clearly based on Sydney Greenstreet in The Maltese Falcon, and identified by Templar as such – shoots the Saint and kills him. When Templar wakes up alone twelve hours later, still alive and with no sign of any of the characters he has encountered, he concludes that it has all been his own dream. Until he checks out the address of the bank clerk and finds that, having been in a coma for three days, the man died last night, recovering consciousness just long enough to shout something about a saint’.
Nation’s tale similarly played with notions of fiction becoming fact – ‘We’re in a world of dreams,’ exclaims the Doctor — and represented a major break with the programme’s founding concept. ‘While the premise,’ noted Kinematograph Weekly of Doctor Who in 1963, ‘is fantastic, the treatment of various places and periods will be treated realistically.’ It was a formulation that restated the founding document of the horror and fantasy tradition, Horace Walpole’s 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto; in the preface to that book, Walpole had explained his rationale for dealing with the supernatural: ‘Allow the possibility of the facts, and all the actors comport themselves as persons would do in their situation.’ The haunted house sequence in ‘The Chase’, however, turned its back on such an approach, instead allowing every possibility, and, coincidentally, came much closer to what would shortly become known as the new wave of science fiction. Then in its infancy – Michael Moorcock had only taken over the editorship of New Worlds magazine in 1964 – the new wave was to refocus attention from outer to inner space and much of it looked to the experimental work of William S. Burroughs for inspiration; Nation, by drawing on the far less celebrated experimentalism of Charteris, ended up in a not dissimilar place.
It was all too much for Lambert. ‘I think that if we go into these realms of fiction we are opening a door on the Doctor Who series which may run us into considerable trouble in the future,’ she noted. ‘I do not feel that the Daleks should arrive in a place which is an Earth fictional place, and if they do not, it really means that the place does not exist at all, except in the minds of our four characters.’ Much of the more ambiguous dialogue was dropped and an ending added that showed, after the travellers had left the house, a ticket booth identifying the place as ‘Frankenstein’s House of Horrors’, an exhibit at the 1996 Festival of Ghana. All the monsters, we were now informed, were mechanical toys intended to divert tourists. ‘I think there’s a much simpler explanation,’ Ian had responded when the Doctor explained his theory of the ‘collective human mind’. Indeed there was, but it was nowhere near as interesting.
Other elements in the serial included a clip of the Beatles on the Time-Space Visualiser performing ‘Ticket to Ride’ (it was hoped the group would film a special sequence showing them as old men playing a fiftieth anniversary show, but their manager, Brian Epstein, scotched that suggestion); the creation by the Daleks of a robot replica of the Doctor (an idea surely deriving from Philip K. Dick’s ‘Imposter’), who then duels with the real Doctor, using walking-sticks as swords; and carnivorous vegetation in the form of the thoroughly unconvincing Fungoids. There were also the Mechanoids, large, globe-shaped robots sent from Earth to prepare the planet Mechanus for colonisation – the anticipated ships full of human immigrants, however, never arrived and the robots had since created their own society. The climactic battle between the Daleks and the Mechanoids is one of the better realised elements of the serial, and clearly used up a substantial proportion of the budget.
The Mechanoids, again designed by Raymond P. Cusick, also turned up in the TV Century 21 comic strips, and on an EP featuring this element of the story, which was released on Gerry Anderson’s Century 21 Records. They were designed by Nation to be a potential rival to his more famous creations. ‘You had your eye on the chance that anything could possibly catch on,’ he reflected. ‘The Mechanoids were manufactured as toys, but of course they didn’t take off.’ Part of the problem was that, being large and spherical with spindly little arms, they were both difficult and unattractive to imitate in the playgrounds, while for the production crew on Doctor Who, they were simply too big for the restricted studio sets that were then available. ‘The Mechanoids would have caught on if they’d been pushed a bit more,’ believed the serial’s script editor, Dennis Spooner. ‘But they weren’t pushed because no one could have stood the problems it would have caused if they had caught on. They were just physically impossible to get in and out of the studio. They were just designed wrong. Terry was very unhappy about it.’
Although ‘The Chase’ had lost some of the imagination and ingenuity of Nation’s script through production decisions and shortage of funds (‘in TV inspiration costs money,’ as Spooner observed), it did still demonstrate that there were new angles to be taken with the Daleks, as long as the background kept changing to compensate for their lack of variety. Having been seen first at home on Skaro, and then visiting Earth, they were now rampant throughout the universe, with no apparent limit to their possibilities. Except, of course, for their inbuilt limitations. The protective shells were designed for use in the underground city on Skaro, a Dalek-friendly environment with no known enemies, to which they were perfectly adapted. Now that the creatures were seen aggressively venturing forth, it became clear that their lack of speed and mobility, as well as their inability to engage in hand-to-hand combat, made them slightly less terrifying than they were painted. They ran the risk of becoming victims of their own success: the design flaws were only revealed when they began to expand and talk about universal domination, but by then the public appetite demanded that the creatures remain essentially the same, while posing ever greater threats to all other life-forms. For the most part, however, the audience went happily along with this, even when attention was drawn to their drawbacks (in a line probably added by Dennis Spooner to ‘The Chase’, Ian suggests that the travellers hide upstairs, because ‘Daleks don’t like stairs’).
The willing suspension of disbelief was shared by their fans in high places. Chief among these was Huw Wheldon, who had recently become controller of programmes for BBC1 and whose mother-in-law was much taken with the Daleks. Wheldon expressed his disappointment at the brevity of their appearance in the first episode of ‘The Chase’ (the final shot had been of a Dalek emerging from beneath the sands of the Aridian desert), and although he was assured that they would appear more substantially in the subsequent episodes, and that they were pencilled in for a fourth story later in the year, he was keen that there should be still more of the creatures, asking if the forthcoming series couldn’t perhaps be extended. Others in the BBC hierarchy agreed and, against the wishes of the production team, ‘The Daleks’ Master Plan’, intended as a six-part serial, was extended to twelve episodes.
Now fully engaged in his work on The Baron, Nation simply didn’t have time to complete such a major project. David Whitaker was already handling much of the expansion of the Daleks mythology in TV Century 21, so Nation turned to his other colleague, Dennis Spooner, to share the burden of ‘Master Plan’. Nation was responsible for the basic storyline but wrote only six of the episodes; the remainder were contributed by Spooner, who had in the meantime handed over the duties of script editor on Doctor Who to Donald Tosh in order that he too could work on The Baron. Other changes in the programme’s personnel had seen the departure of the characters Ian and Barbara at the end of ‘The Chase’, and shortly thereafter that of producer Verity Lambert, to be replaced by John Wiles, who inherited ‘Master Plan’ despite his distaste for its unwieldy length. Even Nation was far from convinced by the scale of the undertaking: ‘If I was a producer on a show like that,’ he reflected later, ‘I don’t think I would ever commit myself to a three-month Dalek story without a lot of other stuff in it as well.’
To add to the burden, another single-episode Dalek story, ‘Mission to the Unknown’, had also been commissioned, intended to serve as a prelude to ‘The Daleks’ Master Plan’ and to feature none of the regular cast, since they were due to be on leave at the time of filming. In their place, Nation created a new organisation named the Space Security Service (SSS), an official agency tasked with defending the Earth and its colonies, whose agents – in overt tribute to James Bond – are ‘licensed to kill’. One of those agents is Marc Cory (Edward de Souza), who finds himself, in ‘Mission to the Unknown’, on the planet Kembel on the track of the Daleks. He knows they’re here because there are Varga plants on Kembel, and the Varga is ‘a thing part-animal, part-vegetable’ that was invented by the Daleks on Skaro; ‘they use their roots to drag themselves along’ and they attack people with their spikes, turning the victim into a Varga. In short, they are a cross between a triffid and a vampire.
If Nation was not at his most original in concocting this blend of familiar elements, he was clearly preparing the ground for an attempt to extricate the Daleks from Doctor Who by giving them a new set of foes to combat. And he was breaking away from the English eccentricities of William Hartnell’s Doctor to create a character template that was intended to have far greater international appeal, even if it was less intriguing than anything yet seen in the TARDIS. For the SSS agents in ‘Master Plan’, Bret Vyon (Nicholas Courtney) and Sara Kingdom (Jean Marsh), were as derivative as Marc Cory had been; the former is described as ‘the 007 of space’ in Nation’s storyline, and the latter is not very far removed from Honor Blackman’s character, Cathy Gale, in The Avengers: glamorous but good with a gun and always up for some unarmed combat.
Nonetheless, there’s a great deal of fun to be had in Nation’s first five episodes of the story. The Doctor and his companions travel rapidly around the universe, starting on Kembel before moving on to a penal colony planet, Desperus, then to Earth and thereafter to a distant planet named Mira, inhabited by invisible beings called Visians. But there is also some rather downbeat material. Marc Cory was killed at the end of ‘Mission to the Unknown’, and in ‘Master Plan’ his fellow agent, Bret Vyon, is killed by Sara Kingdom, who believes him to be a traitor; he wasn’t but it does turn out that he was her brother (returning to the fratricide seen in ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’). Sara too fails to survive the serial, while Katarina, a woman from ancient Troy brought along on the TARDIS from the previous story, ‘The Myth Makers’, dies in an act of heroic self-sacrifice.
Counterpointing the Doctor’s adventures is the story of Mavic Chen (Kevin Stoney), the most powerful man on Earth and holder of the office Guardian of the Solar System. Despite his initially dignified bearing, he turns out to be a power-crazed despot who is secretly in alliance with the Daleks, providing them with the vital component, Taranium, needed to complete the Time Destructor, with which they intend to conquer the universe. In characteristically excessive fashion, Taranium is said to be ‘the rarest mineral in the universe’, and the Time Destructor ‘the most dangerous weapon ever devised’. If the Daleks are, as ever, derived from the Nazis, then Mavic Chen is clearly modelled on Stalin, his first appearance including a reference to a Non-Aggression Pact, which can hardly fail to bring to mind the Molotov—Ribbentrop Pact of 1939 (it was even signed in the year 3975).
After these five episodes, Nation handed over to Spooner to complete the story, returning only for the seventh episode, ‘The Feast of Steven’, which was broadcast on Christmas Day 1965 and which therefore, in accordance with BBC practice at the time, abandoned the storyline for some fun. The TARDIS materialises in 1960s Liverpool, where the crew run into trouble with the local police (originally it was hoped to tie in with the cast of Z Cars, though this didn’t work out), then finds itself in Hollywood during the silent movie era, complete with a Keystone Kops-style slapstick chase sequence and a desert melodrama, the latter dominated by a glamorous hero who, Nation noted, should be ‘very superior and good looking in the tradition of Valentino’. It ended with the crew safely back on board and celebrating the festive season. ‘A happy Christmas to all of us,’ toasts the Doctor, before turning to the camera: ‘Incidentally a happy Christmas to all of you at home.’
The Daleks, however, make no appearance in that interlude, and rather more chilling was Nation’s sign-off to episode five, the last of his Dalek tales to be screened for more than seven years. As the Doctor and his companions are discovered by the monsters, he goes further than ever before in admitting defeat: ‘I’m afraid, my friends, the Daleks have won.’ They hadn’t, of course, and nor had we seen the last of Sara Kingdom, although she crumbled to dust in the final episode, victim of the Time Destructor as it accelerated her ageing. She was back later in the year as the star of her own comic strip in the final spin-off book that Nation authorised for publication by Souvenir Press, The Dalek Outer Space Book (written by an ALS colleague, Brad Ashton), as well as featuring heavily in his plans for his next enterprise.
Meanwhile, Spooner’s six scripts kept the story moving along at the same pace and with the same balance of fun and terror (the materialisation of the TARDIS on a cricket pitch during a Test match is especially pleasing in its incongruity). As script editor, Donald Tosh felt – as others were later to find – that Nation’s scripts for the Daleks needed some reworking, but it was a process with which Nation pronounced himself perfectly happy. ‘I’ve already told Donald that any changes he wants to make in the script will meet with my approval,’ he wrote to John Wiles in September 1965. ‘I’m sure we’re all aiming at the same thing.’ In the same letter he ruminated on the nature of names for fictional characters: ‘Our Victorian dramatists had a splendid system of immediate identification. For instance, a Roger could not be anything but a clean limbed, bright eyed, decent chap, whereas a Jasper had to be a moustache twirling, whip cracking hound.’ In this context, he approved of the name Bors being given to one of the characters on the penal planet: ‘Obviously any man called Bors started his day with a murder and by lunch time had worked up to really serious crimes. Splendid name.’
That Christmas saw the production at Wyndham’s Theatre in London of The Curse of the Daleks, a play credited to Terry Nation and David Whitaker, though again it appears that the primary responsibility for the writing actually fell to Whitaker. Aimed squarely at a young audience, it concerned a spaceship with a human crew and passengers, including two prisoners, that lands on Skaro and encounters the Thals and the Daleks. ‘It’s all good clean fun,’ thought the Daily Express, while The Times complained that for a story set in the twenty-first century the dialogue was ‘strangely reminiscent of British war films, with upper lips being kept resolutely stiff’, but concluded that it was ‘an ultimately exciting adventure’. Significantly, in terms of the Daleks, it was another outing in the absence of the Doctor, while Whitaker’s programme notes introduced for the first time the concept of the Dalek Chronicles. These were supposedly a set of microfilms that Nation had found in his garden containing the history of the race, whence all the stories had come. The tag of the Dalek Chronicles was to be used in TV Century 21 and ensuing books.
Nation’s relationship with Whitaker ended with that play and the two men did not work together again. Paul Fishman, who as a child had witnessed some of the writing sessions that produced the Souvenir books under the direction of his father, Jack, was only surprised that the partnership had lasted so long. He recalled Nation struggling to deal with the starchier end of the BBC and, perhaps under the pressures of feeding the fire of Dalekmania, actually coming to blows with Whitaker: ‘There was a terrible fight. Terry took out David Whitaker. It was because he couldn’t handle this Oxbridge attitude. It was the first time I’d ever seen anybody hit somebody.’ It should be remembered, however, that Whitaker had been, alongside Verity Lambert, the first champion of the Daleks at a time when the BBC hierarchy was distinctly unimpressed. ‘The Daleks were a smashing invention,’ he said later. ‘I would say they’re worthy of Jules Verne.’ And he was adamant that, even if it might appear to focus on forbidden bug-eyed monsters, the first serial had fitted perfectly within the remit given to Doctor Who by Sydney Newman: ‘Actually, that Dalek story was educational in a subtle way it showed the dangers of war, pacifism and racial hatred. It contained many admirable and idealistic truths in it, and it was also a jolly good adventure story.’ It was the encouragement, rather than the altercation, that Nation tended to remember: ‘I got along well with David,’ he reflected in 1995. ‘He supported me very thoroughly.’
Notwithstanding the outbreak of Dalekmania the previous Christmas, 1965 was the great year of the Daleks: they appeared in a record fourteen episodes of Doctor Who that year, as well as in the cinema, on stage, in comics and in two books. And emerging from all that work was a pattern that was clearly related to Nation’s comments in August about the possibility of an American television series of the Daleks. The intention to break away from Doctor Who was self-evident.
It was not, however, until the late spring of 1966 that any firm steps were taken to make this a reality. Beryl Vertue had attempted to persuade American television that a stand-alone series could be viable. ‘I had a go at that,’ she remembered. ‘I tried to talk about science fiction, and how well Doctor Who had gone in the UK.’ But the initiative only really got off the ground through her contact with a toy manufacturer, Fred Alper, who was intrigued by the merchandising opportunities if the creatures could be launched in the States. Nation formed a new company, Lynsted Film Productions Ltd, and he and Alper met with BBC Enterprises to pitch the idea of producing a pilot for American television, with the hope that the corporation would come in as joint partners. There was sufficient interest for Nation to develop a storyline, which he then worked up into a full script for a half-hour pilot episode, ‘The Destroyers’, featuring an SSS team that centred on Sara Kingdom, Captain Jason Corey (evidently drawn from the same source as Marc Cory in ‘Mission to the Unknown’) and an android named Mark Seven.
The concept for The Daleks, as the series was to be called, was fairly novel, pitching a team of security agents against a single race of alien monsters, with a female lead character, but it was not immediately clear how this could be sustained over an entire series. Certainly the pilot gave little indication of breaking new ground, relying instead on characteristic Nation elements: jungles, caves, killer vegetation. Considerably more problematic, from the point of view of the BBC, was that when Nation submitted his script in October 1966, it came with an estimated budget of £42,000, appropriate for an American production but wildly excessive by the corporation’s standards. Even then there were doubts that it could be brought in on budget. There was concern too that the peak of the craze had already passed (‘I have very serious reservations as to the audience pull of the Daleks in the UK at this late stage,’ noted a senior figure in BBC Enterprises), leaving the financial success of the project entirely dependent on the unknown American market.
Aware of the pressures of time – it was proposed to film the pilot in December, ready for the buying season in American television the following March – Fred Alper had a contract drawn up that would split the investment costs for the pilot and a subsequent series between the BBC on the one side and himself and Lynsted Park on the other. But the BBC, panicked by how fast the commitment was escalating into a series, got cold feet and backed out of the project altogether. By the end of 1966 it was clear that they no longer had an interest, save in the merchandising rights that might result, and over the first few months of 1967 discussions took place about what the level of these would be. Still talking about raising the finance elsewhere, Nation visited America in search of potential partners. ‘I went to the United States,’ he remembered. ‘I went there to hustle and got very close to doing it.’ But by now the impetus had been lost, and the entire proposal slowly withered away during the course of the year. It had, however, come remarkably close to realisation. There had been talk of interest from the American network ABC and, in a mistaken belief that the BBC were more committed than they actually were, Nation had even booked time for the shoot in Twickenham Studios, where construction work had begun on the sets.
Meanwhile, there were new Dalek serials on Doctor Who: ‘The Power of the Daleks’ (1966) and ‘The Evil of the Daleks’ (1967). Nation had been given the first option of writing the stories, in line with his agreement with the BBC, but was unable to commit himself to the project and agreed instead that they should be written by David Whitaker. Nation was later to express his disapproval of the serials (‘I didn’t like them and I responded very badly to them’), and his attitude was not much ameliorated by the fact that he received little more than a nominal sum for the use of his creation: he was paid £15 for each broadcast that featured the creatures in a script written by someone else, which even the Head of Business at Television Enterprises was later to acknowledge was ‘a ludicrously small fee’.
These were intended to be the last ever Dalek stories in Doctor Who, leaving the field clear for Nation’s proposed series, but the continuing importance of the monsters to the show was demonstrated when William Hartnell left the programme in 1966 and the concept of regeneration was hurriedly invented to allow for a transition to another actor. Just as the Daleks had been used to smooth the departures of Susan, and then of Ian and Barbara, so they were employed in ‘The Power of the Daleks’ to make the transformation from Hartnell to Patrick Troughton easier for viewers to absorb. Even so, viewing figures, which had been falling in the later Hartnell stories, did not regain the peaks to which they had been pushed a couple of years earlier by ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’.
With their apparent farewell from Doctor Who and the abandonment of the solo series, it seemed by the end of 1967 that the era of the Daleks had drawn to its close. There were no more annuals forthcoming from Souvenir Press, the idea of a third movie had fallen through, and the comic strip had also come to an end – having moved from TV Century 21 to TV Comic at the beginning of 1967, with a different writer and artist, it had lasted only a few months. In December that year, Nation did agree in principle to the idea of a new story for the 1968 season, but refused the BBC’s suggestion of pitching his creations against the new monsters on the block, the Cybermen, and nothing came of the proposal. At their height, the Daleks had ensured the survival and then the success of Doctor Who, and had at times completely eclipsed the programme itself, but now they were finished, and the series was continuing.
They had had a good run, and it’s unarguable that Nation had reaped enormous rewards from their glory years, but the failure to secure an American series was a bitter personal blow. ‘Terry was really ambitious,’ said Beryl Vertue. ‘He wanted to be international.’ By that he meant, as did all his British contemporaries, that he wanted to make it in America, where the real money and prestige was to be found. From 1966 onwards, as BBC Enterprises began serious efforts to sell Doctor Who around the world, he received a steady stream of income from sales to dozens of countries, from Australia to Zambia, but that wasn’t the same thing as breaking the States. And it wasn’t his show. He was also receiving only the standard BBC royalties due to a writer, an arrangement that made no allowance for the significance or merit of the work; ‘The Daleks’ earned a little more when it was sold to Jamaica than did ‘The Keys of Marinus’ in the same territory, but only because it comprised seven episodes rather than six.
None of this was a substitute for the real thing. In a career as long as Nation’s there were bound to be any number of missed opportunities, projects that never materialised, but the failure of The Daleks was perhaps the biggest and most significant of all. Yet it’s not easy to imagine it being much of a hit, even if the series had been commissioned by a US network. The verdict of the BBC hierarchy on the pilot script was encouraging enough but was hardly a ringing acclamation of a major new piece of work: ‘representative children’s science fiction’, thought Shaun Sutton, the head of drama serials; ‘a typical – and therefore excellent – Doctor Who-type story’, was the verdict of David Attenborough, then the controller of BBC2, as he turned down the idea of taking the proposed series for his channel. These were experienced broadcasters who knew how big the Daleks had become, and still their enthusiasm was strictly limited.
Even if the show had made it on to American television, it seems unlikely that it would have lasted for more than one series, if only because the variations that could be wrung out of the situation were so limited. The formats of British shows that had translated successfully to America, such as The Avengers and The Saint, had a flexibility that made them capable of almost endless permutations; the Daleks, a purely evil creation with no shades of grey, were a much more restricted proposition. To take a slightly unfair example from a different field, the Daleks had for a moment at Christmas 1964 rivalled the popularity even of the Beatles, but in terms of creativity they had been left a long way behind. The Beatles had then been singing ‘I Feel Fine’; by the time Nation was looking for investors in The Daleks, they had moved on to ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’. The Daleks were capable of no such development.
For they were ultimately handicapped by their voices and their lack of visual response. There was a very definite limit to how long a viewer could take a conversation between Daleks, as Nation seemed to have recognised in his scripts for Doctor Who. Unusually for that series, the Daleks were seldom the sole alien life-form on display, their lack of variety being compensated for by the presence of the Thals, or the Aridians and the Mechanoids, or the Vargas and the Visians, while in ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’ the Robomen had fulfilled the same function. In purely technical terms, there were related problems; as Richard Martin pointed out, the director had to work hard at camera angles just ‘to give them a sort of dynamic that they themselves did not possess’. Had the special effects available at the time been capable of reproducing the full Dalek empire depicted in TV Century 21, it might have been different, but they weren’t, and however big the budget seemed from a British perspective, it was always going to look a bit cheap compared to American shows.
And a failure in America would surely have finished the Daleks off for good. It would have been extremely difficult for the BBC to countenance them traipsing back, metaphorical tail between metaphorical legs, to Doctor Who. Paradoxically, the collapse of The Daleks probably ensured the ultimate survival of the monsters. Untainted by their likely malfunction elsewhere, they remained in the storage lockers of the TARDIS, ready for exhumation at a later date. The truth was that, without their original and greatest foe, they were never going to be as much fun on their own. ‘The Daleks have no value outside Doctor Who,’ was Terrance Dicks’s conclusion. ‘Terry made several attempts to launch the Daleks by themselves, and none of them were really successful. They’re Doctor Who’s main monster, and they’re inviolable in that position, but that’s the only position they’ve got.’