THE MAN WHO MADE THE DALEKS
Today would have marked the 90th birthday of one of the key players in the history of Doctor Who – the Welshman who created the Daleks, Terry Nation. David Owens pays tribute to the Cardiffian who fashioned a legend
WHEN Doctor Who made a triumphant return to our screens in 2005, it was Cardiff that the sci-fi series chose as the location for its stunning televisual revival.
Doctor Who’s regenesis came exactly half a century after the man who would create the greatest adversary the Doctor has ever faced took his leave of the Welsh capital to seek out his destiny in London – and in doing so launch a legacy that is as keenly felt now as it has ever been.
Although he passed away in 1997, Cardiff-born writer Terry Nation, the man who created the Daleks, is enshrined in Doctor Who history.
For the creations who Nation dubbed his “intergalactic Nazis”, it’s a past that still resonates today.
Nation and his legendary foe live on in the minds and memories of generations who have hidden behind the sofa, out of sight of his villainous creations.
While his genocidal pepper pots brought him notoriety and riches, the lad from the leafy suburb of Llandaff played a much wider role in British broadcasting’s golden age.
As part of the legendary Associated London Scripts, he wrote for Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers, Frankie Howerd and Tony Hancock. And as one of the key figures behind the hugely successful rollicking adventure series of the ’60s and ’70s – including The Avengers, The Saint and The Persuaders – he turned the pulp classics that he was so fascinated with as a boy growing up in Wales into a major British export.
His sci-fi order of merit may have peaked with Doctor Who’s nemesis, but he was also the creator of much-loved cult TV classics Blake’s 7 and Survivors.
Born into a prosperous family on August 8, 1930, Nation’s childhood was surrounded by the outbreak of World War II.
From his parents’ house in Fairwater Grove West he heard the Luftwaffe planes regularly bombing Cardiff docks. A stray bomb even destroyed part of nearby Llandaff Cathedral.
A blue plaque to commemorate his birthplace was unveiled at the writer’s childhood home in 2013.
Nation’s father was in the army serving in the war and his mother was an ARP, an air-raid warden, so when the bombing raids came she needed to be out working.
An only child, he used to spend nights alone in the family’s air-raid shelter. It was there he would make up stories for himself – something that stayed with him his whole life.
It’s believed the Daleks are clearly based on the Nazis – the harshness of their trademark “Exterminate” cry recalling Hitler.
Just like Hitler, the Daleks were the personification of evil, and there is no doubting Nation’s childhood days spent sitting in an air-raid shelter reading comic books as bombs dropped informed his creation of them. Escapism from the horrors of the reality of war was a major element in shaping his work.
The war and the young Nation’s obsession with comic books fed his ever-expanding imagination. It also caused him endless distractions at King’s College School in Cardiff, where teachers remarked that Nation was “too much of a daydreamer”.
After leaving school, the Welshman joined the family’s furniture business, but tiring of life as a salesman, he began to write comedy. He initially sold jokes to Welsh comedians such as Stan Stennett, Wyn Calvin and Harry Secombe as part of the hugely popular radio series Welsh Rarebit.
In 1955, at the age of 25, he headed to London to work as a stand-up comedian with a Welsh friend, Dick Barry. After nights struggling on stage, and with a recollection of his success selling jokes back in Wales, he began to consider the possibility of writing gags for other people.
While Barry ultimately emigrated to Australia, the BBC suggested that Nation went along to see Spike Milligan, Eric Sykes and Tony Hancock’s writers, Galton and Simpson, who had set up an agency to represent
young writers.
The story goes that when Nation arrived to see them he looked so worn and thin that Milligan gave him a cheque for £10 and told him to go and get a decent meal. At that stage Milligan was the biggest name in British comedy and he knew everyone at the BBC.
Establishing his comic credentials by writing for radio, Nation came to the attention of comic icon Tony Hancock, who had fallen out with his writers for more than a decade – the revered duo Galton and Simpson.
Hancock was represented by the same agency that represented Nation and there was a sense that this handful of trailblazing writers and comedians were breaking every mould that existed in British comedy at that time.
It was thanks in no small way to a fateful parting of the ways with Hancock that Doctor Who came calling. The pair fell out over scripts and Nation’s life was about to head into previously uncharted territories.
Turning down the first opportunity to write for a new BBC show called Doctor Who when still working with Hancock, financial necessity when he parted ways with the comic meant he eventually took the BBC up on their offer.
Between sitting down to write the Doctor Who scripts, he’d been offered the opportunity to write for Eric Sykes, and that was much more of a big deal as far as he was concerned, because Sykes was a major figure, as opposed to this fledgling kids’ science fiction show.
Nation’s intention was to knock out the Doctor Who scripts as quickly as possible, taking him a week to write seven episodes, at the rate of one a day. He sent them off to the BBC and promptly forgot about it. Then he went off to write for Sykes.
Little did he know it but that first Nation-penned episode, The Mutants, was to change the face of British television for ever.
The first episode ends with a shot from the Daleks’ position. You don’t see the full creature and that cliffhanger ending intrigued people so much that the following week an extra two million viewers tuned in and saw the full glory of the Daleks.
So important were his inventions to the show’s survival, that arguably without Terry Nation and without his creations Doctor Who would not exist today.
It certainly rescued the show, the first episode of which was first aired at 5.15pm on November 23, 1963.
The Daleks was the second storyline that was broadcast on Doctor Who and what made Doctor Who such a hit. The first four weeks of the programme hadn’t done very well and there were some at the BBC thinking they were going to cancel the show.
The Daleks transformed its fortunes, creating an audience, as it captured the imagination of the viewers.
It also offered up the most incredible merchandising opportunities, making Nation a wealthy man in the process.
When toy manufacturers started turning up at the BBC saying they wanted to make Daleks, hurried negotiations took place with Nation receiving 50% of all profits. It was estimated that he had earned the equivalent in today’s money of £5.5m in the first 18 months of the Daleks’ appearance on TV.
Dalekmania swept all before, even eclipsing the Fab Four in popularity. When the second Dalek story was being broadcast at Christmas 1964, ITV put up The Beatles against them on the programme Thank Your Lucky Stars and the Daleks won with a bigger viewing figure.
There is much conjecture over the origin of the name Dalek and Nation himself was prone to playing up to this fact. There are many apocryphal tales of how the word was derived. The most famous is when Nation told a Daily Mirror reporter in 1964 that the Dalek name came from a dictionary or encyclopaedia volume, the spine of which read “Dal-Le”.’
However, the name as far as he was ever able to discern just popped into his head. Ironically, it also turns out to be a genuine word in Croatian, which astonishingly enough means “alien”.
Success flowed thick and fast for Nation throughout the 1960s.
He’d always wanted to write his own series, and the BBC afforded him this opportunity in the ’70s with cult sci-fi series Blake’s 7 and Survivors.
However, the Welshman had often dreamed of going to America.
With the success of the Daleks he had understood the importance of establishing his own brand. In the UK he was an unmitigated success but he wanted the challenge of cracking the States in the UK, so in 1980 he moved to America.
Career-wise the transplantation to the US wasn’t the glamorous progression he had dreamed of.
While he found work, very little of it ever got made.
On the one hand this was frustrating, on the other Nation was living a very comfortable life in the Hollywood Hills with his wife, Kathleen, and their two children.
Although the shows he was most associated with, Doctor Who and Blake’s 7, weren’t big hits in the States, people in television over there knew who he was.
His legendary status among the sci-fi community, however, did bring its own rewards with the rise of Doctor Who fan conventions. There Nation was a hugely popular guest, thousands of people queueing up to meet him.
However, as far as his career was concerned, the politics and bureaucracy of American television frustrated him. He was used to the free-and-easy world of British TV.
Still, money from the Daleks kept rolling in and Nation maintained a fierce grip on the way they were portrayed, keeping tight control over how they were used officially.
The one exception was when Spike Milligan used them in a sketch. Originally Spike applied to Terry Nation’s agent, who refused the request because it was a comedy sketch, but then Spike wrote to Nation, and in recognition of Spike giving him his first break in the business, Nation gave him the right to use his creation and didn’t ask for any money for it.
It was the one time the Daleks were portrayed in a comedy context and without a fee being paid.
Throughout his life the writer had been a heavy smoker and it was this that was to cause his untimely death on March 9, 1997, at the age of 66, after suffering from emphysema for several years.
He had been ill for some time, and hadn’t written anything for a while.
Nevertheless, Nation’s place in cultural folklore was assured. The writer was more than at peace with the fact his epitaph was always to be Dalek-related.
He understood to create a fictional character that transcended your own work to become a household word was very rare indeed.
Since that fateful day when they first appeared on screen Terry Nation was very comfortable that he would always be known as the man who created the Daleks.