Just four months separated the broadcasting of the final episode of Hancock from Terry Nation’s creation of the Daleks. But the change of direction was not quite as abrupt as it might appear, for there had been precedents, both direct and indirect, and there was a reservoir of work on which he could draw.
There had been, even during his years of writing comedy, the influence of Spike Milligan, whose scripts for The Goon Show took up the nonsense tradition in British humour and extended it to the point of pure fantasy. The fourth series of the show, for example, broadcast during Nation’s last year in Cardiff, included episodes such as ‘Through the Sound Barrier in an Airing Cupboard’, ‘The First Albert Memorial to the Moon’ and ‘Ten Thousand Fathoms Down in a Wardrobe’, titles that indicated a blend of absurdism and what would – in other circumstances – be considered science fiction. When interviewed at the time, Milligan was keen to expound his theory of Dimensionalism, arguing that the listener ‘is in a dream world, where the rigid dimensions of time-space unity need not confine him’. The free rein he thus gave to his imagination was not far removed from Nation’s own comment: ‘The wonderful thing about science fiction is that if the author says a thing is so, then nobody can deny it.’ Writing patter for Ted Ray might not have given Nation much scope for such adventures, but the proposal for The Fixers made it clear that Milligan’s work had helped shape his ideas of what was possible in comedy.
More immediately obvious, there had been, as Nation tried to find work as a solo writer, a transition period of scripting science fiction and non-genre drama that predated his involvement with Tony Hancock and that was to extend beyond it. Though not a phase of his career on which he tended to dwell in later life, it contributed markedly to the range of his writing, and it gave him a grounding in contemporary science fiction. None of the programmes have survived (in common with so much from the era, copies were not kept), but they were significant both in their own right and in terms of their influence on Nation’s later work. And it’s notable that, following his disappointment with the BBC over the rejection of Uncle Selwyn, this opportunity to find a new direction came not from the corporation that had nurtured him, but from ITV.
The launch of independent television in Britain in September 1955, though widely reported in the national press, was not actually a national phenomenon. London was the only region capable of receiving the service at that stage, and it took several years before the availability of programmes spread through the entire country. Even at the start of the 1960s some outlying regions, including the north of Scotland and south-west England, weren’t covered, and only in 1962 were the Channel Islands and north Wales finally included in the exciting new world of two-channel television. After a hesitant few months, however, the experience everywhere was the same; in each new region that it reached, ITV had an enormous and virtually instantaneous impact. By 1957 the new channel was attracting a seventy-nine per cent share of the viewing audience in those areas where it could be seen, and was claiming that in London, of the 542 programmes that made the top ten that year, the BBC was responsible for just three. The experience was strongly reminiscent of Radio Luxembourg’s success in the 1930s, when the BBC had been similarly eclipsed by an upstart rival.
The public’s enthusiastic embrace of the alternative offered to them was evidently a response to ITV’s populist stance, its deliberate departure from the paternalism that still pervaded the BBC twenty years on from John Reith’s ‘I do not pretend to give the public what it wants’. The commercial channel, receiving no money from the sale of radio and television licences, could afford no such lofty disdain for its viewers’ taste; its task was to deliver the largest possible audience so that advertisers would wish to invest their money, thus ensuring the survival of the service. ‘This is free television in a free country,’ insisted Sir Robert Fraser, director general of the Independent Television Authority (ITA), ‘and people will get the television they want, as they get the press and government they want.’
Inevitably there was, in the circles of the great and the good, much criticism of allegedly low standards, particularly when the report of the Pilkington Committee on broadcasting was published in 1962; too heavy a reliance, it was said, on game shows, variety entertainment, American westerns and cheap and cheerful swashbuckling dramas. In pursuit of an audience, however, ITV also demonstrated in its early days a willingness to take risks that the BBC conspicuously shunned. It had the best rock and roll shows in Jack Good’s Oh Boy! and later in Ready Steady Go, it commissioned avant-garde comedy such as The Idiot’s Weekly, Price 2d, and it took a chance on oddities like Gerry Anderson’s puppet science fiction shows. It also ended the BBC’s deferential – sometimes even craven – handling of politicians, setting new standards for political coverage. Even when it came to highbrow programming, it had a record to be proud of, giving Sir Kenneth Clark, the founding chairman of the ITA, free rein to produce arts documentaries long before he made the celebrated series Civilisation for the BBC, and introducing the brilliant history lectures of A.J.P. Taylor (again subsequently to be poached by the BBC). Perhaps most significant of all, the independent franchise company ABC recruited to head its drama department Sydney Newman, a man who – among all his other achievements – was to play a crucial role in Terry Nation’s career.
Newman was one of the most charismatic and divisive figures in British television over the span of a decade to the end of the 1960s, a big enough character both to hold his own in the frontier years of ITV and to ruffle establishment feathers at the BBC. Peter Luke, a script editor who worked with him, described him as ‘a cross between Genghis Khan and a pussy cat’, while another colleague, Leonard White, saw him as ‘the non-conformist outsider’, adding: ‘Sydney was noisy. And unsubtle.’ Moustachioed and bow-tied, he was ‘more impresario than tycoon, a suave character,’ according to the Observer, ‘with a strong line in gently outrageous conversation, whose appearance and purring voice suggest a Tennessee Williams gone right’. The value of his work was even more hotly disputed; according to the Daily Mail in 1962, ‘to some he was the great impresario of commercial television, to others the purveyor of pretentious pigswill.’ There was no question, though, that he changed completely the nature of television drama in Britain, and that he brought to the screen two of the most iconic series of the 1960s: The Avengers and Doctor Who.
Newman had formerly been responsible for drama at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, where he had promoted the work of young writers including the future novelist Arthur Hailey and Bernard Slade (later to give us The Partridge Family), and had been part of the great era of television plays in North America in the mid 1950s. Arriving in 1958 to take over the existing ABC series Armchair Theatre, he began by exploring the London stage having, on an earlier visit, been to the Royal Court to see John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger, a play whose claustrophobic domesticity and dissatisfaction with modern Britain was not dissimilar to that of Hancock’s Half Hour, though without the jokes. (Ray Galton and Alan Simpson paid tribute in a radio parody with Hancock entitled ‘Look Back in Hunger’.) Enthused by the possibilities that such an intimate and direct style of drama offered for television, Newman began to commission new work by the likes of Alun Owen, Harold Pinter and Angus Wilson. ‘The policy I adopted for Armchair Theatre was to do plays about contemporary Britain,’ he was later to explain. ‘No adaptations from theatre or literary sources were wanted. The plays had to be fast and exciting and concerned with the turning points in contemporary society.’ He cherished his reputation as the man who helped British drama make its move from the drawing room to the kitchen sink: ‘I am proud that I played some part in the recognition that the working man was a fit subject for drama, and not just a comic foil in a play on middle-class manners.’
Armchair Theatre was accorded a highly desirable programming slot, following on from one of ITV’s guaranteed ratings winners, the variety show Sunday Night at the London Palladium (so popular that some churches rescheduled their services to allow the flocks to watch), and the strand achieved impressive audiences. Harold Pinter’s first play for television, A Night Out (1960), was the most viewed programme in the week that it was broadcast, an achievement repeated later that year by Ray Rigby’s The Cupboard. Actual viewing figures, as opposed to relative chart positions, are difficult to determine for the era, but at the time the Daily Mail claimed that the audience for the series exceeded 16 million, while the Daily Mirror put it at 21 million.
Despite its embrace of social realism, Armchair Theatre had a wider remit than was sometimes acknowledged, and included some original works of science fiction. (‘I’ve always been a sucker for science,’ admitted Newman.) Donald Giltinan’s The Man Out There (1961) was a grim tale of an astronaut, played by Patrick McGoohan, on a doomed mission, while Jimmy Sangster’s I Can Destroy the Sun (1958) and James Forsyth’s Underground (1958) both dealt with the threat of nuclear weapons. The latter, set on the London Underground in the aftermath of a nuclear explosion, was one of the last plays in the strand to go out live, its broadcast being overshadowed by the heart attack and death during the performance of one of the actors, Gareth Jones. The show continued, largely under the direction of a production assistant named Verity Lambert, with Jones’s role being hurriedly written out. The success of these and other plays helped persuade Newman to accept a programme proposal from Irene Shubik, a script editor on Armchair Theatre, and in 1962 the company launched Out of this World, an anthology series of one-off science fiction dramas. It was a significant moment in British television, partly because it opened up new avenues for young dramatists, including Clive Exton and Leon Griffiths as well as Terry Nation, and partly because it arguably did more to popularise contemporary science fiction in Britain than anything since the heyday of H.G. Wells.
There had, of course, been broadcast science fiction in Britain before, and much of it had been highly popular. In 1954 the BBC had shown Nigel Kneale’s adaptation of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, turning a novel with respectable sales into a paperback best-seller and a modern classic: the second broadcast (not strictly speaking a repeat, since it was another live performance) attracted what was then the largest audience for a British television broadcast. Kneale’s own The Quatermass Experiment the previous year had launched the eponymous character, and two more serials featuring Professor Quatermass were to follow later in the decade, again finding large audiences of over eight million; all three were subsequently made into movies by Hammer Films. Even on the wireless, Radio Luxembourg had in 1951 catapulted into space Dan Dare (‘pilot of the future’) from the Eagle comic, and for five years he had been central to the station’s post-war rebuilding of its audience, despite the incongruity of his daily serial being sponsored by Horlicks. The popularity of Dan Dare was sufficient to prompt the BBC into launching Journey Into Space (1953–9), created by Charles Chilton, which regularly achieved audiences of two and a half million.
But these were isolated pieces and appeared to have little impact in terms of promoting science fiction among the general public. Even as late as 1962, the year after the celebrated television series A for Andromeda, the BBC felt that the opportunities were limited, that science fiction was, in the words of an internal report, ‘too remote, projected too far away from common humanity in the here-and-now, to evoke interest in the common audience’. The report’s summary was not encouraging: ‘Our conclusion therefore is that we cannot recommend any existing SF stories for TV adaptation.’
While the genre was building a substantial following in other countries – particularly the United States and the Soviet Union – it languished in Britain, seemingly unable to break through either to a mass market or to intellectual respectability in the way that, say, detective fiction had. ‘In the late 1950s,’ J.G. Ballard was later to write, ‘science fiction was generally regarded as not much better than the comic strips.’ There was a small hardcore of support, its numbers perhaps suggested by the 5,000 members of the Science Fiction Book Club, though the American magazine Astounding Science Fiction claimed a British circulation in 1959 of 35,000, and there were a handful of home-grown magazines, one of which – New Worlds, edited by John Carnell – conducted a survey of its readers in the middle of the decade. ‘Ninety-five per cent are male, their average age 31,’ it was reported. ‘More than a third were technicians of some kind and six per cent were in the RAF. Nine per cent had been to university.’ There was also anecdotal evidence to suggest that readers had a marked political inclination to the left, reflected in the fact that, among the national newspapers, it was the Observer and the Guardian who were most supportive, the former running a competition in 1954 for new short stories set in the year 2500.
There were, however, signs of change by the end of the decade. In 1959 Kingsley Amis demonstrated that he was a better critic than he was a novelist, with a celebrated series of lectures at Princeton University on the current standing of the tradition, subsequently published as New Maps of Hell. In the same year the British Science Fiction Association was launched in an attempt to combat the negative image; the scale of their task was such that even the name was contentious and some argued against the use of the term ‘science fiction’ at all. The support of established writers including Amis, Angus Wilson, Robert Conquest and Edmund Crispin began to attract more mainstream coverage, though there was still some confusion over what was seen as the divided nature of the writing and its followers. ‘The most baffling characteristic of this vastly uninhibited conference,’ noted the Guardian correspondent who attended the Association’s 1961 gathering, ‘was the peculiar mixture of juvenile delight in gimmicks and facetious humour with a great deal of serious discussion.’ The imagery of the 1930s pulp magazines, dealing with what Amis referred to as ‘man-eating, death-ray-dealing aliens’ and commonly referred to by the shorthand phrase ‘bug-eyed monsters’, was proving hard to shake off, even if the genre was now attracting those with a proselytising belief that, in Ballard’s words, ‘science fiction was the true literature of the twentieth century’. It offered, argued Wilson, ‘more vitality, a more expanding prospect, than any other branch of fiction today’, despite the fact that, at its worst, it was ‘the most pulpy product of a pulp-producing age’. The problem was convincing the rest of society that there was intelligent life beyond the pulp.
The chief exception in 1950s Britain, the one writer capable of breaking out from the limited fan base into widespread popularity, was John Wyndham, whose work harked back to the tradition of H.G. Wells and was sometimes disparaged by the more self-consciously literary practitioners of the genre. His 1951 novel The Day of the Triffids was reported to have sold over 100,000 copies by the end of the decade, and had been broadcast on BBC radio both as a reading, in 1953, and as a six-part drama in 1957, before being filmed in 1962. That book had been followed by a series of other best-sellers, including The Kraken Wakes (1953), The Chrysalids (1955) and The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), the latter of which was also filmed, in 1960, under the more sensationalist title of Village of the Damned. Unsurprisingly, therefore, it was one of his stories, ‘Dumb Martian’ (published in 1952), that was selected by Irene Shubik to launch Out of this World; though in the event the play was screened within the Armchair Theatre strand on Sunday 24 June 1962 as a trail for the new series, which started officially the following Saturday.
Out of this World took its title from a series of anthologies edited by Amabel Williams-Ellis and Mably Owen, and published by Blackie from 1960 onwards. The first volume had included work by the likes of Arthur C. Clarke, Arthur Porges and Fredric Brown, as well as the obligatory Wyndham, and the thirteen-week television series that bore the same name was to feature a similarly diverse collection of writers, among them the Americans Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov and Clifford D. Simak. In all three cases, it was the first time that any of their work had been adapted for the screen, whether cinema or television, and thus the first time that it was encountered by a sizeable audience in Britain. Shubik later commented that ‘science fiction of the “adult”, as opposed to the “bug-eyed monster”, kind had always been a pet subject of mine’, and her selection of material, assisted by John Carnell of New Worlds, was to set new standards for the treatment of the genre. Her intentions were strictly serious, and hinted at the campaigning spirit of Ballard and Wilson. ‘I think everyone is interested in the idea of life on another planet and what the future holds,’ she remarked, as she promoted the show. ‘I’m fed-up with kitchen sink drama and plays about who goes to bed with whom. Science fiction at least has a philosophical speculation behind it which I find fascinating.’
Terry Nation’s involvement in the series – he adapted two existing short stories and contributed an original tale – came as something of a surprise to his colleagues at Associated London Scripts. ‘I can’t really remember him being interested in science fiction,’ commented Ray Galton, and Beryl Vertue was similarly unaware of his interest: ‘I don’t remember him talking about it hugely.’ Fortunately Nation’s friend, Clive Exton, thought he knew better. A stalwart of Armchair Theatre – six of his plays were screened in the strand in 1960 alone – Exton was already being hailed by The Times as ‘one of the most subtle and individual among the new generation of dramatists produced by television’, and he had earlier encouraged Nation to write Uncle Selwyn. Somewhat more helpfully, when he was commissioned in 1962 to write ‘Dumb Martian’ for Out of this World, he suggested to Shubik that Nation was a science fiction aficionado and would be ideal for the series. Nation was later to admit that this was overstating the case (‘I had nothing to back this up with at all’), for he was out of touch with modern science fiction and had never adapted anyone else’s work, but he made a suitable impression when he met Shubik and he was sent away with a story to adapt.
Only one episode of Out of this World – Leo Lehman’s dramatisation of Asimov’s ‘Little Lost Robot’ – has survived, but from contemporary reviews and the memories of those involved, it is evident that Nation largely stayed faithful to his source material. The first of his adaptations was Philip K. Dick’s story ‘Imposter’ (1953), set on a future Earth that is engaged in a deadly and protracted war with unknown forces from the Alpha Centauri star system, known as Outspacers. One of Earth’s most important research scientists, Roger Carter (called Spence Olham in the original), is on the verge of a major breakthrough in the development of a new weapon, when he is suddenly arrested on suspicion of being a robotic replica who has killed the human Carter, and who is concealing in his chest cavity a bomb that will destroy the project he is working on. Unable to prove that he is who he knows himself to be, Carter escapes custody and hunts down the imposter, eventually finding a dead body in a crashed Outspacer ship. At which point he realises that the dead man is the real Carter and that therefore he must indeed be the robot. That realisation is the trigger for the detonation of the bomb he is carrying inside himself.
The second adaptation was of Clifford D. Simak’s ‘Immigrant’ (1954), a story that lent itself less readily to television, being a slower-paced, more deliberately didactic piece that lacks the dramatic drive of ‘Imposter’. For nearly a hundred years the best and brightest humans from Earth have been emigrating to the planet Kimon, but still virtually nothing is known about their destination, save that it seems blessed with fabulous mineral wealth. The Kimonians are an advanced species, further down the evolutionary road than humans, adept at telepathy and telekinesis, but they have no desire to establish diplomatic relations with any other planet, and are extremely choosy about who they allow to visit their planet: only those with the highest IQ scores are considered and even then, following years of study, only one in a thousand taking the final tests is accepted. None of those who have emigrated have ever returned; they confine themselves to sending money home in letters that tell of the extraordinary wages paid, but reveal nothing of their life on Kimon.
The story follows Seldon Bishop, one of the few who are accepted, as he endeavours to make a new life in this ‘galactic El Dorado’. The material rewards are all that he expected, and the standard of living is luxurious in the extreme, but it doesn’t take long to discover why previous immigrants have been so reticent in their accounts of the place. For the Kimonians regard humans as being on a level somewhere between household pets and playmates for their children: ‘You might have a doctorate on Earth, but still be no more than a kindergarten youngster when you got to Kimon.’ Rather than admit this fact, the humans on Kimon privately nurse their wounded pride, and engage in the traditional expatriate activities of sport and drinking. Yet, as Bishop discovers, for those prepared to adopt the correct attitude, there is hope: ‘There is only one thing that will crack this planet and that is humility.’ And finally the Kimonian project becomes clear to him. They want to provide the opportunity for future human evolution, to teach those who wish to be taught, those who are prepared to accept that as yet they know nothing and that their schooldays are only just beginning. The theme of a wiser, older civilisation taking humanity under its nurturing wing was not unusual in Simak’s work.
Of the two stories, there is little doubt where Nation’s sympathies lay. The simple narrative of ‘Imposter’, driven by action rather than philosophy, was much more to his taste than the ruminative fantasy of Simak, as was Dick’s pessimism; elements of the tale – the perpetual state of war and the concept of a robotic double – were to return in his subsequent writing. His own contribution to the series, ‘Botany Bay’, was certainly more in the mould of Dick. Set in a psychiatric institution, it depicted evil aliens taking over the bodies of the inmates with, as The Times’s reviewer reported, ‘an ingenious twist’ in which ‘we were made to realize that we ourselves, the inhabitants of Earth, were the sinister intruders on some simpler future world: that not only were the wrong ’uns winning, but they were us after some further centuries of decadence.’
The series was a success in terms both of ratings and critical acceptance. It attracted larger audiences than the BBC’s science fiction offering for the summer – The Andromeda Breakthrough, a sequel to Fred Hoyle’s A for Andromeda the previous year – and there was widespread praise. ‘The level of writing and direction has been encouragingly high,’ said The Times; ‘certainly the most intelligent and best written of its genre since Quatermass’, approved Kinematograph Weekly; while the Yorkshire Evening Post went one better: ‘the most accomplished thing of its kind TV has yet produced’. The Daily Mail was quick to praise its ultimate creator: ‘the series as a whole has been surprisingly good. Much of the triumph belongs to ABC’s story editor Irene Shubik – one of the few women to get real satisfaction out of science fantasy. Miss Shubik is an enthusiast, the venture was a labour of love for her, and it showed.’ For Nation himself, it had the added benefit of allowing him to work with one of his great Hollywood heroes, since each episode was introduced by the legendary horror actor Boris Karloff. ‘That was a great moment,’ remembered Kate Nation, ‘when he met Boris Karloff.’
The other beneficiary from the success of the show was Sydney Newman, who had shown that he could spin off hit series from Armchair Theatre, first with Armchair Mystery Thriller (1960) and now with Out of this World. His standing within the industry was so high that the BBC, desperately trying to catch up with its independent rival, recruited him to become its own head of drama in early 1963. BBC SIGNS ITV ‘DUSTBIN’ MAN, read the headline in the Daily Mail and, keen to cement his reputation as the nation’s chief purveyor of social realism, Newman created for the corporation The Wednesday Play, which was to prove even more controversial than his work on ITV. In his new role, he was also responsible for the drama output on the new channel, BBC2, that was due to launch in 1964, following the recommendations of the Pilkington Report. And one of those he recruited to staff this expansion was Irene Shubik, who became the script editor on Story Parade, a series of single dramas adapted from contemporary novels, ‘a sort of anthology of new fictional writing’.
It was a lucky break for Terry Nation, who now had, for the first time, a supporter within the drama department of BBC television. He had been trying since Out of this World to find an opening within the corporation, but without success. He submitted a proposal, titled ‘The Thousand and Several Doors’, for the series Suspense, but it was rejected as being ‘too derivative’ (the same conclusion that had been reached with Uncle Selwyn), and although he was commissioned to write a script for Z-Cars, it was never made. His one non-genre piece to be broadcast had come in October 1962 with an episode of the long-running police series No Hiding Place, which was again an ITV production. Story Parade was to change his run of poor luck at the BBC, and he was commissioned in 1964 to write three plays for the series.
Of these the most significant was an adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s novel The Caves of Steel, first published in Galaxy magazine in 1953. Shubik was an admirer of Asimov’s work, and indeed of the man himself; ‘one of the most interesting and amusing men I have ever met’, she was later to comment of the writer whose stories, particularly those dealing with robotics (a word he coined), had made him one of the leading figures in science fiction. The Caves of Steel was among his best work, and the resulting BBC production was immediately acclaimed as a triumph.
Set three thousand years in the future, the novel depicts a society in which Earth has colonised fifty other planets, the Outer Worlds. A division has arisen between the overcrowded, primitive Earth and these Outer Worlds, on which the descendants of the settlers, known as Spacers, are technologically more advanced, and where human and robot societies are closely integrated. In the Great Rebellion, the Outer Worlds achieved independence from Earth, and the Spacers and Terrestrials now live in uneasy harmony. The Spacers are still human, but have been genetically selected over many generations and have therefore evolved differently – among other things, they have a life expectancy in excess of three hundred years, largely thanks to the abolition of disease.
The story is set in New York, which, like other major population centres on Earth, is now a massive conurbation, enclosed in a vast steel dome (hence the title of the novel) so that it has become like a super-sized mall, with no view of the outside to disturb its air-conditioned security. Inside the dome, society is run as a strict hierarchical bureaucracy, with no room for ‘individualism and initiative’ (despite an underground movement of dissidents known as the Medievalists). This artificial community is entirely dependent on technology and therefore highly vulnerable; as one character explains, water has to be brought into the City, air requires constant circulation inside the dome, and the whole thing is powered by nuclear plants that need uranium supplies: ‘The balance is a very delicate one in a hundred directions, and growing more delicate each year.’ Any interruption to this ecosystem would have terrible consequences. ‘When New York first became a city, it could have lived on itself for a day. Now it cannot do so for an hour. A disaster that would have been uncomfortable ten thousand years ago, merely serious a thousand years ago, and acute a hundred years ago would now surely be fatal.’ This was to become one of Nation’s favourite themes, though in the Asimov story the more immediate threat to social stability comes from the robots that are gradually being introduced into everyday life. ‘Do you fear robots for the sake of your job?’ a character is asked, and he replies, ‘And my kids’ jobs. And everyone’s kids.’
Within this setting, the plot is essentially that of a detective novel. A scientist, living in the Spacer community just outside the City, has been murdered and a New York detective named Elijah Baley is assigned a humanoid robot partner for the investigation. The deliberate, and mostly successful, mixing of science fiction and mystery conventions inspired many other writers, including Nation himself, who – particularly in Blake’s 7 – was to use science fiction as a base from which to explore other genres; the episode ‘Mission to Destiny’ was similarly a straight murder mystery, even if it were set on a spaceship. Other elements of The Caves of Steel were also to be evident in his later work, especially that idea of the fragility of modern life.
The one major change made by Nation is the imposition by the Spacers of a 48-hour deadline for solving the case; unless the murderer is caught within that time, New York City will be occupied or destroyed. The introduction of a time limit makes perfect dramatic sense until, with just half an hour left, the threat of violence is withdrawn; instead there’s a new deadline, this one taken directly from the book. Nation’s fondness for countdowns, which was to become a feature of his writing, is here an awkward and unnecessary intrusion.
Elsewhere, however, there is some fine writing, particularly in the opening shot of the domed city, with a voice-over by Baley (played by Peter Cushing): ‘New York City. The culmination of man’s mastery over environment. Fourteen million people crowd beneath its protective dome. And out there in the open country: Spacetown. Unwelcome and unwanted. With its handful of Outer World scientists seeking to change us, interfering, trying to impose new cultures.’ The terse phrasing drew on the style of contemporary American police shows, reapplied to paint a compelling vision of the future in a beautifully succinct piece of scene-setting.
Broadcast in June 1964 and repeated the following August, the play was a popular hit for the new BBC2, which was seen as something of a minority channel from the outset. The repeat attracted a respectable audience share of 13 per cent and got a reaction index from the BBC’s sample panel of viewers of 61, slightly above the average rating of 60 for television drama of the era (even a play as celebrated as Nell Dunn’s Up the Junction only rated 58). It also won over the critics. ‘A fascinating mixture of science fiction and whodunit which worked remarkably well,’ judged John Russell Taylor in The Listener, ‘despite a slightly specious, dragged-in attempt to suggest a parallel between the characters’ attitude to robots and ours to racial minorities.’ The Times’s reviewer was likewise impressed, calling it ‘highly successful’, though he too wondered about the subtext: ‘the story hinges on a fanatical hatred of robots by most humans in a remote future. Why do they hate them? We are supposed, apparently, to link up immediately with race hatred in the modern world, but that, though it may work in a novel or short story, just will not do in a play. In a play we want to know more of the whys and hows.’ Unequivocally enthusiastic was Dr Anthony Michaelis, the Daily Telegraph’s science correspondent: ‘I could find no fault whatsoever with the scientific extrapolation to the future. Every small item was remarkably well thought out and beautifully achieved.’ His praise was spoilt only by a sideways dig at another series with which Nation was already involved: ‘The first science fiction programme on BBC2 last night was an outstanding success and certainly surpassed most similar works on BBC1, such as Fred Hoyle’s A for Andromeda and Doctor Who.’
Nation was also responsible for an adaptation of Ira Levin’s 1953 novel A Kiss Before Dying, a less significant contribution to the series, partly because it had already been filmed – with Robert Wagner and Joanne Woodward in 1956 – and partly because it was a straightforward thriller, a genre much more familiar on British television than futuristic science fiction. Its status has been further eroded by the success of subsequent films of Levin’s work, including Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives and The Boys from Brazil. Even so, the story of an amoral social climber who seduces three sisters in turn, killing each before moving on to the next, was well received at the time: ‘a highly polished, holding piece of light entertainment’, noted The Times. Nation, too, was happy with the result: ‘I actually sat back and forgot I’d written it and watched it and enjoyed it.’ The piece was, like ‘The Caves of Steel’, directed by Peter Sasdy, a Hungarian who had fled to Britain after the crushing of the 1956 uprising. Sasdy was also in line to make the third of Nation’s commissions for Story Parade, an adaptation of Ray Bradbury’s short story ‘The Fox and the Forest’, though in the event it was left to the less experienced Robin Midgley to direct.
Indeed the whole production history of ‘The Fox and the Forest’ was plagued by problems. Nation himself was not the first choice of writer; the project had already been to two others, Ken Taylor and Ilona Ference, and the latter had produced a full script, which Shubik rejected. She instead offered the job to Nation, noting: ‘I am confident he will do an excellent job on it, as both his other adaptations have been first class.’ When he delivered the script, however, three months behind schedule, she was less impressed, considering it too violent and too rooted in contemporary gangster slang. Even after he did a rewrite and received his fee of £500, it was passed on to yet another writer, Meade Roberts, who was paid a further £200 to rework it further. Since Bradbury was receiving $1,000 for the rights with, unusually, an additional $1,000 for each repeat (the standard arrangement saw a 50 per cent reduction for repeats), it was already proving to be an expensive production.
The story concerned two fugitives from a future dystopia – Earth in 2155 – who have been granted the highest possible privilege of being allowed a holiday in time. Arriving in Mexico in 1938, they decide to try to lose themselves in the crowd and remain in a happier age, but are hunted down by an agent from their own time, who explains that they cannot so easily evade their responsibilities. ‘The rabbits may hide in the forest,’ he tells them, ‘but a fox can always find them.’ It’s a tense but very brief tale that, unlike Nation’s two other commissions for Story Parade, required some expansion, and his response was a device that was to become characteristic of his work: the raising of hopes only to dash them. One of the renegades is caught and about to be deported back to the future, when the other appears and shoots dead their pursuer. But it’s a false salvation and eventually they are recaptured. Nation also tried to change the period to 1963, just before the assassination of John F. Kennedy – playing on contemporary anxieties as he would on Doctor Who – though he was overruled by the director and Bradbury’s original pre-war setting was restored.
The delays in the writing process meant that ‘The Fox and the Forest’ didn’t appear in Story Parade, as originally intended. Instead it formed part of the first series in 1965 of Out of the Unknown, a new BBC2 project, again helmed by Irene Shubik, which was explicitly based in science fiction and was essentially an extension of Out of this World. The play was finally broadcast in November 1965, appropriately enough on the second anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination, and it received some critical praise; it was ‘one of the most convincing produced plays in the series’, according to Television Today, and Mary Crozier in the Guardian wrote that the ‘feeling of remorseless pursuit was steadily instilled with a nightmarish intensity’. But Shubik herself was unhappy with the final product, and the audience too was unimpressed: the piece received a reaction index of just 52, the lowest for any of the twelve episodes in the season. It never received a repeat screening.
By this stage, however, its success or failure made little difference to Nation. For by now he was one of the most successful television writers in the country, fully occupied on a variety of projects, many of which were concerned with the creatures that had finally catapulted him out of the ranks of the unknown.