Lew Grade was not too badly damaged by the decline of the adventure series, and still had his biggest television hits yet to come: the star-studded biopic of Jesus of Nazareth (1977) and the even more star-studded comedy of The Muppet Show (1976). Both were huge hits in America, increasing ATV’s exports still further, and Grade was promoted from the knighthood to the peerage – becoming Lord Grade of Elstree – in the resignation honours list when Harold Wilson stepped down as prime minister in 1976. By then the action shows were a fading memory, tailing off with The Protectors before one final flourish with the short-lived 1974 series The Zoo Gang.
The Protectors was made by Gerry Anderson (though with human actors rather than puppets), ran for two seasons in 1972–4, and was clearly cast from the same mould as the earlier series, with three agents engaging in the usual adventures around the better known parts of Europe. Its stars were of a higher order than those of, say, The Champions, even if they didn’t reach the same level as The Persuaders!: the American Robert Vaughn, formerly of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Nyree Dawn Porter, best known from The Forsyte Saga as well as having been Sydney Newman’s original choice for the female lead in The Avengers, and the relative newcomer Tony Anholt. But despite the cast, and despite a great theme song – the storming ‘Avenues and Alleyways’, written by Mitch Murray and Peter Callander and sung by Tony Christie – the show suffered from one crucial flaw: it reverted to the half-hour format of the 1950s swashbucklers (minus commercial breaks), leaving no room for any of the guest characters to establish themselves or for any proper plot development. Consequently it looked very much like the poor relation in the ITC family, dreaming of a glamorous lifestyle but having to get by in reduced circumstances. There was no style, no swagger, no humour, just a pale imitation of past glories, the leftovers from the 1960s served up lukewarm to a hung-over nation.
It was, in other words, perfectly suited to the impoverished era in which it appeared. For these were dark days. Many commentators in the early and mid 1970s were agreed that Britain was at best in terminal economic decline and at worst sliding into anarchy, with the trade unions the most commonly cited cause of the country’s problems. In 1972, when The Protectors debuted, a total of 24 million working days were lost in industrial action, double the level of the previous year, and easily the worst tally since 1926, the year of the general strike. The same year unemployment exceeded the million mark, then considered a shockingly high level, and politicians and pop stars alike, from Richard Crossman to David Bowie, busied themselves evoking the imagery of Weimar Germany. And things got worse. During the second season of The Protectors, an international oil crisis combined with an overtime ban, which became a strike, by the National Union of Mineworkers to plunge the country into a fuel crisis, leading the government to declare a state of emergency (the fifth in four years).
Through the winter of 1973–4 new restrictions on everyday activities were introduced on what seemed like an almost daily basis; street lighting was cut, electric heating banned in workplaces and a 50 m.p.h. speed limit introduced on the motorways. At its silliest, the emergency prompted the energy minister, Patrick Jenkin, to suggest that if everyone brushed their teeth in the dark, that might save a bit of fuel; at its most serious, British industry was restricted to a three-day week. Television too was affected, with the government ordering that broadcasting end by 10.30 p.m., though that was often an academic issue for would-be viewers already blacked out by power cuts. But in this quarter at least there was some relief to come; when the prime minister, Edward Heath, called a general election for February 1974 – intended to decide once and for all who was going to govern Britain, Parliament or the trade unions – special dispensation was granted for normal broadcasting to be resumed, so that politicians might breathe the oxygen of publicity. The outcome of that election was a humiliating defeat for Heath and the return to Downing Street of Harold Wilson, a quieter, more sober figure than he had been in his 1960s heyday.
Terry Nation gently lampooned this change in government in a short story, ‘Daleks: The Secret Invasion’, published in 1974 in London’s Evening News. A group of children encounter Daleks at large in London and are ushered into the corridors of power to give their accounts. One of the children recognises and points out the prime minister, leaving her brother perplexed: ‘That’s not Mr Heath.’ She has to correct him. ‘Of course it’s not,’ she says. ‘It’s Mr Wilson’s turn this month.’ As Nation notes drily: ‘Emilie knew about politics.’ She also correctly identifies a man with ‘spectacles and a worried expression’ as the home secretary, Roy Jenkins, though regrettably neither Wilson nor Jenkins is called upon to negotiate with the Daleks. (An encounter between the urbane Jenkins and the profoundly uncivilised Daleks would have been worth seeing.)
The heady days of the 1960s were clearly long since gone, and the country was sufficiently demoralised that it even settled for the low-level thrills of The Protectors, sending the show into the top twenty. Terry Nation wrote four episodes of that second season, and they were far from memorable, though ‘Bagman’ did feature a guest appearance by Lalla Ward prior to her incarnation as Romana in Doctor Who. The best of the episodes, ‘A Pocketful of Posies’, featured Eartha Kitt as a veteran singer on the verge of a big comeback concert, being drugged with mildly hallucinogenic stimulants by her husband and his mistress, who plan to kill her and make it look like the suicide of a madwoman. In moments that hint at the glory days of The Avengers, she starts experiencing hallucinations: a glass of wine disappears, a clock runs backwards, a record player starts playing the nursery rhyme ‘Ring a Ring o’ Roses’, even though there’s no record on the turntable and the machine isn’t plugged in. It could all have been splendidly creepy, but here, given just twenty-five minutes, there was insufficient time to build any real sense of tension or terror.
If The Protectors was little more than a pale echo of the 1960s, Nation had already contributed to a largely unheralded but nonetheless effective elegy to the passing of that decade. As filming on The Avengers came to an end, he and Brian Clemens began planning a screenplay for a movie to be titled And Soon the Darkness. The credits showed the two men as co-writers though, according to Clemens, that didn’t fairly represent the division of labour: ‘We sat down and did this kicking around thing, blocking it out. We finished it on the Friday and I got home and I was so excited that I sat down and wrote the whole damn thing over that weekend.’ The film was directed by Robert Fuest – who had directed Nation’s best episode of The Avengers, ‘Take Me to Your Leader’ – and released in 1970 by Associated British Production Company, the first product of a much trumpeted programme of British releases under the aegis of the established British director Bryan Forbes.
The story takes place in a single afternoon and shows two young nurses from London – Jane (Pamela Franklin) and Cathy (Michele Dotrice) – on a cycling holiday in rural northern France. Early on, the pair discuss the death the previous week of a one-day-old baby in the hospital where they work, and the image of the death of innocence hangs heavy over the rest of the film. Neither girl speaks any French, which is something of a disadvantage since most of the people they encounter speak very little else, and the failure to communicate gradually builds an atmosphere of menace as they cycle on through small, almost deserted hamlets under big, open skies that look increasingly oppressive. ‘Cette route,’ warns a woman at a roadside café: ‘mauvaise réputation, très mauvaise réputation.’ And eventually, now split up after an argument, they discover that a young Dutch tourist was murdered here three years ago. ‘She was young and pretty,’ an unhelpful English woman explains. ‘They always are, I suppose. Loathsome business. It was more than murder, if you know what I mean. Still, she was asking for trouble – alone on the road.’ At one stage they pass through a village named Landron, and Cathy greets it sarcastically: ‘Hey, swinging Landron!’ And the disjunction implied by the comment seems entirely appropriate. Two young women on bicycles wearing skimpy clothing – it looks like a perfect Swinging Sixties image, except that it ends in violence and murder.
In retrospect the location of horror in an idyllic rural setting, the gleeful knocking down of the idea that the countryside might be a refuge from the sins of the city, makes And Soon the Darkness look like a precursor to a theme that was to become very common, with films like Straw Dogs (1971), Deliverance (1972) and The Wicker Man (1973), as well as novels like Thomas Tryon’s Harvest Home (1973). That wasn’t how it was seen at the time, however, and it received a critical mauling. ‘I shall be charitable, and say nothing,’ wrote Derek Malcolm in the Guardian, ‘except that Robert Fuest has made a thriller which has to be seen to be believed.’ John Russell Taylor in The Times was less generous – ‘a would-be thriller of almost unbelievable ineptitude’ – and James Thomas in the Daily Express didn’t even rate the twist in the tail: ‘it has all the surprise and fascination of a rent increase.’ Nor did the movie fare very well at the box office.
At the time of the film’s release, Nation was already engaged in the preproduction schedule for The Persuaders!, and the reviews were of little significance. But as that series ended, and it became clear that the days of the ITC adventurers were coming to a close, there was a renewed need to find work. With nothing obvious on the horizon, he returned to the idea of creating his own series, and began to tout around various proposals.
One of these was The Team, a proposed pilot for a series that would centre on a husband and wife detective partnership. It wasn’t an entirely original concept, for the idea of a married couple having a shared interest in investigating crime had been around since the early days of detective fiction. Irish QC and MP Matthias McDonnel Bodkin wrote books about two separate detectives, Paul Beck and Dora Myrl, before marrying them off in the 1909 novel The Capture of Paul Beck. There was also Busman’s Holiday (1937), the last of Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey books, in which the aristocratic sleuth is joined in his investigations by the former Harriet Vane, who has finally consented to marry him. More directly influential on Nation, one suspects, were Nick and Nora Charles, the heroes of Dashiell Hammett’s 1933 novel The Thin Man, a couple who interrupt their drinking only to engage in yet more witty banter and solve crimes. The story was filmed the following year with William Powell and Myrna Loy, who proved so successful in the central roles that five sequels appeared in the next twelve years. MGM, who made the movies, clearly liked the format and launched a new married couple, Joel and Garda Sloane, in Fast Company (1938), based on the novel of the same title by Harry Kurnitz.
There was, then, considerable precedent for Nation’s pilot for The Team, and there was no reason why it should not have worked. But despite approaches to several television companies, he made no progress. Perhaps the timing was wrong, coinciding too closely with the similar McMillan and Wife, starring Rock Hudson and Susan Saint James, which first aired in the USA in September 1971 and in the UK six months later. Nonetheless the idea did eventually bear fruit, when Brian Clemens returned to it as the basis for ‘K Is for Killing’, a 1974 episode in the second season of his excellent anthology series, Thriller (US title: ABC Mystery Movie.) Gayle Hunnicutt and Stephen Rea starred as Suzy and Arden Buckley and, like And Soon the Darkness, it was co-credited to Clemens and Nation – though Clemens insisted that he didn’t use Nation’s storyline, taking only the essential setup of the married couple.
More immediately productive was a meeting in December 1971, when Nation presented two proposals to Andrew Osborn, head of television drama serials at the BBC: one was a post-apocalyptic series to be titled Beyond Omega, the other an idea for the adventures of a Victorian investigator of the paranormal named Dr Robert Baldick. Both were received positively, and Nation was bursting with energy and eagerness when he wrote to Osborn the day after the meeting: ‘I promise you I’ll make both these series work, not only for myself, but to justify your confidence and enthusiasm.’ After some discussion concerning fees (Associated London Scripts were asking for £1,000 for a pilot script of each, but settled for £750 instead), both pilots were commissioned, Beyond Omega having a delivery date of 31 January 1972 and Robert Baldick of 7 February.
At this point, Nation’s fervour seems to have evaporated a little as he realised the scale of the undertaking to which he had committed himself. Previously he had written to a brief, following a structure already laid down, using central characters who already existed; even the pilot for The Daleks had been based on previous work. Now he was facing an entirely new proposition: the creation from scratch of a programme that was intended to be the foundation for an entire series, sustainable for potentially dozens of episodes. And he was committed to do it not once but twice, in the space of less than two months. Worrying too about how a series of his own creation would work out in practice (how many episodes, for example, would he write himself?), he told Osborn at the beginning of January that he didn’t think he could meet the delivery dates for the two programmes and that it would take till March to get them both finished. That, replied Osborn, ‘is leaving things so late as to almost constitute a crisis so far as we are concerned over production’. It was agreed therefore that the Beyond Omega project be withdrawn, and that Nation should concentrate solely on his script for Robert Baldick. Delivered almost on time, it was immediately accepted, and by June 1972 it was in production.
The title went through various permutations in its early stages, including The Incredible Dr Baldick and The Amazing Robert Baldick, before settling on its final form, The Incredible Robert Baldick. What didn’t change, though, was the name of the protagonist, for Nation had overcome the problem of finding new names for his characters – a familiar chore for all prolific television writers – by borrowing that of a friend. The real Dr Robert Baldick, an Oxford academic specialising in French literature, agreed to his name being used for Nation’s latest creation, apparently amused by the concept of being associated with a fictional character. Unfortunately, however, he died in April 1972, before the programme was broadcast, and although his widow was content for the agreement to be honoured, his son – also named Robert Baldick, and then studying for a PhD – was less happy about his name being used in this context. For several weeks in the summer of 1972, with filming already complete, the younger Baldick was in discussions with the BBC, seeking to have the show retitled and ultimately threatening to obtain a court injunction to achieve this end. While refusing to accept that there truly was a legal case here, Andrew Osborn eventually conceded that, although it was too late to change the pilot, the name would be amended – probably to Baldwick – were a series to develop. In the meantime, the uncertainty had been a major factor in the rescheduling of the programme: originally intended as the first of three shows in a short Drama Playhouse season, due to be shown on 23 August, it was instead placed at the end of the run on 6 September.
At the time, the rescheduling seemed of little significance. The Drama Playhouse strand, broadcast at 8.10 p.m. on Wednesday nights on BBC1, attracted strong audiences and had an excellent track record for launching new programmes. Four of the six pilots previously screened had spawned their own series – Codename, The Regiment, The Befrienders and The Onedin Line – and great hopes were held out for the new season, which included Sutherland’s Law and The Venturers in addition to The Incredible Robert Baldick, all of them produced by Anthony Coburn, who had written the first ever episodes of Doctor Who. And indeed the ratio of winners continued: Sutherland’s Law eventually ran to forty-six episodes spread over five seasons, while The Venturers managed a single season of ten episodes. The Incredible Robert Baldick was less fortunate; despite a repeat screening in February 1974, no follow-up to the pilot was ever commissioned.
The problems started with the programme’s new broadcast date. The Olympic Games, staged that year in Munich, were entering their final week when, just before dawn on 5 September 1972, nine members of the Palestinian terrorist group Black September infiltrated the Olympic Village, shot dead two members of the Israeli team and took a further nine athletes hostage. An increasingly desperate siege lasted all day and finally ended just after midnight, when in a failed rescue attempt all nine hostages were killed together with a West German policeman, as well as five of the gunmen. It was one of the most spectacular terrorist actions the world had thus far witnessed, complete with live footage. For the first time in its history, the Olympic movement suspended competition, instead holding a memorial service to the dead athletes, before resuming in a subdued atmosphere.
British television responded, as it generally does in such situations, by rearranging its schedules in an attempt to show it was aware of the enormity of events. Among the programmes lost in the rush to demonstrate relevance was The Incredible Robert Baldick, its broadcast postponed to a 9.25 p.m. slot on Monday 2 October, where it was sandwiched between the Nine O’Clock News and International Show Jumping from the Empire Pool, Wembley. It was watched by a fair-sized audience of 6.6 million viewers, but it looked a little isolated in the schedules, and undoubtedly suffered from being up against the popular ITV agony-aunt series Kate, then in the midst of its third season, and the might of News at Ten. Whether it would have fared better in its original time slot – taken instead by Sutherland’s Law – is arguable, but the rescheduling certainly didn’t help its cause.
The fact that the show didn’t grow into a series was regrettable, for despite some flaws its premise was eminently sound. Dr Robert Baldick (played by Robert Hardy) is a mid-Victorian scientist of enormous private wealth – presumably inherited, since he’s a baronet living in a manor house in Baldick Park – who is also an independent investigator of mysteries. ‘He cannot resist the inexplicable,’ explains one of his assistants. ‘Almost any happening qualifies for his interest so long as it is out of the ordinary. He’s a man of insatiable curiosity.’ The man adds that his employer prefers to be known as Dr Baldick rather than Sir Robert: ‘After all, he does have the highest scientific qualifications in the country.’ (This is not, it has to be said, Nation’s best writing; even allowing for the necessity of setting the scene and establishing character in a pilot, there is a prosaic quality to it, quite apart from the silliness of those ‘highest scientific qualifications in the country’.) Baldick is accompanied by his valet, Thomas Wingham (Julian Holloway), who happens to be an expert researcher with a sound grasp of archaic languages, and by his gamekeeper, Caleb Selling (John Rhys-Davies), who can bring his knowledge of nature to bear on the case in hand. A thoroughly meritocratic type of Victorian, Baldick treats these two not as servants but as colleagues, albeit junior colleagues who are never quite up to speed, though this is largely because their master shares Sherlock Holmes’s habit of not revealing what he has deduced until after the denouement: ‘All in good time, Thomas, all in good time!’
Armed only with intelligence and enthusiasm, and adorned with the facial hair considered appropriate for the nineteenth century (Caleb has the edge on the others, sporting a pair of sideburns that would have been envied by early 1970s pop stars like Ray Dorset of Mungo Jerry and Trevor Bolder of the Spiders from Mars), the three heroes travel to the site of their investigations in Baldick’s private train, a luxuriously furnished affair known as the Tsar, since it was originally built for Nicholas I of Russia. Their only other companion is a pet owl named Cosmo.
All of this is attractive and appealing, suggesting one of the fifty-seven varieties of Edwardian detective that had recently been collected by Hugh Greene in book form as The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes (1970), a volume which had subsequently inspired the Thames Television series of the same title. Among the characters featured there was William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghost-Finder, who investigated seemingly paranormal events, some of which had rational explanations while others turned out to be supernatural manifestations. Carnacki was the last in a line of psychic doctors dating back to Sheridan Le Fanu’s Dr Hesselius in the 1860s and reaching maturity in the Edwardian era with Algernon Blackwood’s Dr John Silence and others, before starting to look merely quaint and out-of-date in the aftermath of the First World War and the rise of Freudianism. Robert Baldick can be seen as sitting squarely in this now defunct tradition, while also sharing something with William Hartnell’s incarnation of the Doctor: another Edwardian figure intent on bringing his intellect and curiosity to bear on unknown situations.
The pilot episode, ‘Never Come Night’, is similarly promising, with an eclectic blend of Gothic, detective, fantasy and science fiction genres. It starts in Hammer Films style on a dark and stormy night with the death of a servant girl, savagely beaten to death in a ruined abbey. The local squire and the vicar call in Baldick, for this is not the first violent death in the vicinity of the abbey. ‘Local legend has it that the deaths go back into prehistory,’ explains the vicar. ‘There are written records covering the last two hundred years, and documented proof of at least forty-three deaths.’ As he excavates the site, Baldick argues that there is something in the place itself that stores up fear: ‘An accumulation of terror that has festered in men’s minds for all of time and has given this place a real power of evil.’ That power is unleashed on those who venture too near during hours of darkness, manifesting itself in the form of the victim’s personal phobia. The dead servant girl, for example, had a fear of being beaten, thanks to an abusive father, while Baldick himself, terrified of cobwebs since he was a child, finds himself alone at night in the abbey becoming enveloped in a web. (In the original proposal, the vicar also had a fear of snakes, and the squire of leeches.)
Summoning up all his reserves of will, Baldick is able to rationalise his fear and thus overcome it sufficiently that he can carry out his intention of burning the place down. He concludes that the evil here pre-dates humanity, and the suggestion is of a supernatural force, though the final scene opens up an alternative, rational explanation that could take us into the realms of science fiction. For Baldick has discovered, in the course of their digging, a strange object; made of an unknown metal, it comprises some kind of electrical circuit and a keyboard of mysterious design. ‘Something from the past,’ ponders Baldick. ‘Or the future?’
There are elements here reminiscent of Nigel Kneale’s 1958 television drama Quatermass and the Pit: the depiction of a localised evil pre-dating humanity and requiring excavation, the explanation of paranormal events as the product of alien technology, even the deconstruction of place-names. The abbey is set in Duvel Woods, which were originally known as Uvel, the Middle English for evil, just as Hobbs Lane in Quatermass and the Pit was originally Hob’s Lane, Hob being an old name for the Devil. There is too, in this tale of ‘a physical manifestation of a mental condition’, a memory of the house of horrors created by Nation in the Doctor Who story ‘The Chase’, a place that ‘exists in the dark recesses of the human mind’. And, of course, Nation’s recurrent interest in phobias is central to the plot. The fear of cobwebs and spiders expressed by Baldick had been a key part of the original script for ‘The Chase’, with the Doctor explaining to Ian that such phobias derive from early memories: ‘All your life, you have believed that a spider running across your hand is an unpleasant experience. As an intelligent adult, you know it can’t hurt you. Despite that, your earliest childhood memories dominate. You have an unfounded – pre-conditioned – fear of spiders.’ This was dropped from the screened version of ‘The Chase’, but Nation was reluctant to lose anything, and the idea resurfaces in Robert Baldick.
But perhaps the most obvious association in the mind of a modern viewer is with Nigel Kneale’s The Stone Tape, a similar blend of science and the supernatural, in which the walls of an old mansion record the violence that has happened there. Any such resemblance, however, was entirely coincidental. Kneale’s play (directed by Peter Sasdy, who had earlier made ‘The Caves of Steel’ and ‘A Kiss Before Dying’) was not broadcast until Christmas 1972 on BBC2, and had not even been commissioned when Nation delivered his script.
Despite all the potential of the character, the pilot episode didn’t entirely convince. For the most part it was a stylish, well-produced piece. A crane shot of the drive to Baldick Park was impressive enough to have come from an ITC production, while Baldick’s private train – courtesy of the Severn Valley Railway – was shown in all its finery, steaming through the English countryside, almost as though it were a period parody of the luxury cars we had seen in those action hero series. (‘Should add the railway nuts to the horoscope consulters and swell the ratings even further,’ wrote critic Clive James in the Observer.) But there was a strange lack of drama at both beginning and end that fatally undermined the piece. The title sequence was so casual that it had no theme tune and used captions that looked like an amateur slideshow, while what should have been the climactic burning of the abbey was low key to the point of being perfunctory. Nor was the final reveal of the unearthed object from the future given the weight that it deserved, hurried over as though time had got the better of the director.
A more serious difficulty, since those problems could be addressed in later episodes, was the casting of Robert Hardy as Baldick. A respected, highly competent actor, Hardy was solid and believable, but was simply too smooth a presence for a character who needed a fair degree of eccentricity if he was ever going to become an audience favourite. There was insufficient intensity, an absence of quirk, in the depiction. The ghost-finder Carnacki in Thames’s The Rivals of Sherlock Holmes the previous year had been portrayed by Donald Pleasance, and Baldick similarly needed someone rather less emollient than Hardy. Nor did the two sidekicks add sufficient colour to the proceedings, either in the writing or in the acting.
Even so, there was confidence in the project at the BBC, an expectation that a series would result. And in many ways it seemed appropriate for a time when nostalgia was very much in the air. The huge success of The Forsyte Saga, a series made by the BBC in 1967 from the novels by John Galsworthy, had been followed by several other period dramas at the beginning of the new decade, including Upstairs Downstairs and The Onedin Line. It wasn’t just on television, for some of the most iconic 1960s brand names were also reaching back into Britain’s past for inspiration: the Biba fashion label, which had done so much to popularise the mini-skirt, was now finding inspiration in Victoriana and art deco, while the quirky products of Portmeirion Pottery were being replaced by images culled from nineteenth-century illustrations to create the Botanic Garden range, one of the great export successes of the time. Laura Ashley was making a name for herself with romantically rustic clothing designs, and the day was not far off when Edith Holden’s The Country Diary of an Edwardian Lady would become a publishing and marketing phenomenon. The slow death of 1960s idealism was matched by a rise of revivalism in every corner of popular culture, and there was no obvious reason why Baldick should not benefit in the retreat from the present.
Nation spent some time negotiating what his position would be in the event that the show took off. Having learnt from his experience with the Daleks where the real money was to be made in television, he was determined to maximise his earnings should opportunity come knocking again. His contract for the show licensed the format and characters to the BBC in return for a fee of £85 for each episode on which he wasn’t the writer, rising to £100 per episode after the first twenty-six had been made. He reserved the film, publishing and merchandising rights (though the BBC would receive a small cut of these), and he insisted on being appointed series consultant, explaining: ‘This position would simply allow me to have the authority to comment on, make suggestions, to be consulted and generally assist in the development of any series that might result from the pilots. This, I assure you, is no lust for power. It is merely to allow me to have a voice in the progress of the series. After all, no one will care more deeply about the shows than I.’ (This was to become a familiar comment.) It was further determined that the words ‘Series created by Terry Nation’ – a credit to which he had aspired for years – would appear as a single caption in the titles, and would be included in the Radio Times listing. He even signed a separate book deal with the publishers Weidenfeld & Nicolson, though the failure to secure a series meant that the proposed volume never appeared.
The BBC’s decision not to exercise its option was a major setback for Nation. After a decade of writing for other people’s series, it looked in the first months of 1972 as though he had finally broken through with his own project. He had aspired to that credit — ‘Series created by Terry Nation’ – for years and briefly it had seemed to be within his grasp, before again slipping through his fingers. Uncle Selwyn had originally been intended as a pilot, but never got past the single drama stage, The Daleks hadn’t even got that far, and now The Amazing Robert Baldick had similarly failed. The following year, he received yet another commission that never materialised. He was paid by the BBC to write two episodes of a series to be entitled No Place Like Home, set in Ireland with two retired couples, one English and one American. This was talked about as a series of twelve episodes, and the first two scripts – ‘The Accident’ and ‘Everything in the Garden Is Lovely’ – were delivered, sent for rewrites and accepted, before that project too was abandoned.
By then, however, Nation was less concerned, for he was greeted on his return to the BBC fold, nearly seven years on from ‘The Daleks’ Master Plan’, by offers of new work. In April 1972 he was commissioned to produce a Doctor Who storyline, which would become ‘Planet of the Daleks’, and the following month the Beyond Omega proposal was revived under another title; he was offered £750 to write a pilot script for a potential series to be called The Survivors.
That latter commission proved to be the last contract he signed under the auspices of Associated London Scripts. In early 1968 ALS had merged itself with the Robert Stigwood Organisation, though two of the founders, Spike Milligan and Eric Sykes, remained behind and kept the offices at Orme Court. Thereafter it began to drift away from the single business of being an agency. Beryl Vertue, who had represented Nation for so long, was becoming involved in production, working on the 1966 film The Spy with the Cold Nose, written by Alan Galton and Ray Simpson, and then serving as executive producer on Eric Sykes’s The Plank (1967) and the movie version of Till Death Us Do Part (1969), all of which were made by a new sister company, Associated London Films. ‘I stopped being an agent, because I wanted to be a producer,’ she explained. ‘Then in the end we decided we wouldn’t have an agency at all.’ At the start of the 1970s, as Vertue’s interests moved elsewhere, it increasingly fell to Pam Gillis to negotiate on behalf of Nation, but in 1972 he left ALS altogether and became instead the client of Roger Hancock, younger brother of Tony, who had by now formed his own agency; he was to remain here for the rest of his life.
‘Roger was a legend,’ remembered the comedy writer Barry Cryer, who had been represented by Hancock since the mid 1960s. ‘He was very tough – his clients were everything. But he had so many friends. I never heard a bad word about him on a personal level.’ It was an opinion shared by others. ‘Off work, he was very charming, very amusing,’ noted Alan Simpson, while Doctor Who producer Barry Letts, who encountered Hancock from the other side of the negotiating table, recalled him and Nation as a double-act: ‘They played good guy, bad guy. Roger Hancock was a very fierce agent and made sure he got the best, best deal for Terry.’ And Terrance Dicks, who described Hancock as ‘a Rottweiler’, saw the success of the partnership in this meeting of opposites: ‘I think Terry knew he was so easy-going that he had his agent to protect him.’ As Cryer made clear, Hancock’s relationship with his clients was based on absolute trust; Cryer himself never signed a contract, merely shaking hands on a deal that was based on a simple premise. ‘He said: If you get pissed off with me, you walk away. If I get pissed off with you, I walk away.’ That arrangement lasted until Hancock’s retirement.
The benefits to Nation were soon to be manifest in better contracts with the BBC, but the connection with ALS was not entirely at an end. In 1973 Associated London Films produced a new film, a horror comedy titled The House in Nightmare Park, starring Frankie Howerd and co-written by Nation and Clive Exton, the latter also from the ALS stable.
Again, just as the idea for The Team had revisited The Thin Man, so this new venture was rooted in the Hollywood of Nation’s youth, for it came fairly directly from The Cat and the Canary, originally a stage play written by John Willard, but best known as a 1939 film, starring Bob Hope as a wise-cracking, cowardly actor. He and a motley and eccentric collection of family members gather in an old, dark house to hear the reading at midnight of a dead man’s will, and to chase after an inheritance that centres on a fortune in diamonds, hidden on the estate. Over the course of the ensuing night, we discover that there’s a vein of hereditary madness in the family, which might explain why the characters are being killed off one by one. The story had been reworked in 1961 by Robert S. Baker and Monty Berman as What A Carve Up!, with Kenneth Connor and Sid James; the source material here was credited as being Frank King’s novel The Ghoul, which accounted for the setting of the Yorkshire Moors, but the influence of The Cat and the Canary was unmistakable.
So too was it in The House in Nightmare Park, which again featured a rambling, eccentric family gathered in a remote mansion in pursuit of a cache of diamonds hidden somewhere on the estate, as they are successively murdered. Into this situation comes Frankie Howerd as a dreadful Edwardian actor, hired – so he believes – to provide entertainment based on his dramatic readings from Dickens, though it transpires that he too is a member of the family and unwittingly holds the key to the location of the diamonds. Despite its creaky and derivative plot, much of the film is very successful, with some classic Howerd lines. ‘Do I play the piano?’ he says indignantly. ‘Does Paganini play the trumpet?’ Asked how he takes his whisky, he requests ‘just a threat’ of soda. And when he finally discovers the truth about the diamonds, he bends over to explore a secret cavity in the floor and is horrified to see a snake rearing up between his legs: ‘Please make it a crusher not a biter,’ he murmurs. Delivered in Howerd’s most fervent voice, it’s a line that works beautifully at the time, even if it defies rational analysis.
The best moment though comes with the revelation that when the family was stationed in India, they used to have a variety act, Henderson’s Human Marionettes, in which the sibling children dressed as, and behaved like, dolls. Now middle-aged adults, they dress up again for a rendition of their party piece, which is genuinely disturbing. At the end of it one of the brothers, Ernest (Kenneth Griffith), is found dead, stabbed in the back while portraying a golliwog. It’s a sequence that could have come straight from The Avengers, and indeed the film’s director, Peter Sykes, had worked on a couple of episodes for that series, including Nation’s ‘Noon Doomsday’. As well as Griffith, who hadn’t acted in a Nation script since Hancock, the cast included Hugh Burden, Rosalie Crutchley and Ray Milland, who had once been a pupil at the same Cardiff school as Nation. But it was Howerd who dominated the proceedings. It was very much written with Frankie in mind,’ according to Verity Lambert, again the executive producer, while Nation and Exton were credited as the producers. (They even formed a company for the occasion, Extonation, though it did no further business.)
‘I was grateful the film received the first unanimously good press I’d had for a picture in a long, long time,’ remembered Howerd. ‘You expect, naturally, some divergence of opinion, but as I recall it, not one critic panned The House in Nightmare Park.’ He was right; the movie got tremendous reviews. ‘As good an attempt as anyone has made to employ the elusive gifts of Frankie Howerd,’ said David Robinson in The Times; ‘his funniest film role’, agreed the Daily Mirror; while ‘for much of the time’ it had Ian Christie of the Daily Express ‘quite helpless with laughter’. Derek Malcolm in the Guardian thought that the creators had ‘obviously tried for more than routine comedy and have, at least in part, succeeded’, and in the Observer George Melly declared that it was ‘as British as nailing a kipper to the underside of an unsympathetic seaside landlady’s dining-room table’.
There was perhaps an element of nostalgia in this reception. Howerd had first become a star more than a quarter of a century earlier, with Variety Bandbox, and his persona had changed very little in the intervening years, so that he was now a reassuring presence at a time when familiar comforts were much in demand. For Nation, about to embark on some much darker work, it was an unexpected footnote to his career as a comedy writer, his first piece of overt comedy for a decade. It also proved to be his last, but it did earn him some of the best notices of his career.