In 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.
But if the literary references were more than half a century old, they were heavily reworked to address entirely contemporary themes. Whereas Wells had seen the Morlocks and Eloi evolving from current humanity, the extreme products of a split between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, Nation was interested less in class war than in nuclear war. The development of the neutron bomb, which was to cause such contamination on Skaro, had been widely covered in the media of the early 1960s (a fact noted by Ian in the original script, though his comments were deleted from the final version), and a bomb had in fact been constructed and tested by America in 1963, though that was not publicised at the time. What was very much in the news, as Nation sat down to write, was the signing on 5 August 1963 of the Test Ban Treaty by America, the Soviet Union and the United Kingdom, the three countries that then possessed nuclear weapons; for the first time an international agreement had been negotiated that attempted to regulate the development of such armaments. In retrospect it became clear that this triggered a collapse of support in Britain for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (it was to return in the 1980s), but for the moment CND remained the great cause of the left, included in whose ranks were many of those with whom Nation mixed socially and professionally.
A large part of the central section of ‘The Daleks’ deals explicitly with a debate over pacifism, as represented by the Thals, who have abandoned their past incarnation as warriors and instead become farmers. ‘Fear breeds hatred and war,’ declares Temmosus (Alan Wheatley), the leader of the Thals, as he prepares to encounter the Daleks. ‘I shall speak to them peacefully. They’ll see that I’m unarmed. There’s no better argument against war than that.’ He is promptly killed by the Daleks with their death rays. ‘Can pacifism become a human instinct?’ wonders Barbara, and Ian dismisses such beliefs as pure idealism: ‘Pacifism only works when everybody feels the same.’ He later proves his point by seizing a Thal woman named Dyoni (Virginia Wetherell) and threatening to hand her over to the Daleks, thereby provoking Alydon (John Lee), the new Thal leader, into hitting him. Meanwhile the Doctor, ethically a more complex figure than he was later to become, is proving even more bellicose. ‘We have a ready-made army here,’ he declares, and when it’s pointed out that the Thals don’t believe in violence, he waves away such petty objections: ‘This is no time for morals.’ After further agonising – in which a key role is played by Dyoni, telling Alydon that she’s glad he stood up for her (‘If you hadn’t fought him, I think I would have hated you’) – the Thals decide to abandon centuries of non-violence and join the TARDIS crew in attacking the Dalek city.
The provocation of Alydon is a little glib, derived perhaps from the question so often put to conscientious objectors in the First World War: What would you do if you saw a German trying to rape your sister? (To which the homosexual writer Lytton Strachey famously replied: ‘I would try to interpose my body.’) But in the context of a children’s television drama, the simplicity is effective enough, and it was certainly an issue that caused Nation some soul-searching. ‘I had a bad time with the first episodes of Doctor Who,’ he commented in 1966. ‘The Doctor had to say to the Thals: “If you are worth keeping, if you have anything to contribute, it is worth fighting for, it is worth laying down your life for.” It was against all my beliefs, but I made him say it.’ He added, with the tone of a man more preoccupied with the Second World War than with a possible third: ‘It is a problem we all have to face. I don’t have the answer.’
There had been in Nation’s first storyline, ‘The Survivors’, one further echo of the times. The original concept had been that both the Thals and the Daleks blamed the other side for having started the war on Skaro. It is only at the end – when the Thals have beaten but not (in this version) killed the Daleks – that the Doctor pieces together the historical records of the two races and deduces that ‘both hemispheres were destroyed simultaneously, and there is evidence that before the attack the radar had recorded something in space’. The idea of two power blocs being provoked into war, and thus destroyed, by a third party chimed with contemporary fears about the rise of China, which was then widely seen as a potentially destabilising influence on the fine balance between the USA and the Soviet Union, particularly after the Sino-Soviet split became public in 1960. (An early script for the subsequent story, ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’, included a reference to China being at war with both the USA and the USSR.) Unusually for Nation, however, the storyline ends on an entirely upbeat note: rockets arrive on Skaro carrying representatives of this third power, who explain that ‘they have realised the enormity of the crime committed by their forefathers. They have waited for the radiation level to fall, and now they come to make reparations and assist in rebuilding the planet.’
Fortunately this entire plot development was jettisoned, to be replaced by the destruction of the Daleks, thus avoiding the terrible possibility of viewers being left with an image of Thals and Daleks living together happily ever after. Such a denouement would have sat uncomfortably with the imagery of the preceding episodes, dominated as they were by overt Nazi references to the extermination of opponents. The very word ‘exterminate’ was firmly associated in the public mind with the Holocaust, a connection reinforced recently by its repeated use during the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann for his part in the Final Solution. And a happy ending would have gone utterly against the grain of the scene in which the Daleks rank up alongside each other, raise their right arms in a stiff salute and announce: ‘Tomorrow we will be the masters of the planet.’
Despite these allusions to serious and current issues, however, there remained the unavoidable fact that the Daleks were dangerously ‘close to the cheap-jack bug-eyed monsters’ that Sydney Newman insisted should play no part in Doctor Who. ‘David Whitaker and I both thought it was a terrific story and very exciting,’ remembered Verity Lambert, but Donald Wilson, the head of serials, to whom they were directly answerable, was less impressed. ‘This is absolutely terrible,’ he told them. ‘I don’t want you to make it. What else have you got?’ The answer was that they had nothing else. ‘The Daleks’ had originally been intended as the fifth story in the series, but the scripts for the projected second story had been rejected, and with production due to start shortly, there was an urgent need for a replacement. The speed with which Nation had delivered his scripts meant that his piece was the only option available. ‘Had we had anything else,’ said Lambert, ‘I don’t think the Daleks would ever have hit the screen. We had to make it.’
Nation’s description of the Daleks captured their essence, without going into great detail about their appearance: ‘Hideous machine-like creatures, they are legless, moving on a round base. They have no human features. A lens on a flexible shaft acts as an eye. Arms with mechanical grips for hands.’ The responsibility for turning this description into usable props fell to the nascent visual effects department at the BBC, the design being the responsibility of Raymond P. Cusick, with the realisation of that design falling to his colleagues Jack Kine and Bernard Wilkie. The first decision was that the machines would have to be operated by humans inside the props. ‘If you had anything mechanical, ten-to-one it would go wrong on the take,’ explained Cusick. Having further established that the initial idea of having the operators standing up would be far too tiring, ‘I drew a seat, ergonomic height, eighteen inches, got the operator down, and then drew round him; that’s how the basic shape appeared.’ Other limitations came from the budget. Cusick wanted the lower half to be a curved skirt made from fibreglass, but was told the material was too expensive. Instead he designed it using plywood panels, only to find out that Shawcraft Models – the firm who manufactured the props – had used fibreglass anyway.
The final version stood four foot six inches off the ground, ran on castors (concealed by a thick rubber skirt at the base) and had just enough room for an operator, whose task it was to move the object with his feet, while controlling the two arms, the eye-stalk and the lights on the top that flashed to indicate which Dalek was speaking. This latter requirement also meant that the operator had to learn the script, even though he did not himself provide the voice. It was a set of skills not dissimilar to those demanded of a one-man band, with the added problem of restricted vision through the mesh section at the top.
The finished props were not, as objects, immediately inspiring to the crew. ‘The first time I saw them, I laughed,’ reflected William Russell, one of the original stars. ‘It seemed ridiculous.’ And he was not alone. ‘I remember looking at it and thinking, “This’ll never take off”,’ commented Jack Kine. ‘But once the actors got inside, the things took on a life of their own.’
The one point that Nation had made from the outset was that the Daleks were to be as non-human as possible. ‘I had been a cinema-goer all my life and loved going to what were rated in those days as horror movies. But whatever the creature was, somewhere in your heart of hearts, you knew it was a man dressed up. So my first requirement was to take the legs off. Take away the humanoid form and we were off and running.’ He was insistent that there should be no visible means of propulsion, citing as his inspiration the Georgian State Dance Company, who had recently been seen on British television performing a dance in which the women wore floor-length skirts, concealing the movement of their feet, so that they appeared to glide across the stage. They were not, however, the only act exploring this concept. Earlier in 1963 the comedian Hattie Jacques, whom Nation knew from her work with Eric Sykes and Tony Hancock, had appeared at the Players’ Theatre in London in a routine described by Joan Le Mesurier: ‘I saw Hattie, dressed as a little girl, sing “I Don’t Want to Play in Your Yard”. She moved as if she had wheels concealed under her dress.’
This non-human appearance was a significant departure from established images of robots. The Daleks are actually cyborgs, rather than robots, combining the organic with the mechanical (‘inside each of these shells is a living, bubbling lump of hate’, as the Doctor explains in a later story), but the outer casings are clearly in the robotic tradition; Nation described them as being ‘simply the vehicles’, a similar formulation to Kingsley Amis’s definition of a robot as ‘a mere peripatetic machine’. And the tendency of robots within the science fiction of the time was very clearly humanoid, as seen in films such as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and Forbidden Planet (1956), and as elucidated by Isaac Asimov. ‘The human form is the most successful generalised form in all nature,’ argues a character in The Caves of Steel. ‘If you want a design capable of doing a great many widely various things, all fairly well, you could do no better than to imitate the human form.’ In that novel, and in Philip K. Dick’s ‘Imposter’, the ultimate aim of creating robots was to make them as indistinguishable from humanity as possible. The Daleks, both in intention and in final design, swam firmly against that current. As Terrance Dicks, who was to bring them back to the screen in the 1970s, said: ‘They were original in their time; there hadn’t been anything even remotely like them.’
Cusick’s work in bringing the concept to life met with Nation’s approval. ‘He made a tremendous contribution,’ he was to acknowledge. ‘He took rough notes of my ideas for the Dalek’s behaviour, the electronic eye, mechanical hands and so on, and although I didn’t have a clear visual image in my mind, when I saw his finished Dalek design it seemed very familiar.’ Perhaps Cusick’s only mistake was that, while having lunch with Bill Roberts of Shawcraft Models, he demonstrated the gliding movement he was trying to realise by picking up a pepper pot and moving it around the table, and then told the story to the press, thereby providing the media with a ready-made cliché: ‘Ever since then, people say I was inspired by a pepper pot. But it could have been the salt pot I picked up …’
The other major addition to the creatures was the Dalek voice designed by Brian Hodgson of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, feeding a human voice through a ring modulator, set at a frequency that turned the signal on and off thirty times a second, and then passing it through a graphic equaliser. The voices themselves were provided, in a flat monotone that at times of stress rose to an hysterical scream, by David Graham and Peter Hawkins, the latter having last been heard in a Nation-scripted broadcast playing a stray dog in Floggit’s.
In identifying the main contributors to the development of the Daleks, recognition must also be given to David Whitaker, the script editor. It is unclear who was responsible for the revisions that were made to the script, but certainly the final version had evolved from the original storyline, not least because of the deletion of the argument over who had started the war on Skaro. As a consequence the Daleks became harsher, more extreme creations. When one of them says ‘The only interest we have in the Thals is their total extermination’, the screened version dispensed with the original clarification that this was because they feared the Thals might launch another war; stripped of justification for their actions, the motivation was now genocidal megalomania: ‘Only one race can survive’. Their language and speech patterns had also developed. In the original scripts, the staccato phrasing was less consistent: ‘I can understand your reluctance to tell us anything,’ one of them says, almost chattily, to the Doctor. ‘But you’ll have to tell us.’ The incarnation that reached the screen was a sharply focused portrait of ruthless, amoral survivalism, with no suggestion of any saving grace. One must assume that these changes were primarily the work of Whitaker, and that he too could claim to have helped bring the Daleks into being.
There were, then, plenty of other hands involved in shaping the Daleks – even Hancock, if he was to be believed. ‘That bloody Nation!’ was his response to seeing the Daleks on television for the first time. ‘He’s stolen my robots.’ But while Nation was always happy to recognise the work of these ‘enormous contributors’, he remained clear on the centrality of his own role. ‘I was the one who got the credit for it, and I was perfectly willing to take it,’ he said. ‘Because although a lot of other people contributed and made them work, I did invent the Daleks.’ The issue of who was ultimately responsible for the Daleks never quite went away, however, and towards the end of his life Nation returned to it repeatedly in interviews. ‘I’ve been reading a lot of magazines over the years, and it seems that, over the past two or three years I’m finding an article by a director or a producer or somebody at the BBC all in some way claiming to have been really responsible for the success of the Daleks,’ he said. Referring to his (much less celebrated) second story for Doctor Who, he added sardonically: ‘I’ve noticed that nobody is taking any credit for “The Keys of Marinus”.’
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.’
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.’