The Man Who Invented the Daleks by Alwyn Turner

Author:Alwyn Turner
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781845136871
Publisher: Aurum Press
Published: 2011-04-23T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eleven

Dalek Renaissance

In 1971, as producer Barry Letts and script editor Terrance Dicks planned the ninth season of Doctor Who for the following year, they came to the conclusion that the proposed opening wasn’t quite strong enough. ‘We had a story from Louis Marks about guerrillas from the future, which was good, but we felt didn’t have the “wow” factor that you want for your first show,’ remembered Dicks. ‘And suddenly one of us – I think probably me – had the brilliant idea: let’s put the Daleks in, let’s make the villains behind the villains be the Daleks. Which was fairly easy to do. But incredibly, I forgot that the Daleks were Terry Nation’s copyright.’

In fact it wasn’t the copyright as such that had been forgotten. Letts sent a memo to the copyright department in April 1971 asking them to clear the use of the Daleks in what became ‘Day of the Daleks’, and Nation later signed a contract authorising their appearance (his fee had gone up to £25 per episode by now). To mark the broadcast, Nation also contributed an unfinished story for a Radio Times competition; readers were invited to submit an ending as well as illustrations, with the prize being a model Dalek. But Dicks and Letts had perhaps forgotten the arrangement whereby Nation was to be given the first option of writing any story featuring his creations, and they went to Pinewood Studios – where he was working on The Persuaders! – to apologise. Over lunch it was agreed that Nation would write a Dalek story for the following season, smoothing over any hurt feelings and resolving the situation to everyone’s satisfaction. ‘He said, “Let’s have a bottle of champagne.” And we thought he was celebrating because the Daleks were coming back,’ remembered Letts. ‘Until he actually came to the studio and we realised he always drank champagne, because the Daleks had made him so rich.’

The Daleks had never quite gone away, of course, even though the last new serial had been in 1967. There was still the occasional cheque for an overseas sale (sometimes very small indeed: in 1971 Nation received £3.12 when ‘The Chase’ was sold to Ethiopian television), and there were still payments for the use of Daleks in other programmes, from the quiz show What’s the Sense? through to Look – Mike Yarwood!, the BBC’s vehicle for the up-and-coming impressionist. In 1973 Roger Hancock even managed to get a £10 fee for the use of a Dalek voice on Jimmy Savile’s show Clunk-Click, an agreement which seemed to lack natural justice since the voice was invented not by Nation but by Brian Hodgson. But by that stage Hancock was rapidly proving that his reputation as a determined agent was well founded. There was a continual barrage of letters to the BBC pointing out uses that hadn’t been cleared and demanding payment; he secured, for example, £75 for an appearance on Savile’s other show, Jim’ll Fix It in 1975.

The point of this

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