I’ve heard it said that ‘Terry Nation was a lazy, hack writer who re-cycled the same ideas, a stale set of clichés.’. Fandom these days seems determined to denigrate his role in the development of the show and his capabilities as a writer. All of which I think is a stale, clichéd and lazy piece of criticism in its own right. It is dull and uninteresting in my view and I’ve heard it recycled so many times. I could apply it to plenty of other ‘Doctor Who’ writers who also rely on a set of familiar plot twists, techniques, tricks and tropes, some of whom are similarly very successful in their own right. I won’t list them here because that would be lazy and reductive too. All writers have a finite range and ‘Doctor Who’ burns up imagination every week. So instead, why not ask why he was re-commissioned by successive regimes, how he created some of the most iconic TV of the 60’s and 70’s and why his work was beloved by generations? He isn’t my favourite Doctor Who writer – but I find the on-going narrative about him quite tedious and so if no one else will do this, I’ll stick my neck out to avoid this being a consensus, even if this might be unpopular.
Verity Lambert commissioned Nation 5 times. Barry Letts and Terrance Dicks commissioned him 3 times, if you include Genesis. Philip Hinchcliffe and Robert Holmes commissioned him again. Why? They didn’t need to. They are all bright intelligent people (the best classic show has to offer) and who, in terms of audience, oversaw three golden periods of the show. Well because as with any other writer that was repeatedly commissioned, they knew exactly what Terry Nation offered and wanted that in the seasons they were planning. He delivered, usually with the minimum of fuss, exciting action adventure scripts that fitted the brief, thrilled children and adults alike and just worked as Doctor Who stories. What Terrance Dicks referred to as ‘good, strong Terry Nation stuff’ – in other words he delivered exactly what they were asking him to provide.
Unlike some other writers, his work generally needed little re-writing, just some prompting – things like remembering to include more female characters and to actually give them something to do. Although he often gives the female leads good material and both Survivors and Blake’s 7 both have terrific female characters. Or in the case of ‘Genesis’ being reminded to produce something new and different. So what, he needed challenging to produce his best work? That applies to plenty of other writers too (most I suspect) and it is part of the role of the producer/script editor or showrunner now to do that. They do it every week and where it doesn’t work the script is cancelled or re-written. RTD and Steven Moffat both substantially re-wrote other writers work – script editors from Donald Tosh to Terrance Dicks and Robert Holmes all did the same – it’s the job. Those original writers have effectively taken credit for scenes or ideas that were not their own. A bit of prompting isn’t that unusual. It makes me laugh when people assume that ‘Genesis’ is substantially Robert Holmes’s work just because they just happen to like that one and it doesn’t fit their narrative about Nation. Now I love Bob Holmes and his work, but ‘Genesis’ is about as Terry Nation as they come. Holmes’s script input was minimal – at a time when he had to do page one re-writes of ‘Ark in Space’, ‘Revenge of the Cybermen’ and ‘Pyramids of Mars’ – all originally written by very experienced TV writers.
‘Doctor Who’ was simply built on the work of Terry Nation, it becomes the show it is today because of him, he re-tooled it as a family action adventure show, where the Doctor stands up to and defeats the evil oppressors – that isn’t in An Unearthly Child, Edge of Destruction, Marco Polo, The Aztecs, Reign of Terror etc. – it is in Nation’s scripts. Unfashionable as this is, the show was re-created in his image – from an educational family show illustrating scientific concepts or history to an adventure series, where the Doctor is a moral force for good, standing up for the oppressed against the aggressors – a hero. From the moment the Doctor confronts the Dalek on the banks of the Thames – the Daleks give us their mission statement and in return the Doctor gives us his.
Much as I love The Massacre or The Aztecs (more than any Nation story bar Genesis), that isn’t what got the show to 57 years and counting and a British TV legend – Terry Nation did. And he does it all without ever being in charge of the show – he isn’t script editor or producer or showrunner – he is just a jobbing writer – but within 2 scripts he utterly changes the show and ensures its longevity. The weight of those stories bends the shape of the programme around them. Name me another writer who even approaches that level of influence on the core of the show – the closest I could come up with is David Whitaker – but only because he commissioned Nation to write ‘The Daleks’.
I also find the idea that Nation wasn’t really responsible for the success of the Daleks slightly ludicrous, along with ‘the other people write for them better or understand them better than he does’ narrative. That last one reminds me of the oft repeated opinion on Bob Dylan, about singing his own songs. The Dalek’s success is founded I think on 4 pillars – that they are the first, that the design is great, that the voice is scary, unique and easily imitated and that there is a great core central idea at the heart of the Daleks. That is right there in Terry Nation’s writing and not just his description of them, which does list the key design elements (‘Four hideous machine creatures.They are legless, moving on a round base. They have no human features. A lens on a flexible shaft. Arms with mechanical grips for hands. The creatures hold strange weapons in their ‘hands’. One of them glides forward. It speaks with an echoing mechanical voice They make a hissing noise as they fire. The picture goes negative’) . They are the people who retreated to an armoured casing to survive a nuclear war, mutating horribly in the process and now hate the rest of the universe and anything unlike them. They aren’t just simple robots – the concept has depth and contemporary resonance. The strength of that central idea is the thing they have in common with ‘Doctor Who’s other two biggest, most popular monsters – the Cybermen (again about what is given up in the pursuit of survival) and the Weeping Angels and that comes as much from the writing as their depiction on screen.
It wouldn’t work without the other design elements, but to ignore the writing in my opinion is just utter nonsense. As for other writers, sure Whittaker does a brilliant job of doing something different with them – he is a different writer than Nation so he would – he’s also a bloody good writer in his own right. By the end of the 70’s though we don’t have much of a sample size for other writers writing the Daleks – Dennis Spooner doing some episodes of Master Plan (the not very good ones mostly), the two Troughton Whitaker stories (one of which was rewritten anyway) and Louis Marks doing ‘Day of the Daleks’ (the consensus of which seems to be that he doesn’t quite get the Daleks right anyway and they were a late addition to his existing script). In comparison we have 8 (9 if you count Mission to the Unknown separately) Nation Dalek stories and a very large number of individual episodes, as quite a few were 6 or more episode stories. So, does it boil down to the fact that David Whitaker is a good writer who writes well for the Daleks at a time after the Daleks have already become a national institution while Nation was writing them?
Ultimately, it is as simple as this, without Terry Nation the show possibly doesn’t get to a full first season and probably doesn’t get a second. Read the script of ‘Masters of Luxor‘ if you don’t believe that. He created the version of the show as we know it. Whether you like that or not.
A Journal of Impossible Things 