Terry Nation’s problems on Survivors started with the selection of a producer for the series. The Incredible Robert Baldick had been produced by Anthony Coburn, and Nation discussed the new project with him, since it too was originally intended for the Drama Playhouse slot. As it turned out, however, that strand didn’t come back for a fourth season, and anyway Survivors rapidly progressed beyond the level of a pilot into a fully fledged series. Coburn left for other shows, and in his place came Terence Dudley, who had earlier produced series such as Cluff and The Men from Room Thirteen, though his most recent and relevant success had been Doomwatch, several episodes of which he also wrote.
Perhaps it was Dudley’s aspirations to writing that helped sour the relationship with Nation, for he came to the series with very definite ideas about how it should be shaped, and few of them matched the original vision. ‘I fell out instantly with the producer, Terence Dudley,’ remembered Nation. ‘He didn’t see it at all. Not at all.’ The problems, he said, began very early on, and he used to cite a pre-production meeting at which Dudley insisted that, in the event of such a massive disaster, the BBC would continue to broadcast. This argument was, in Nation’s view, indicative of the man’s inability to grasp the concept of the series fully, though one might feel that he exaggerated the level of what he viewed as naivety. Dudley’s point was not entirely fanciful, as Nation, to whom the radio had been so important during the war, might perhaps have recognised. A couple of years after Survivors, the government and the BBC began working together on plans for how to respond to a nuclear attack, and even got as far as scripting the initial announcements: ‘This is the Wartime Broadcasting Service,’ it was to begin. ‘This country has been attacked with nuclear weapons ...’ It was not unreasonable to assume that, faced with civil disorder following a deadly pandemic, the government would see broadcasting as being among its highest priorities, an essential part of keeping alive at least the illusion of authority.
Nation evidently won the argument, for the BBC is conspicuous by its absence in the series, but it didn’t set the two men off on a good footing. And others involved in the series noticed that Dudley was not a man who easily forgot disputes. Carolyn Seymour, around whose character of Abby the entire first season revolved, ran into problems with the producer even at the stage of contract negotiations. ‘It was a tortuous affair, because I was pushing the envelope a little bit and we were asking for a little bit more money than they were used to paying,’ she recalled. ‘That was one of the problems, that he lost ground, and he had to give up some things he didn’t want to give up.’ Others too fell foul of Dudley, including Clive Exton and the writer Michael J. Bird, who had been commissioned to write three scripts but left the project after the first episode he submitted was rejected.
From Nation’s point of view, a large part of the problem was that there was no script editor to act as a buffer between himself and the producer. Officially he himself was being retained as script consultant, but – isolated in Lynsted Park, with a heavy writing schedule – his ability to shape the continuing storylines was extremely limited. And while Dudley might have conceded the point about the BBC, much of what emerged on screen was determined by him. It was significant, for example, that the discovery at the end of ‘A Beginning’ that Abby Grant’s son Peter is probably still alive was not in Nation’s original script for the episode. Its late addition allowed the season to end on an optimistic note, as well as preparing the ground for Abby’s departure from the series altogether, a development which Carolyn Seymour believed was already in Dudley’s mind long before she learnt of it.
The disputes with Dudley meant that for Nation the creation of Survivors was not a particularly happy experience, and the bitterness was evident in interviews given years later. ‘He wanted to get the electricity turned back on. That was their main aim by the third episode. I could have fought him, and I could have won on every possible occasion, but I was trying to write the episodes, and it gets so exhausting to fight every inch of the way.’ Nation was probably overstating his ability to emerge victorious from any conflicts, but the note of weariness was genuine enough. Pennant Roberts, who directed five episodes of the first season, remembered him chiefly for his absence: ‘He was basically quite a shy man, who kept himself very much to himself down in Kent.’
Nation’s enthusiasm for the series was not increased when Brian Clemens initiated a court case against him for allegedly stealing his idea in the first instance. While the two men were working together on The Avengers and And Soon the Darkness, said Clemens, ‘I came up with this idea called The Survivors, about a holocaust that destroyed the world and what the people did. I couldn’t get it off the ground with London Weekend Television, but then I should think a year later, suddenly I read in the papers that the BBC is doing a series called The Survivors, and it was absolutely my idea. What pissed me off – I didn’t mind him stealing the idea – was that he was so lazy he didn’t even change the title!’ To make matters worse, he thought the series that emerged did no justice to the concept at all: ‘They did it ever so badly. It became a sort of tract on how to survive. Oh, it was awful.’
The lawsuit was brought in the spring of 1975 and dragged on for nearly a year before, in May 1976, Clemens decided that the only beneficiaries were going to be the lawyers and he abandoned the case. ‘After I spent a few thousand pounds, I realised it was a bottomless pit,’ he said. ‘I pulled away.’ Since it never reached a full court hearing, it is impossible to know what Nation’s defence against the accusation of plagiarism would have been, but one can perhaps assume that he would have been able to cite large parts of his own previous writing to demonstrate that Survivors fell clearly into that body of work, from the title onwards. (Though it should be noted that there is no copyright in titles.)
Nor was the idea itself particularly original. Many post-apocalyptic fictions had concerned themselves with the fate of human society in the wake of near-extinction, from Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague (1912) through George R. Stewart’s award-winning Earth Abides (1949) to John Christopher’s The Death of Grass (1956) and John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids and The Chrysalids, traces of all of which can be seen over the course of the series, whether deliberately or not. Indeed the estate of John Wyndham might have had cause to look quizzically at the series, for there are some very obvious nods to The Day of the Triffids, which also featured the proliferation of small communities in the wake of an apocalyptic event, an attempt to impose martial law by the Emergency Council for the South-Eastern Region of Britain, and a widespread belief that help would come from across the Atlantic: a ‘Micawber fixation on American fairy godmothers’. Much of the thinking articulated by Nation is foreshadowed in the same book. ‘There won’t always be these stores,’ a character explains, arguing that the survivors must go ‘back and back and back until we can – if we can – make good all that we wear out’. Wyndham’s novel ends with a colony of survivors on the triffid-free Isle of Wight looking across the Solent at a land under enemy occupation. Similarly the suggestions of empty streets in Survivors are familiar from H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, while the 1953 film version of that book featured a church full of the dead, an image that recurred in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt: ‘The church was crammed from end to end with kneeling figures,’ notes Malone the narrator, one of only five people to have survived the end of humanity (as it seems). ‘It was a nightmare, the grey, dusty church, the rows of agonised figures, the dimness and silence of it all.’
Given the literary precedents, alongside Clemens’s feeling that ‘I didn’t think they made the series I wanted to do,’ it’s not easy to see how a charge of copyright infringement could have been made to stick, even if he were correct that Nation was inspired by his concept. But the episode ruptured the friendship between the two men, and they remained estranged for nearly two decades until Clemens brought the dispute to an end in the mid 1990s. ‘I wrote to Terry and said: Look, I want to bury the hatchet; we were always good friends before. And he wrote back and said: God, I wish I’d written this letter to you.’ They continued to correspond for the last couple of years of Nation’s life.
Combined with the disputes with Terence Dudley, this distressing affair did little to endear Nation to the idea of further work on Survivors. Even before the first season ended in July 1975, a second had been commissioned and Dudley was writing to Nation, discussing which actors should be retained: ‘All the regulars are available with the exception of Carolyn Seymour. Her availability in future is very much in doubt and I think we should forget about her.’ The final plot twist of ‘A Beginning’ had suggested that Abby wouldn’t be making a reappearance, but the decision still came as a kick to Seymour: ‘It was a shock, it was a blow, I certainly was horrified.’ Abby was not the only casualty of Dudley’s new approach to the series. ‘Thinking hard about Garland,’ he wrote to Nation, ‘I feel that the character has limitations and that he will counter audience identification. I think the “Roger Moore” cardboard is ideal for the hokum series with the stylish tongue in cheek approach. Audiences for this sort of thing escape in fantasy and are voyeurs of the antics of superman.’ Arguing that the bulk of the correspondence he received from viewers was about how they identified with the everyman normality of the characters, Dudley dumped Garland and began to shape the future direction of the series so that it depicted a more settled farming community.
At this stage, in late 1975, Nation was still officially part of the team. He withdrew from the role of script consultant, but was pencilled in to write four episodes in the forthcoming season, and was even commissioned to write two of them, with half-fees being paid upfront. And the letters from Dudley continued to arrive, all of them perfectly friendly and courteous, though they remained unanswered. It wasn’t until January 1976, when the delivery dates for the two scripts had passed with no sign of anything having been written, that Dudley allowed himself to express his true feelings in an internal memo. ‘In my judgement Terry Nation can’t give the programme the sort of scripts it needs at present. He is unhappy writing “character” and “atmosphere” which is the requirement,’ he claimed, adding a hint of his own frustrations from their previous collaborations: ‘I don’t want, as in Series One to commission scripts from him that have to be drastically rewritten by me.’ There is little to support such a claim – save that infelicitous resolution to Abby’s quest tacked on to the end of the first season – but it was an indication of how strained the relationship had become. The commissioned episodes were cancelled, with an agreement that the advances already paid were to be recovered from the royalties due to Nation over the coming season.
A further twenty-five episodes of Survivors were made over the course of two seasons in 1976 and 1977. Nation had no involvement at all, though he was, of course, still being paid his format fees. (Roger Hancock’s negotiating was paying dividends; when the BBC suggested a payment of £175 per episode for the third season, Hancock held out for and won £200 – even allowing for inflation, this represented an increase of nearly 40 per cent on the first contract.) With both Nation and Clive Exton having left, the only writer to survive was Jack Ronder, his scripts augmented by contributions from Don Shaw, Martin Worth and Roger Parkes – all of whom had worked on Doomwatch – as well as an episode apiece from Roger Marshall, a veteran of The Avengers, and from Terence Dudley himself, who was unquestionably the most influential figure in the series, the one constant factor running through all three seasons. There were also three scripts by the actor Ian McCulloch, whose character, Greg Preston, emerged as the most powerful figure in the absence of Abby. ‘I was happier with the same format and the same style that Terry Nation did,’ he was later to say. ‘It was an action adventure as far as I was concerned, and when it got into what I consider the feebler plots, the more philosophical plots, I found them drawn out, boring, banal.’ Convinced that the show had lost its way, he was reluctant to return for the third season at all, and only agreed to appear in the two episodes that he scripted, though his presence looms large throughout.
The post-Nation Survivors had a very different feel to the original. It opened with a fire that wrote out some of the peripheral characters, and saw Greg and the now-pregnant Jenny set up a new community with Charles Vaughan (Dennis Lill), a former architect who had appeared in one of Jack Ronder’s episodes the previous year. Much of this second season was concerned with the maintenance of their settlement, the practical difficulties of establishing a sustainable technology, and there was noticeably less action than in Nation’s work. But certain episodes, such as ‘The Chosen’ and ‘New Arrivals’, both written by Roger Parkes, continued to explore alternative social structures and the nature of leadership. There was also Ronder’s excellent two-part story ‘Lights of London’, depicting a rat-infested city, where five hundred survivors huddle in the Oval cricket ground and – following the example of The Day of the Triffids – plan their escape to the Isle of Wight. They are ruled over by yet another power-hungry leader, Manny (Sydney Tafler), and the blackouts and the scenes set in Tube tunnels evoke the Blitz in a way that even Nation should have appreciated. Manny ends his broadcasts to his people with the catchphrase ‘TTFN’, the sign-off popularised by the charlady Mrs Mopp in Tommy Handley’s ITMA, even though his authoritarianism clearly places him on the wrong side of such imagery.
The third season took another turn again. Greg had departed for Norway in a hot air balloon at the end of the previous year, promising to return, and the survivors moved on from the settlement they had so painstakingly established, spending most of the twelve episodes on the road. Again there were some strong and celebrated episodes: Don Shaw’s ‘Mad Dog’ and Ian McCulloch’s ‘The Last Laugh’, in the latter of which Greg becomes infected with smallpox and acts as a kind of suicide bomber, harbouring within himself a biological weapon as he inveigles his way into the camp of yet another warlord. But there was also a certain lack of focus, as well as a not entirely convincing restoration of elements of pre-plague civilisation: steam trains are put back in action, it is discovered that the Scottish Highlands have been largely unaffected by the infection and, in the final episode, the National Grid is switched back on to provide power.
The series did, however, end on a suitably intriguing note as the laird, McAlister (Iain Cuthbertson), sits down to a romantic candlelit dinner with his housekeeper, candles now being once again an optional extra rather than a necessity. The implication is that, after all the discussions on social organisation and all the different structures we have encountered, it is the quasi-feudal society of the pre-plague Highlands that has survived best of all. It was an image not far removed from Nation’s evident attraction to Jimmy Garland’s hereditary claim, but if he recognised it as such, it did nothing to assuage his scorn at the restoration of power with the switching on of the hydro-electric plant. ‘They seemed to think that if you get the electrical systems turned back on, everything would be just hunky,’ he mocked. ‘Which was silly.’
By now the series had departed entirely from Nation’s original vision. Despite his comments about the need to relearn basic technologies, the truth was that he wasn’t much interested in the practicalities of how that would work, but rather in the psychology and human drama of surviving the collapse of civilisation. He toyed with the principles of self-sufficiency without being committed to exploring the implications. Beyond that, his concerns lay in humanity’s instinctive drive to ensure the continuation of the species, as opposed to the survival of individuals. The idea of getting the lights switched back on had no appeal to him, however symbolic it seemed in the mid 1970s, with the power cuts of the Heath years still fresh in the country’s memory. Nation’s model was essentially that of the western, the struggle against nature and the attempt to establish a morality in a lawless land.
His conception of how the story might have developed was hinted at in the novel he wrote based on the first season, which was published in 1976. Not strictly a novelisation, since Nation had no access to the episodes written by Ronder and Exton or to the characters developed therein, it opens with an extended treatment of the first three instalments, before diverging sharply from the television narrative. The core of the book, however, remains the tale of Abby Grant. In this context it should be acknowledged that having Abby as the central figure was an unusual development at the time, a fact of which Nation was justifiably proud. ‘I’m one of the few people who had an adventure show with a woman as the lead,’ he noted in retrospect, ‘because I saw she was mother, she was the future, she was all of those things.’ At the time, perhaps reflecting on his own limited experience of self-sufficiency at Lynsted Park, he argued that the choice of a female protagonist was a simple recognition of reality: ‘Women are better survivors than men. They are tougher than men physically and psychologically.’ Carolyn Seymour shared much the same perspective. ‘I become a matriarch because I’m the only one with a sense of purpose,’ she told the press. ‘It’s very good propaganda for Women’s Lib, and I’m all for that – in a gentle way.’
But while the central characters remain strong, there is in the novel no significant development, despite the extra space available. As a television writer, and as a devotee in childhood of the thriller genre, Nation remains wedded to action and dialogue, allowing little scope for interior depictions of his characters; we seldom know what they think, only what they express in words to others. Perhaps the one exception is Greg, whose reluctance to commit himself is more convincing on the page, and who does emerge as a more believable figure. His detachment, his sense of relief at having unwanted responsibilities lifted from his shoulders by the plague, is more thoroughly fleshed out, but again this tends to be through his own words, with even the smallest changes resonating. ‘I was wrong, Jeannie,’ he says to the dead body of his wife, who has perished in the epidemic. ‘I thought you were the sort of bitch who would survive just to spite me.’ The word ‘bitch’ was not in the television script and adds considerable weight to his comments, even though it remains an unlikely thought to articulate aloud to a corpse.
It is not a wholly successful book. Too episodic, too reliant on dialogue, it largely confirms Nation’s own assessment: ‘I don’t come easily to prose, I don’t find prose an easy form to write in.’ Even in the moments when the writing almost breaks free from its origins to achieve its own identity, there are still traces of the staccato rhythms of a television script:
Some roads had almost vanished, and passage along many was all but impossible. Weeds and saplings and briar buried the land and what stood on it. Only the small pockets of cultivated ground around the communities remained. Like islands in a rising green sea. The survivors found the limits of their worlds at the edges of their small holdings. They ate, and they worked. And they worked to eat. The demands of maintaining that cycle allowed them little else.
Even so, there are good things about the book. The tone throughout is low-key and unsensational, despite the much more pessimistic – or, one might argue, realistic – narrative. Vic Thatcher, left abandoned in the quarry with his legs crushed, dies alone, rather than being found alive months later, while Abby carries out euthanasia on a member of the community with terminal cancer, and other survivors resort to cannibalism: ‘When there was nothing left, some conquered their disgust at eating human flesh and lived on.’ Most shocking of all, Jimmy Garland, whose war with Knox is recounted in the novel (though at a different point in the timeline) doesn’t live long enough to ride in to whisk Abby away, but instead dies of a wound that turns gangrenous. In a way of which Terence Dudley would probably have approved, his death isn’t even depicted directly, but only mentioned in passing by Abby later on. Meanwhile the threat posed by Arthur Wormley’s National Unity Force looms larger than it did on television; the community has to learn to live with the ever-present risk of attack.
This grim note, apart from being closer to Nation’s original concept, is also indicative of a general attempt to make the material more adult, in contrast to the television version, which had been criticised by some as juvenile. (‘It goes down very well indeed with children,’ noted Nancy Banks-Smith in the Guardian.) That hadn’t been Nation’s intention, but he had been restricted by the pre-watershed scheduling and by conventions over which he had no control. Most absurdly, the BBC had refused to allow a shot of Abby and Jimmy Garland in bed together, since they weren’t married, reflecting a moralistic attitude that permeated British broadcasting at the time; in 1977 the ITV sitcom Robin’s Nest had to get special dispensation from the Independent Broadcasting Authority to show an unmarried couple living together. It was perhaps in retaliation that the novel shows Abby, alone in her bed, masturbating to the image of Garland, though it’s not a very convincing passage. Survivors was already Nation’s first serious work to attempt a love interest; venturing into sex scenes was perhaps a step too far.
There is, however, one major exception to the harsh tone, a genuine lightening of the original. Clive Exton’s episode ‘Law and Order’ had depicted the community celebrating May Day with a party, after which the former tramp Tom Price rapes and murders one of the women while he’s drunk. He then frames a simple-minded resident, and the rest of the community try the man in an ad hoc court, find him guilty and execute him, before some of them discover their mistake. It’s a shocking development, coming completely out of the blue and seemingly out of character, and Nation subsequently provided Price with an element of redemption, having him die a heroic death in ‘The Future Hour’. In the novel, without benefit of Exton’s plot, there is no rape, no murder and no need for self-sacrifice. Instead Nation lets Price live on and takes a much more generous view of the character. Far from being a killer, Price is here simply a roguish Welsh fantasist, ‘a man to whom lies came more easily than truth’. He’s always keen to seek refuge in fiction, so that when he reveals his knack for snaring rabbits and wins the praise of the others, he can’t help but spin yarns about having been the head gamekeeper to Lord Glamorgan, with twenty men working under him. And when the group decide to arm themselves, he begins to reminisce ‘about his past campaigns, his heroism and the medals that recognised it’. He remains an outsider in the group, but he is at least tolerated and accepted.
Nation was later to explain that Price was based on a man he knew in his local village, a part-time poacher who did some casual cash-in-hand work, who he thought would find a niche, however catastrophic the situation: ‘this guy had scrounged around, he’d done an odd job here, an odd job there, he’d steal something, and he was a survivor right from the beginning.’ But there were also surely memories of Nation’s own Welsh childhood, his preference for a good tale over prosaic reality, almost as though he were imagining an alternative reality for himself in which he never became successful, never discovered a legitimate outlet for his storytelling. As Price picks up a flash car in the immediate aftermath of the plague, he imagines the response it would have elicited from his old acquaintances. ‘Damn! Look at that! There’s old Pricey in a bloody Rolls-Royce!’ he says aloud with, we are told, ‘his Welsh ancestry strong in his voice’.
The biggest change made in the novel, however, lies in the ending. Five years on from the advent of the plague, Abby has come to the conclusion that the British climate simply isn’t amenable to the level of subsistence farming required, let alone to building something more durable. So she proposes to the group that they relocate: ‘I want to cross into Europe and move down to the Mediterranean. Probably Italy.’ It’s an argument whose foundations had been laid by Greg some time earlier: ‘In this country we have only about six months when the ground is workable. In that time we have to grow enough to eat day by day, enough to set aside for a six-month winter. Provide winter feeding for our stock. Collect fuel. There’s no way it can be done.’ However daunting the prospect of such a move, the alternative of remaining, with the ever-present danger from Wormley’s NUF, proves too much for the survivors and, reluctantly, they agree to the undertaking. And so the community uproots itself and begins the long trek to the south coast, where they hope to find the means to cross to France.
There, just outside Dover, with most of the group having already sailed, Abby finally comes face-to-face with her long-lost son Peter, for whom she has spent so much time searching in the wake of the outbreak. And, before he realises who she is, he shoots her dead.
If it’s a somewhat melodramatic conclusion to the novel, as fanciful in its way as Garland’s appearance on a white charger, it is at least in tune with the sense of hopelessness and the haphazard violence that has punctuated the whole story. Abby’s journey began when she woke up from her bout of the disease to find her husband dead (a particularly severe shock in the screen version, since it meant the loss of the ever-likeable Peter Bowles), and death has stalked her ever since, an unpredictable interruption to life. Nation’s artistic vision was becoming increasingly dark, although – given his chosen medium of populist television – the bleakness manifests itself in a slightly different manner to that of much contemporary fiction.
There weren’t, for example, the moral ambiguities and confusions of John le Carré’s novels, where the well-intentioned find themselves corrupted by the actions demanded of them. Rather Nation’s work still presents an essentially black-and-white world where there is little confusion about who are the good guys and who the villains, even if the baddies are more subtly written than before. This is not a post-apocalyptic world in which society and community collapse altogether – as in Barry Hines’s television drama Threads (1984), where even language falls apart in the aftermath of a nuclear attack – for there is still an optimism about humanity and morality. But there is also an abandonment of any suggestion that virtue might bring its own reward. The senseless brutality and bloodshed were almost reminiscent of the new generation of horror writers led by James Herbert, author of the best-selling The Rats (1974), The Fog (1975) and The Survivor (1976), except that in Herbert’s novels it is always clear who the victims are going to be; characters appear, have their life histories sketched in and are dispatched within the space of a few pages. With Nation there is no such certainty who will survive. A hero is as likely to die suddenly as a villain, and Abby Grant’s death, just at the moment of escape to a better future, just when she has discovered that her son has survived against all the odds, is the most startling manifestation of the theme.
Rather less convincing is the way in which the departure for Europe feels as though it’s tagged on to the end. The whole episode is covered in barely thirty pages, and one can’t help thinking that it would have made for a more coherent narrative if the group had embarked upon the project earlier, if the trek towards sunnier climes had been explored at greater length. Or, indeed, if they had got further than merely crossing the Channel, which was, Nation explained in later interviews, how he’d wished the story to develop. ‘Really what I wanted was to have them go back to the valley of the Indus. They have to go across the English Channel to France, and then find some way across the Mediterranean, and this was on a gigantic scale which we could never do on television.’
He was right, of course, that it was entirely impractical for a television drama, but he spoke too about writing ‘the novel of the length I wanted to do’. And this certainly was within his control, though not perhaps within his powers, for a book on the epic scale he was suggesting was an undertaking of a very different nature to anything he’d ever written. What did emerge was a hybrid that didn’t convince as a novel in its own right, while being too far removed from the television storyline to satisfy many viewers. By sticking too closely for too long to the scripts he had already written, by staying with the objectivity of television rather than the subjectivity of prose fiction, Nation sacrificed the integrity of a novel that could have stood alone.
The book was published in hardback by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (who were to have published The Incredible Robert Baldick) and in paperback by Futura, and sold well enough to merit a sequel, particularly in light of the television series being commissioned for a third season. Survivors: Genesis of a Hero emerged in 1977, though it had no involvement from Nation himself, and was written instead by John Eyers. Unable to use the continuing story from television, he starts at the point where Nation’s book left off, on the beach near Dover where Peter Grant has just shot his mother. The narrative then follows Peter as he rises through the ranks of the National Unity Force, before he falls foul of court politics and defects to a rival society in Wales. It’s an entertaining romp through post-industrial barbarism, but has nothing to do with the television series or with Nation’s conception. (Only one other book ever appeared under the name of John Eyers, a spin-off from the ITV series Special Branch titled In at the Kill, published in 1976, and it is generally accepted that it was a pseudonym.)
Nation’s awareness of his own limitations when it came to writing prose, however, needs to be balanced by the success of the only other novel he wrote. Rebecca’s World, published in his annus mirabilis of 1975 – when ‘Genesis of the Daleks’ and the first season of Survivors also made their appearance – was a children’s book, named for his daughter, to whom, he announced, he was assigning all the royalties. It’s the tale of a small girl named Rebecca, who is accidentally transported via a transmitter beam to another planet, rather in the manner of Lewis Carroll’s Alice falling down a rabbit-hole. The world on which she finds herself has four suns and a wide variety of wildlife, including Silkies (bat-like creatures that spin silk as they fly), Swardlewardles (who breathe out laughing gas to render their prey helpless) and Splinter Birds (who remove splinters from people). Sadly, however, there is little now for the latter to do, for this is a world in which all the trees have been chopped down in order to feed the vast furnaces making the glass out of which the buildings, and most other things besides, are constructed. This has had unfortunate consequences for the population, since it turns out that it was only the presence of the trees that kept at bay a tribe of evil, shapeless monsters called GHOSTS (the capitalisation is Nation’s own). Without the trees the GHOSTS can now prey on the people at will.
Rebecca soon acquires three companions: a deeply depressed man named Grisby, who has a Hancock-like obsession with his feet (they are, he insists, ‘the sorest pair of throbbers in the entire history of feet’), an unemployed spy named Kovak, who believes he’s a master of disguise, though he always remains instantly recognisable, and a would-be superhero named Captain ‘K’, whose only power comes from his possession of the last stick of wood on the planet that isn’t owned by the all-powerful Mr Glister. It was the Glister family who discovered how to make glass and who now control the whole planet. When the magical power of the trees became apparent, the Glisters had the last remaining specimens chopped down and the wood made into planks, from which were constructed GHOST shelters. Now, whenever the GHOSTS attack, the populace swarm into these shelters to hide, for which privilege they are charged by the grasping and wicked Mr Glister. ‘Nature has endowed me with all the finest qualities a man can have,’ he brags. ‘I am a splendid liar, a marvellous cheat and a magnificent bully. I have made myself rich by being vicious and cruel.’ There is, however, one small ray of hope. A map exists showing the location of one last tree, hidden deep in the Forbidden Lands, guarded by GHOSTS and accessible only by passing through a series of challenges and trials. And so Rebecca and her three new friends set out in the hope of saving the world.
Apart from the echoes of the Alice stories, there are also nods to The Wizard of Oz – a small girl and her three ill-assorted companions set off on a quest, albeit from a glass city rather than to an emerald one – and there is even a hint of the Daleks when the GHOSTS, believing that they have destroyed the last remaining tree, become hysterical in their demands that the people bow down before them. ‘We are the victors!’ they shriek. ‘The supreme power of this planet!’ And, of course, the theme of a world in which technology has triumphed over nature to the detriment of the inhabitants parallels much of Nation’s thinking in Survivors.
The structure too is recognisably Nation. Ever since ‘The Daleks’, he had regularly used the device of his hero arriving on a planet in the midst of a story and having another character bring him up to speed on the history of the place. Even Survivors had started with the epidemic in full sway, with much of the background sketched in after the fact. The same is true here, as Rebecca’s new friends fill her in on how they got to this parlous position. Similarly the perils and predicaments that they face, as well as the plans they concoct to escape, are characteristic of his work, though, as so often, it is the villain who commands centre stage. Glister is a wonderfully evil creation, a monstrously caricatured capitalist who becomes self-indulgently maudlin when he thinks about the poor. ‘Call me silly and sentimental if you will,’ he tells Rebecca with a sob in his voice, ‘but one day I hope that everybody in this world will be penniless, hungry and in rags. With poverty on that scale I could love them all.’
The book was well received – ‘a pleasant, entertaining and imaginative tale for 8 to 12s’, thought the Daily Express – and in April 1976 it featured on the children’s story-telling series Jackanory on BBC television, read in five fifteen-minute episodes by Bernard Cribbins, who had a decade earlier battled the Daleks in the second Peter Cushing movie. It ran to more than a dozen printings and attracted a great many enthusiastic readers, both among children and teachers, the latter finding that it lent itself admirably to being read aloud to a class. Perhaps it was appropriate that the best prose writing of a man who worked almost exclusively in television was more suited to oral delivery than it was to solitary reading. ‘I’d been reading children’s stories to my daughter and to my son, and I get really very bored with some of them,’ he explained. ‘And I wanted a book that was going to please the adult who read aloud and please the child who was listening to it.’ In common with much of Nation’s work, it continued to find new audiences after his death, being released in 2010 as an audio CD, read by Paul Darrow, while early editions became highly sought after collectors’ items, partly in tribute to the beautiful illustrations by Larry Learmouth.
But if 1975 was mostly a series of triumphs for Nation, he didn’t exactly end the year in style. November saw the broadcast of ‘The Android Invasion’, his first non-Dalek story for Doctor Who in over a decade, and perhaps his least celebrated of all. Its low critical standing is perhaps a little unfair, for it starts tremendously well, with the TARDIS landing on what is assumed to be Earth (‘Oak trees don’t grow anywhere else in the galaxy,’ reasons the Doctor), just outside a picture-postcard village that Sarah Jane Smith recognises as Devesham. Almost immediately the travellers find themselves in an altercation with men who wear white isolation suits and helmets and who shoot with their fingers; they also witness a soldier running off a cliff to his certain death for no apparent reason. Escaping their pursuers, the Doctor and Sarah make their way into the village, only to find it entirely deserted, until a flatbed truck arrives, from which disembark dozens of villagers who behave as though they have been brainwashed. The Doctor goes off to investigate at the nearby Space Defence Centre, leaving Sarah in the local pub, where unfortunately she is discovered – by the very soldier they had earlier seen killing himself. Nor is the Centre immune to the strangeness.
It’s a great first episode, the image of the abandoned English village reminiscent of an episode of The Avengers or, more particularly, one of the best Department S stories, Donald James’s ‘The Pied Piper of Hambledown’. To confirm the impression, the Doctor comments that it’s all a bit like the Mary Celeste, the original reference point for Department S. And while the title of the story, ‘The Android Invasion’, seems to give the game away, there are other details to suggest this might not be simply a reprise of the 1956 movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers; most puzzling of all, it appears that every coin in the vicinity is from the same year. As the story progresses, it turns out that they aren’t actually on Earth at all, but on Oseidon, a planet occupied by a race of rhinoceros-looking aliens named the Kraals, who are planning to invade Earth to escape the rising radiation levels at home, and have built this replica village for the purpose of a training exercise. The invasion of the androids has not yet happened, and it can still be prevented if only the Doctor and Sarah can get back to Earth in time to deliver a warning, a process made more difficult by the fact that they have temporarily lost the TARDIS.
Thereafter, the story degenerates rapidly. Nation returns to his idea from ‘The Chase’ of having an android Doctor, and adds a duplicate Sarah to be on the safe side, both of whom add some nice complications, but much of the remainder of the tale involves a great deal of aimless rushing around. And at the centre of it all is a yawning hole where there should have been an explanation of why the Kraals went to so much trouble recreating Devesham. For once it is revealed that the Kraal plan is to release a virus on Earth that will kill all humans within three weeks (a not unprecedented theme in Nation’s writing), the existence of the imitation village becomes entirely inexplicable. Nor is it clear why the Kraals then proceed to destroy their creation, since they are planning on leaving the planet anyway. The lack of logic is not unique in Nation’s work for Doctor Who – or elsewhere – but here it is actively intrusive; his tendency to leave loose ends, evident as far back as What a Whopper and the Hancock episode ‘The Assistant’, renders the story somewhat meaningless. There are, as ever, some tense and exciting moments, but never before had there been such a sense of him having lost interest in a story quite so quickly and comprehensively. The serial still commanded audiences averaging more than eleven and a half million over the four episodes, far in excess of anything Survivors achieved, and higher than any of the more celebrated stories from the same season, but Kenneth Williams had it about right when he noted in his diary after the second episode: ‘Doctor Who gets more and more silly.’
By this stage, however, Nation was not much concerned by the reception of ‘The Android Invasion’, for he had already pitched a new idea to the BBC, and had been commissioned to write a pilot. And this time, scarred by the experience of Survivors, he was determined to keep a tighter grip on his creation.