The Man Who Invented the Daleks Read Online Free PDF Page A

won hands down over church. There was a religious influence on his upbringing – apart from formal church-going, he spent a great deal of time at the house of his father’s friend, Bob White, the Anglican verger of Llandaff Cathedral – and the influence of the work ethic fostered by religion was evident throughout his life. ‘I’m a prolific writer because I’m always uneasy,’ he was to reflect. ‘Maybe it’s my Welsh guilt that I can’t really sit around and not do anything. I feel very guilty if I’m in a room and not actually working at the table.’
    But the cinema loomed far larger. He became addicted to the magic of the picture-houses, the dark crowded theatres, thick with clouds of cigarette and pipe smoke through which the imagery of Hollywood could be seen flickering on a screen, briefly transporting a huddled, rain-sodden mass to a far-off land of glamour and wealth. Nation found his escape from everyday reality in that dream of America, as did so much of the country in the years of depression, those slightly older than him fuelling their fantasies with mass-produced clothes bought on hire purchase. ‘You may have three halfpence in your pocket and not a prospect in the world,’ wrote George Orwell in The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), ‘but in your new clothes you can stand on the street corner, indulging in a private daydream of yourself as Clark Gable or Greta Garbo, which compensates you for a great deal.’
    Nation may have been too young to express his dreams quite so overtly, but he would have understood the sentiment and for him, fantasy was always liable to take precedence over the mundane reality of education. ‘He played truant for one whole term,’ recounted his wife, Kate. ‘He got found out because he’d been given these cheques for his school fees and finally the headmaster rang his mother and asked where the money was. And it was still in his pocket. He’d been to the movies every afternoon.’ As he remembered, ‘I grew up in the front row of the local Odeon.’
    The nature of the films that Nation encountered, however, was not quite as wide-ranging as he perhaps would have wished. Desperately few science fiction movies were available in the late 1930s and 1940s, with the exception of single-reel serials like Flash Gordon , nor was the cinema able to satisfy his childhood taste for horror stories. (‘I read a lot of horror fiction,’ he was to reflect; ‘gave myself the scares in the dark’.) There had been a spate of impressive and successful horror movies coming over from America but, in an early panic about the influence of cinema, their popularity had prompted British film censors to introduce in 1937 a new ‘H’ certificate, restricting the viewing of such material to those aged sixteen or over. A few years later, a decision was made in official circles that fictional horror was not conducive to civilian morale during wartime, and between 1942 and 1945 ‘H’ certificate films were banned altogether; just at the age when an adolescent, particularly one as tall as Nation, should have been trying to sneak in to see a movie for adults, the opportunity was snatched away.
    The only home-grown rival to the dominance of the cinema was BBC radio, the first truly national cultural phenomenon that the country had known. The British Broadcasting Company had begun transmissions in 1922, at which stage there were just 35,000 licences in the country, permitting the bearers to receive the early broadcasts. By the time of Nation’s birth, that figure had risen to three million and it was to treble in the following decade, while the BBC had been transformed into the British Broadcasting Corporation, established under a royal charter as the monopoly provider of services: the first nationalised industry. It was not, though, without rivals, particularly at the weekend, when the entertainment