The Man Who Invented the Daleks by Alwyn Turner Read Free Book Online Page A

similar experiences of the limited horizons offered by a South Wales education. In schools whose ‘job was to turn out more cogs for the industrial machine’, wrote Summers in his semi-autobiographical book The Raging Summer , a child who showed too much imagination ‘was to be quickly hammered and stamped back into regular shape before he could get out and become dangerously loose in the world’. ‘There was an instant recognition of brotherhood’, remembered Greene; the two men ‘had similar interests, were about the same age and got on very well, often walking off into the castle grounds to talk, where we’d lose them for hours’.
    Nation became part of the student-dominated social scene that congregated upstairs at the Khardomah café on Saturday mornings, and the fact that he was happily mixing with such a group, many of whom were a significant couple of years older than him and had served in uniform, was an indication both of his ‘affable nature and of the fact that he was the epitome of self-confidence’. Although not a student himself, he participated in many social events, helping to organise the first Cardiff Arts Ball (inspired by the Chelsea Arts Balls) in 1949, and forming part of the team that created a sketch called ‘The Poor Man’s Picasso’ for the 1948 rag week. The idea for the sketch was that the performers would draw objects on a white flat screen and that the drawings would then become functional, so that a hatstand would be drawn and a coat then hung upon it, a picture of cupboard doors would be opened, and so on. The main practical difficulty was to find a drawing implement big enough to be seen from the back of the theatre, a problem to which Nation, displaying an inventive resourcefulness that would become characteristic of his fictional heroes, found the solution: a condom with a rolled-up piece of carpet stuffed inside and filled with purple ink, the whole thing being bound with elastic bands to form a prototype marker pen. The performance at the Capital Cinema was filmed by members of the Cine Society and eventually reached the attention of a television producer; consequently, in 1955, Harry Greene and another student, Ivor Olsen, appeared on the BBC show Quite Contrary under the names Pedro and Pinky with a revived version of the routine, almost certainly the first time that a condom had been seen on British television.
    By the end of the 1940s, Nation was also beginning to develop his solo comedy act, which he was to take around the circuit of pubs and social clubs in the area, already home to Stan Stennett and Wyn Calvin and soon to be illuminated by a teenage singing prodigy from Cardiff named Shirley Bassey. The highlight of his routine was a series of funny walks, mostly exploiting his gangly physique, though one variation saw him walking on his knees, with his trousers rolled up and shoes acting as knee-pads, in the manner perfected by José Ferrer when playing Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec in the 1952 film Moulin Rouge. Again it was an aspect of his early life to which he would return when writing scripts for the 1963 Hancock series. In the episode ‘The Writer’, Tony Hancock tries to convince a professional comedian named Jerry Spring that every comic needs a funny walk, and proceeds to do an impression of Groucho Marx’s stooping prowl and Stan Laurel’s loose-limbed lollop, before giving his own suggestion that Spring should imitate a penguin. Similarly, one of the jokes that Hancock tries to foist upon Spring has all the hallmarks of coming from the repertoire of an inexperienced stand-up in South Wales. A man walks into a cottage in the Rhondda Valley, covered head to foot in coal dust, and when his wife exclaims at the state of him, he asks why, after twenty years of him coming home from work every day in this condition, she’s still surprised. ‘Well, after all, Dai,’ she replies, ‘you are a