By the end of the 1970s Nation was reaching a critical point in his career. Now in his late forties, he was a major figure in popular television in Britain, coming off two successful series of his own devising, and with the Daleks confirmed as a continuing, integral part of Doctor Who. Like Ray Galton and Alan Simpson and Johnny Speight, his erstwhile colleagues at Associated London Scripts, he had become a name in his own right, even if this was partially achieved in spite of the BBC; they might have refused to put his name above the titles, but the merchandising of Blake’s 7 and the Daleks was doing its best to redress the balance. Within his field, there was little more that Nation could achieve on television at home.
For someone in his position twenty years earlier, the logical next step would have been into the movies, but the British film industry was now at its lowest ebb, with even the established box-office brands failing. Hammer had made its last horror film, To the Devil a Daughter, in 1976, while the Carry On series had petered out with the substandard Carry On England (1976) and Carry On Emmanuelle (1978). Lew Grade, obliged to retire from his television empire at the age of seventy, had moved instead into film-making, but ITC’s touch was less sure when it came to the cinema and the company came a cropper with the hugely expensive flop Raise the Titanic (1980). Less celebrated companies were also struggling: Amicus had a three-year gap before its final production, The Monster Club (1980), and Associated London Films, ALS’s sister company, had made its last big-screen picture with Steptoe and Son Ride Again in 1973.
Nation did try to develop a film project in 1978, to be titled Bedouin. ‘It’s a marvellous adventure story to be shot in the desert,’ he explained at the time. ‘I think twelfth century – the Crusaders.’ There was to be a strong vein of fantasy running through it, going back to an earlier theme of ancient wisdom: ‘The von Däniken kind of thinking. I disapprove of him entirely, but is there a wisdom somewhere that could have been from another source?’ Discussions were held with a production company in Geneva, but it came to nothing.
The opportunities for new challenges in Britain seemed slight, and if he was ever going to make a serious attempt to break America, clearly it had to be soon, before age caught up with him. There was some encouragement that the tide might be turning in favour of his style of writing. In 1977 Doctor Who had finally found a home in the States on the Public Broadcasting Service, and even on some commercial channels, and by the end of the decade it had begun to build a cult following. By 1984 it had become established enough to warrant coverage in Time magazine.
And so, in 1980, Nation and his family moved to Los Angeles for what was initially intended to be a two-month trial. He celebrated his fiftieth birthday in Hollywood.
In his absence, the unexpected commissioning of a fourth season of Blake’s 7 resulted in a very tight production schedule, complicated further by the departure of producer David Maloney, to be replaced by Vere Lorrimer, who had already directed a dozen episodes of the series. There was too a change in the cast. Jan Chappell, who played Cally, decided not to return, so was killed off-screen in the first episode, leaving just two of the original crew members – Avon and Vila – on board a new ship, the much less impressive Scorpio, joined by a new comrade, Soolin (Glynis Barber). Jacqueline Pearce, on the other hand, whose involvement was initially doubtful, did return, via a somewhat tortuous plotline that meant Servalan was posing for some time under the alias Sleer to no discernible dramatic advantage.
Lorrimer visited Nation in Los Angeles to discuss the direction of the fourth season, but it was more a matter of courtesy than of serious consultation, and Nation was far from impressed with the results: ‘I didn’t have anything to do with the last [series], which I hated. I’ve seen some of them and I think, again, that they missed it.’ There was, he argued, an inherent problem with other writers taking over his characters: ‘I believe that I wrote Blake’s 7 (and Survivors and the Daleks) better than anybody else, simply because I invented them. I knew them deeply and more intimately than anybody else. I knew what I was trying to achieve.’ It was a complaint that he had made repeatedly when others had taken on his creations, though it was hard to see how it could be avoided, given the collaborative medium in which he worked.
Even Nation, however, could not help but admire the last episode of season four. Written by Chris Boucher and broadcast in the Christmas week of 1981, ‘Blake’ was a great piece of television. Again Avon has discovered that Roj Blake is still alive, this time on an obscure, lawless planet named Gauda Prime, raising hopes that he might return as the unifying figurehead for the resistance. And this time the reports are true. Blake is indeed alive, but Avon, mistakenly believing that he has betrayed the rebel cause and gone over to the Federation, shoots him. Federation guards arrive, kill all the others – Dayna, Vila, Soolin, Tarrant – and surround Avon, who stands astride the corpse of Blake and raises his gun to shoot, as he breaks into a smile. The image freezes, and as the credits roll, we hear the sound of a gun battle on the soundtrack.
Few series have ever dared go out on such a triumphantly negative note. But then few series have been prepared to sacrifice characters in the way that Blake’s 7 had. The ending was entirely in keeping with what had gone before; indeed its conclusion echoed its start four years earlier with a Federation massacre of rebels. Blake had now been killed off for the third and final time, on this occasion – it appeared – with every other member of the cast. The only missing element was Servalan herself, a fact which reportedly upset Jacqueline Pearce, though dramatically it was a wise decision not to include her in the episode: this was a tale of grim fatalism, no place for her brand of warped glamour.
‘I did admire enormously the dramatic moments of Avon standing over Blake’s body and raising the weapon and starting to smile,’ admitted Nation, ‘which I think was sensational but dumb.’ He also claimed that the production team ‘purposely did not let me know what was happening’, calculating that he would have disapproved of this radical gesture, this slaughter of so many characters, in contradiction of ‘my old axiom: Never kill anything off.’ But when his initial anger at what had been done faded, he reasoned that at least we hadn’t definitively seen Avon die. There was no reason why he couldn’t make a return, if the possibility for further episodes arose. Boucher made the same point: ‘It was an ending in itself, but it wasn’t necessarily the end of the programme. If Blake’s 7 had returned for a fifth series, then the episode would now be regarded as a cliff-hanger, following in the tradition previously laid down by Terry Nation.’ For now, however, there was no doubt that it was the end of Blake’s 7 – this time there was no last-minute reprieve from a BBC executive. Viewing figures had fallen (the season averaged 8.5 million viewers, down from 9.5 million the previous year) and no one appeared to have an appetite to continue.
Meanwhile, back in Hollywood, Nation appeared to have fallen on his feet. He became involved in a proposed series titled The Young Arthur and discovered the delights of the development deal, an entirely unknown concept in British television. ‘They paid me a lot of money, gave me an office and a secretary and paid my expenses,’ he explained. ‘The idea was that I was to come up with episode and series ideas for television.’ The contract, with Columbia Television, was followed by similar deals with 20th Century Fox, MGM and Paramount. But The Young Arthur never got made, nor did anything else, and gradually the joy of receiving a regular wage began to pale. ‘I was very frustrated by it,’ he admitted. ‘I just didn’t want to work at the studios anymore, so I quit and waited for people to say, “Good God, he’s available!” But nobody did.’
In fact very little of Nation’s later writing ever appeared on American television. There was work to be done doctoring other people’s scripts, but it was not until 1985, when he contributed to a new series titled MacGyver, that he got an on-screen credit at all. He was listed as producer for three episodes and also wrote the pre-title sequence for three, supplying five-minute stories that had no connection with the main plot of the following episode. MacGyver, played by Richard Dean Anderson, was a secret agent who relied more on his wits than on weaponry, allowing Nation a chance to indulge his love of an action hero making use of everyday objects; in prelude to the episode ‘Target MacGyver’, our man rescues a kidnapped general using only a collection of saucepans, a bag of ice, some cooking oil and a garden hose. It was all perfectly agreeable and the show was, eventually, a huge success, running to 139 episodes over seven seasons, but it was no match for the wit and style of ITC in the 1960s. And Nation’s contributions were all made within the first ten episodes, before it really took off.
He was now inhabiting a very different world to that of the BBC, where he could wander into the office of his friend, Ronnie Marsh, pitch an idea for Blake’s 7 and walk out with a commission for a pilot that evolved into a series. ‘What is difficult in the United States is that you work for twenty-seven masters each time,’ he complained. ‘You have several producers, you have the studio, you have the actors, and all of them seem to be asking for something different. It drives you insane.’ But the stakes were so much higher, and the rewards so much greater, that the temptation to continue playing the game was almost irresistible. ‘If you make a smash-hit here – had Blake’s 7 been made here and had the same level of success – I would be a multi-multi-millionaire,’ he said. ‘These are the glittering prizes in the United States. It’s not just the fact that you have a good audience out there, it’s the fact that you are making vast amounts of money, and people kill for less.’ As MacGyver once observed: ‘Typical! Just when you’re getting ahead, somebody always changes the odds.’
The idea of a two-month trial period had long since been overtaken by events, and in 1983 the Nations burnt their bridges with the sale of Lynsted Park. The family was now settled in Los Angeles and it would remain his home until his death, however unsatisfying it was in creative terms.
By the end of the decade he had notched up just two more screen credits. One was an episode of the short-lived series A Fine Romance, also known as Ticket to Ride and not to be confused with the British sitcom starring Michael Williams and Judi Dench. Titled ‘The Tomas Crown Affair’, it was, unsurprisingly, a parody of the 1968 movie The Thomas Crown Affair and featured a dentist (played by David Rappaport) concealing a smuggled diamond inside the tooth of Michael Trent (Christopher Cazenove). Nation, in an interview conducted at the time of writing, described it as ‘a kamikaze episode. You know it’s going to go down and nobody’s going to watch it – not even me!’
On a slightly happier note, there was A Masterpiece of Murder, a television movie screened in 1986 that he co-wrote with Andrew J. Fenady. It told the story of an ageing private detective and an equally ageing crook teaming up in pursuit of an art thief, and while it may not have set many pulses racing, it was notable for teaming up the veteran actor Don Ameche with Bob Hope, the comedian to whom Nation had listened so avidly on the American Forces Network as a child during the war. Nation didn’t originate the storyline, and he never cited the piece in interviews as any kind of achievement, but if, thirty-five years earlier when he was trying to establish himself as a stand-up in South Wales, he’d been shown a vision of his future self, living in Hollywood and writing for Bob Hope, he would surely have considered it the wildest, most fantastic success story. ‘He absolutely loved that,’ remembered Kate Nation. ‘These were idols to him. He was just like a kid with a new toy.’ Unfortunately, the reality was not as impressive as the dream. ‘Hope is game, but painfully past his prime’, noted one review, adding that ‘the script is never more than mediocre.’
Apart from working on other people’s scripts, Nation also spent time trying to bring his own work to the screen. In the mid 1980s this primarily meant a remake of Survivors, which he wished to relocate to America. The new Abby would be living in the north-east of the country, with her son, Peter, in Los Angeles. The story would thus come closer to his original concept of a trek across vast distances, with a makeshift convoy of ‘strange vehicles crossing empty America, where there are little pockets of survivors here and there, all doing different things’. There had always been a strong element of the frontier western in his episodes of the BBC original and in his novel; this new version would emphasise the theme still further, tapping into ‘the American ethos of the wagon train – there’s always that great urge to push west for the Americans’.
It was an inspired idea, and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t have worked, at least commercially. One suspects that, had it been made, it would have ended up a more cheerful affair than Nation might have wished, but revisiting America’s greatest myth could have fitted well into the more bullish cultural climate of the country in the 1980s, during the years of Ronald Reagan’s presidency. There were, however, other changes in the culture of the times that made the idea of a post-plague drama less appealing to executives. ‘We were so close to getting it on one occasion,’ remembered Nation, ‘and then AIDS reared its head, and everyone was terrified to do anything with it. They didn’t want to be associated with it.’ That, at least, was his explanation, though there were plenty of other factors militating against him: neither he nor the series itself had any real track record in the States, and it was asking a lot of US television executives to put their money on an outsider when he was touting what appeared at first sight to be such a depressing concept. The made-for-television nuclear disaster movie, The Day After, may have achieved record audience figures when it was aired in 1983, but it didn’t spark any enthusiasm for other similarly downbeat dramas.
With the abandonment of that project, Nation turned instead to the idea of trying to revive Blake’s 7. The series had finally been screened in America and, like Doctor Who, it had acquired a cult following, sufficient to warrant the presence of Nation, Paul Darrow and others at fan conventions. By 1989 Nation was talking about making a series ‘next year’, and outlining his thoughts as to how it would work. This time it was not a remake he had in mind, but a continuation of the story from where it had been left off in ‘Blake’. We hadn’t seen Avon die, so he was to return, a decade or so on from that final episode, exiled on an island on a remote planet, like Napoleon on Elba. He appears to have changed sides, making broadcasts in support of the Federation and against an outlaw called Blake, who may or may not be the real Blake: ‘It may be simply that anybody who leads the fight against the Federation becomes Blake; “Blake” has now become a title.’ But in reality Avon is merely awaiting his opportunity to return to the fray, his chance to relive Napoleon’s final campaign in the Hundred Days. ‘That’s the kind of thing I have in mind,’ Nation said. ‘Avon comes out of nowhere and scares everybody to death. Of course, in the end, he cannot win. Like I said, Avon dies.’
This proposal made no progress either, as Nation admitted in a 1992 interview: ‘Nothing has been happening, although I’ll never say never again.’ But it was still in his mind and he was even suggesting that he might bring back Vila as well. More significantly he was now talking about the vague hope that the BBC might take up the idea, as though he had lost any faith in doing anything further on American television. ‘Points of View got more letters for Blake’s 7 than any other series, so there is a demand,’ he argued. ‘I’m ready to go with it, and we’ll give it to them, but I have no idea. The BBC doesn’t talk to me, I don’t talk to them, not for any other motive than we just don’t talk together.’
He was certainly right about the enduring popularity of the programme. In 1983 the BBC had reported that – with the exception of breakfast television, which had been launched that year – the subject that attracted the greatest amount of correspondence from viewers was Blake’s 7. More than two thousand letters were received asking for the return of the series. The BBC dismissed the letters as being ‘part of an organised lobby’, which was true, but it was nonetheless a tribute to the enthusiasm that the show continued to inspire. When in 2000 the British Film Institute polled more than 1,500 people in the industry to find the best British television programmes ever made, Doctor Who came in third, behind Fawlty Towers and ‘Cathy Come Home’ from Sydney Newman’s The Wednesday Play. But when the BFI then asked the public to vote for their own favourites, Doctor Who rose a place to number two, kept from the top position only by Blake’s 7. Admittedly the turnout was very low, the 113 nominations for Blake’s 7 accounting for nearly twenty-five per cent of the votes cast, but it was testament to the loyalty of fans that such a campaign could still be mounted, a generation on from the ending of the show.
Unusually for a science fiction series, a great deal of this support came from women. ‘When the Blake’s 7 Magazine was launched it was hoped it would sell to maturing Doctor Who fans,’ noted Paul Darrow. ‘It didn’t. A survey was undertaken and it revealed that most readers were in the twenty-two to thirty range, with a significant number of older people. Ninety per cent were female.’ He observed the same phenomenon when attending his first fan convention in Chicago.
Although the proposals to bring back Survivors and Blake’s 7 continued to fall on stony ground, seeds were still being sown. And it was a tribute to the roles that Nation had created that, in both instances, a good deal of the running was made by the series’ lead actors. Paul Darrow became heavily involved in the attempts to relaunch Blake’s 7, while Ian McCulloch developed – with Nation’s approval – a concept for a new series of Survivors. Set some fifteen years on from the original, this would show a rudimentary society having evolved but coming under attack from an external power, bent on imperialist domination. He got as far as writing a pilot script and outlines for a further twelve episodes before the idea was rejected by the BBC on the bizarre grounds that it would be racially offensive.
This was, it should be noted, the same corporation that, within very recent memory, had happily broadcast The Black and White Minstrel Show, only ending the programme in 1978, around the same time that Bill Cotton had thrown the dance troupe Ruby Flipper off Top of the Pops on the grounds that ‘the British public didn’t want to see black men dancing with white women’. By the end of the 1980s, however, the BBC had belatedly become sensitive to multicultural sensibilities in the country, even if it remained unsure of its ground. So when McCulloch explained his suggestion that the raiding parties assaulting Britain came from Africa, the BBC panicked and rejected it out of hand ‘because they thought it was racist’. It was an absurd argument, but McCulloch didn’t entirely lose faith. He returned with a reworked proposal in the mid 1990s, though again without success.
But if all these projects came to naught, and if Nation’s writing career in America was little more than a long series of professional disappointments, there were compensations. The income generated by the Daleks had ensured that he and his family could live comfortably, and the rise in popularity of conventions gave him the sort of personal acclaim that writers seldom enjoy. ‘I retain an enormous affection for the Daleks,’ he wrote in 1988. ‘They have rewarded me in many ways, and not least amongst these benefits have been the opportunities to meet fans all over the world. They are dedicated and wonderful people, and I am extremely grateful to all of them.’ Among those fans, helpfully enough given the celebrity-based hierarchy of Hollywood, were some big names, as Nation’s obituary in The Times pointed out: ‘American aficionados of Doctor Who, such as Steven Spielberg, made “the Dalek Man” welcome.’ And, according to Kate Nation, the daily working routine was not always disagreeable. ‘He loved it. He loved going out to the studios to his office, getting involved with people, because writing can be very solitary.’ She added, however: ‘He didn’t get a lot on – he didn’t like that part of it.’
Nation wasn’t missing a great deal at home. As an old socialist, who had grown up in the depression of the 1930s in South Wales, he was unlikely to have taken with any enthusiasm to living in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain. Nor was British television a particularly happy place in the 1980s for the kind of programmes that he wrote. There had been a brief attempt to pour new wine into old bottles with The New Avengers (1976) and Return of the Saint (1978), but neither was entirely convincing, and when Brian Clemens found a durable action adventure vehicle in The Professionals (1977), it owed more to the grittiness of The Sweeney than it did to the fantasies of Steed and Simon Templar.
Science fiction was also struggling. The huge success of Star Wars prompted the making of further Hollywood epics with the likes of Star Trek: The Motion Picture and The Black Hole, both in 1979, and the following year ITV bought in two American series whose high-gloss production values, while not quite on the scale of Star Wars, were a long way from the make-do-and-mend approach to which British fans had become accustomed on television. Battlestar Galactica was screened on Thursdays, while – in an act of virtual sacrilege – Buck Rogers in the 25th Century was broadcast on Saturday evenings, up against Doctor Who itself. Worse still, it began to win the ratings war. In response the BBC moved Doctor Who in 1982, after eighteen years in the same slot, screening it twice weekly on Mondays and Tuesdays. By 1985 it was back in its proper place at a Saturday teatime, though in its new format it now lasted forty-five minutes rather than its traditional twenty-five.
More importantly, the entire episode had demonstrated the BBC’s loss of faith in the brand. The chief villain emerged as Michael Grade, the nephew of Lew Grade and now the controller of BBC1. He was later to say that he thought the show ‘was rubbish, I thought it was pathetic. I’d seen Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and E. T. and then I had to watch these cardboard things clonking across the floor trying to scare kids.’ The option of increasing the budget to keep pace does not seem to have been seriously considered, even though the revenue from merchandising and foreign sales was by now said to be seven times higher than the production costs. Instead, after that 1985 season, the programme disappeared entirely for eighteen months. When it did return it was for a series of much briefer seasons that migrated from Saturdays to Mondays and then to Wednesdays, and attracted ever smaller audiences. The last storyline to be seen by more than seven million viewers was 1985’s ‘Revelation of the Daleks’, written by Eric Saward; by the time of Ben Aaronovitch’s ‘Remembrance of the Daleks’ (1988), which – as part of the show’s silver jubilee season – took the story right back to the junkyard in Totters Lane, the figures were barely scraping past five million and were set to plunge further. The final episode of Doctor Who was broadcast in December 1989 and, although there was no formal announcement of the end of the show, it was clearly understood what was happening. ‘We were told to wait and see about a new season,’ remembered the last script editor, Andrew Cartmel, ‘but it was definitely a flavour of “you’ll have to wait a very long time”.’ Having lost both BBC support and its public, the series was finally cancelled, ending an extraordinary 26-year run.
Unable to match the special effects-driven scale of Hollywood, television science fiction in Britain reverted to comedy, following the lead of David Croft and Jeremy Lloyd’s Come Back Mrs Noah, Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the saga of Captain Kremmen, first heard on the Capital Radio programme of disc jockey Kenny Everett. The two latter eventually made the transition all the way from radio via television to film. Of those that followed, Red Dwarf (1988) was clearly in a class of its own, but there was too a host of other British-made science fiction comedies on television, many of them scarcely remembered: Metal Mickey (1980), Kinvig (1981), Luna (1983), They Came From Somewhere Else (1984), The Groovy Fellers (1989), Mike & Angelo (1989), Kappatoo (1990), Watt on Earth (1991), Space Vets (1992) and WYSIWIG (1992). One of the few serious attempts to produce a science fiction series, a BBC adaptation of John Christopher’s trilogy The Tripods in 1984–5, was cancelled at the end of its second season, a decision again made by Michael Grade, while Chris Boucher’s Star Cops (1987) didn’t get beyond a single season.
Many of Nation’s contemporaries were also finding the changed climate of British television less amenable than it used to be. Gerry Anderson launched a new puppet series, Terrahawks, which ran for thirty-nine episodes between 1983 and 1986, but failed to inspire in the way that Thunderbirds and Stingray once had (and would again). Dennis Spooner wrote for The Professionals and Bergerac though, like Nation, he really yearned for American success; the closest he came, before his untimely death in 1986, was when a story developed by him and Brian Clemens was used for an episode of Remington Steele. Clemens himself thrived more than most; an attempt to create an American version of The Avengers didn’t work out, but he did find success in the States with episodes of Darkroom, Father Dowling Investigates and Perry Mason, before helping to create the British series Bugs (1995) and reviving The Professionals as CI5: The New Professionals (1999). And Clive Exton co-wrote the much-reviled movie Red Sonja (1985), starring Brigitte Nielsen and Arnold Schwarzenegger, before finding mainstream success adapting literary work for series like The Ruth Rendell Mysteries, Jeeves and Wooster and Poirot.
Meanwhile, the luminaries of Associated London Scripts were being made to feel decidedly unwelcome, not by the new generation of comedians – many of whom revered the old masters – but by unimaginative executives who valued birth certificates higher than curricula vitae. When, in 1985, Eric Sykes won a special award at the Festival Rose d’Or in Montreux for his long contribution to comedy, he took the opportunity to pitch some ideas for new programmes to Bill Cotton, only to be told: ‘Your day’s gone Eric. We’re now into alternative comedy.’ Two ALS graduates – Nation’s old writing partner, Dave Freeman, together with John Antrobus – later wrote Carry On Columbus (1992), an attempt to revive the old brand with many of the new comedians (Alexei Sayle, Julian Clary, Rik Mayall and others), but it wasn’t a great success.
There was, though, at least one bright spot in 1986, when the BBC finally got around to repeating some classic episodes of Hancock’s Half Hour on television and found that it had a top ten hit on its hands all over again. Perhaps unexpectedly, it was Beryl Vertue, who had started out as ALS secretary, who emerged from a quiet decade in the 1980s to be one of the key figures in 1990s television, producing the sitcom Men Behaving Badly (1992) and the excellent, if underrated, George Cole comedy My Good Friend (1995). Her company, Hartswood Films, was also responsible for the acclaimed series Coupling (2000), produced by her daughter, Sue Vertue, and written by her son-in-law Steven Moffat, who would later take over the reins of the revived Doctor Who.
None of this suggests that Britain would have provided a congenial environment for Terry Nation. He was still offered the opportunity to write new Daleks stories for Doctor Who, but consistently declined, though he did insist on script approval and made changes where he felt his creations were in danger of being damaged. ‘My agent and I have guarded the Daleks tremendously,’ he said in 1995. ‘We’ve never allowed them to be used as figures of fun, and we’ve tried always to stop anyone looking inside them.’
In the wake of the cancellation of Doctor Who, Nation’s interest in the programme was reawakened. With the backing of Columbia Pictures, he and Gerry Davis, co-creator of the Cybermen and Doomwatch, put together a bid to revive it with the idea of targeting the American market. That venture collapsed with Davis’s death in 1991, but there were many other proposals floating around in the early 1990s for a revival of the show, either as a television series or a one-off film. In those discussions, the Daleks and Davros featured heavily, though Doctor Who, the television movie that finally resulted in 1996, focused instead on a battle between the Doctor and the renegade Time Lord, the Master. The film starts on Skaro where the Master has been sentenced to death by the Daleks, and the intention had been to employ the creatures in a self-contained prologue, but financial restrictions prompted a rewrite and the Daleks were confined to being voices off screen. Nation, however, didn’t come out of the deal too badly. ‘We were forced to pay Terry $20,000,’ noted executive producer Philip Segal, ‘and as it happened, Universal and Fox made me shorten the Dalek introduction to cut the budget.’ Clearly Roger Hancock’s tenacity remained undiminished. And it was somehow inevitable that the closest Nation came to getting one of his creations back on screen – and in America, to boot – was not with Survivors or Blake’s 7 but with the Daleks.
The cultural climate of British television was to change again, becoming more receptive to Nation’s style of programme, but for some time the flames were kept burning in other media. In 1988 Nation lent his name to The Official Doctor Who & the Daleks Book, written by John Peel, a writer whom he then authorised to produce the novelisations of ‘The Chase’ and ‘The Daleks’ Master Plan’, which had long been absent from the list of Target Doctor Who novels. It was Peel too who wrote the first of the New Adventures novels in 1991, a series of original stories about the Doctor published by Virgin Books. Blake’s 7 was also attracting new fiction, with Tony Attwood’s novel Afterlife published in 1984 and Avon: A Terrible Aspect (1989), written by Paul Darrow as a prequel to the series exploring his character’s origins. A decade later came two radio plays, written by Barry Letts and broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Blake’s 7: The Sevenfold Crown and Blake’s 7: The Syndeton Experiment reunited many of the original cast – including Darrow, Jacqueline Pearce and Michael Keating – though they weren’t greeted with a great deal of enthusiasm.
Together with the proliferation of videos and then DVDs and with a continuing high level of fan club and convention activity, particularly in relation to Doctor Who, there were times in the 1990s when it seemed – for those who cared – as though the shows associated with Nation had never gone away. But there was still a gap between the hardcore fan community and the mass audiences for whom the programmes had originally been written. All that was to change in 2005 with the revival of Doctor Who as a BBC1 series on early Saturday evenings. The new incarnation was an instant ratings-winner, updated to attract a new generation while retaining enough of the original features to satisfy those who remembered it the first time round.
The most significant of those features, for most older viewers, was always going to be the Daleks, but for some time it was unclear if they would be making a return at all. For several months in 2004, after the revival was announced, the media were full of stories about the protracted negotiations between the BBC and the estate of Terry Nation – now represented, since Roger Hancock’s retirement, by his son, Tim – which were said to be foundering on questions of the updating of the creatures and the fees that would be due to the estate. Rumours and counter-rumours spread; there were reports at one stage that a figure of a quarter of a million pounds had been agreed to license the Daleks (leading to complaints about how the BBC was spending its money), before it was abruptly announced that the talks had broken down. The corporation issued a statement that ‘Mr Hancock had demanded unacceptable levels of editorial control’, while Hancock was quoted as protesting: ‘We want to protect the integrity of the brand.’ There was a suggestion that in their new incarnation, the Daleks would be ‘too evil’.
It was a story that gripped both the quality press and the tabloids, though the country’s best-selling paper, the Sun, made most of the running. It launched one of its self-proclaimed campaigns, reporting with enthusiasm a protest march in Southampton, staging its own stunts (it had acquired a Dalek prop) and rounding up publicity-hungry politicians to add a quote: ‘Doctor Who without Daleks is like fish without chips,’ opined Tim Collins, the Conservative Party’s education spokesperson. And then came the inevitable press release to reveal that the dispute had been resolved and that the creatures would indeed be back on the screen to battle their arch-enemy, the Doctor (‘thanks to the Sun’s campaign’). As the Daily Telegraph noted, somewhat cynically: ‘Whoever’s in charge of the PR for the new Doctor Who series has been doing a knockout job.’
The result of this saga came in the sixth episode, ‘Dalek’, written by Robert Shearman. ‘This was the one we’d all been waiting for,’ wrote Charlie Catchpole in the Daily Express, and the story of the Doctor (played by Christopher Eccleston) encountering the last surviving Dalek in the universe, now trapped in a private collection of space artefacts, was generally considered to have been a success, though there were qualifications. ‘For thirty pant-shittingly wonderful minutes, BBC1’s new Doctor Who was the best thing on telly. Ever,’ announced Ian Hyland in the Sunday Mirror. ‘Then they went and spoilt it with a load of symbolic, sentimental, one world, one universe, war-what-is-it-good-for nonsense.’
Certainly the sequence that saw the Dalek infuse itself with the DNA of the Doctor’s companion, Rose (Billie Piper), and thereby experience emotion, as well as the opening up of the casing to reveal the organic creature within, went far beyond anything that Nation himself had ever written. But it wasn’t out of character. ‘Destiny of the Daleks’ had failed to convince because it treated the creatures as simple robots, losing sight of the organic life-form inside the metallic shell; ‘Dalek’ paid due respect to the fact that these were sentient beings, aware of what they had lost in their artificial evolution. Their nature as the embodiment of hate-fuelled evil is enhanced by the possibilities opened up by Shearman’s script, and adds to Nation’s legacy.
There were other elements that also made for happy memories of the past. The Doctor’s description of the Daleks as ‘the ultimate in ethnic cleansing’ was an appropriate updating of Nation’s invocation of the neutron bomb in the first serial: current political imagery had always been part of the story. There was something pleasingly nostalgic too about the way that Mediawatch-UK, the latest incarnation of the National Viewers’ and Listeners’ Association set up by Mary Whitehouse, objected to the episode even before it was broadcast. And still there was the great mystery of why the Daleks remained so attractively frightening for children. Russell T. Davies, who had earlier written the acclaimed series Queer as Folk and who, as overseer of the new series, was instrumental in bringing Doctor Who back to the screen, was asked about their appeal and simply shrugged: ‘It’s a bit like asking “why is the dark scary?” I don’t know. It just is.’
As Doctor Who went from strength to strength, spawning another great outbreak of merchandising spin-offs for the programme and for the Daleks themselves, attention turned to another of Nation’s creations, and in November 2008 a six-part revival of Survivors began airing on BBC1. It wasn’t quite a remake, for the rights had been acquired to Terry Nation’s novel rather than to the original series, but the essence remained the same, merely updated to a world even more dependent on technology than it had been thirty years earlier: this time, the collapse of the mobile phone network causes deep disquiet.
The changes that were made revealed intriguingly how television had adjusted its perception of society over the past two decades. Abby is still in search of her son, Peter, but he’s absent from home not because he’s away at public school, but because he’s on a school field trip; Tom Price is a convicted criminal rather than a comic tramp, for homelessness was now seen in a much more concerned light; Greg Preston is played by a black actor, and two Muslim characters are added. Arthur Wormley has disappeared, since no one would any longer believe in a trade union leader having any political authority, and is replaced by Samantha Willis, a government minister who makes the last official broadcast before the power shuts down, promising a swift restoration – in the characteristic terminology of the New Labour era – of ‘your government’. And Jimmy Garland has changed entirely; he’s still trying to get back in his house, but there’s no aristocratic title, no Boys’ Own celebration of adventure, no glamour; instead he comes across, in the words of Andrew Billen in The Times, as ‘a raving, grimacing maniac’.
Created and (mostly) written by Adrian Hodges, the series achieved respectable viewing figures and returned for a second six-week season in early 2010, before being cancelled. By this stage, there was little left resembling Nation’s original work, and nothing that quite matched the high standards set by the first episode of season one – which also happened to be the one that most closely followed Nation’s template.
There was a certain irony that, after all those years of trying to get remakes of his work on to American television, it was Nation’s old employers at the BBC who ended up reviving Doctor Who and Survivors after his death. But then, even with the controversial management reforms in the early 1990s of John Birt, the director general, and Marmaduke Hussey, chair of the board of governors (the pair of them famously denounced as ‘croak-voiced Daleks’ by playwright Dennis Potter), the corporation remained a more open institution than the American broadcasters, more willing to take the occasional risk.
The truth was that Nation was never temperamentally suited to the world of the American networks. He was in his element when sitting at a typewriter, creating absurdly difficult situations and resolving them. When he tried moving into a more executive role, he required the support of a trusted colleague – Dennis Spooner on The Baron, Brian Clemens on The Avengers – if he wasn’t to find himself struggling to keep his head above water, as when he was both script editor and associate producer on The Persuaders!. And the experience of American television was harder than anything he had encountered in Britain. ‘I’m not sure I want to work at this level,’ he admitted in 1989, ‘because it’s a killer level. I find I look for a little more ease now, I look for a little gentler way of life.’ There was still the same dream – ‘I’d also love, as a Brit, to have a smash-hit American show’ – but he knew that it was becoming increasingly unlikely. ‘I don’t know whether a writer ever retires,’ he reflected in 1995. ‘I’ve not written anything recently, that’s true. If I could just raise the energy level a little, there’s so many things I want to do.’
By now, though, he was ill with emphysema, assumed to be the consequence of his long smoking habit. And although he spoke about wanting to write a Blake’s 7 novel to continue the story from the end of season four, he knew that it wasn’t going to happen. Just as he wasn’t suited to being an executive, he lacked the single-minded application to write a convincing full-length novel. In any event he was aware that time was running out and, as he said, with self-conscious irony: ‘You can’t live with past triumphs.’
It had been a long, successful and influential career, centring on that fifteen-year period from ‘The Daleks’ to Blake’s 7. The move to America had, in professional terms, been a mistake, resulting in an equally long period that proved unproductive and frustrating, but there were, by the end of his life, clear signs that his work was not going to be forgotten. Anyway, he had at least got there, he had made it to the Hollywood that he had dreamed of when he was a child back in South Wales. And he surely would have found something very satisfying about the fact that, just a few hundred yards from the street where he grew up in Llandaff, there now stands Broadcasting House, home of BBC Wales, the company that produces the new incarnation of Doctor Who and its associated works. Exactly fifty years after Nation had been obliged to leave Cardiff to seek his fame and fortune in London, the revival of Doctor Who ensured that writers and actors, directors and designers would be making the same journey in reverse.
Terry Nation died in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles on 9 March 1997. He was sixty-six years old.