We need a new Terry Nation

Posted on August 2, 2013 by Tim Hall

Talk of the Dr Who and Nu-Who’s over-use of corny plot devices has made me nostalgic for Terry Nation. As the man who gave us The Daleks, Nation understood science-fiction at a gut level in a way Steven Moffat never will. As well as writing some of the best of “old Who” (Who can forget “Genesis of the Daleks”?), Terry Nation also gave us “Blake’s 7″, “Survivors” and the underrated “Star Cops”. We need a present-day Terry Nation to write the same sort of grown-up, intelligent science-fiction without an American accent for today’s audiences.

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2 Responses to We need a new Terry Nation

  1. Serdar says:
    August 2, 2013 at 5:29 pm

    What I liked about Terry Nation’s approach is that you could tell he took the underlying conceits seriously, *and* he was taking in a range of influences which aren’t as familiar to audiences today — e.g., the Hammer Studios horror productions, which I love. A lot of that seems to have been traded up in favor of a kind of high-end camp.

    I saw “Spearhead from Space” again recently, and again what struck me most about it was how under it all you could tell the people in charge took the whole thing pretty seriously. They weren’t being sly. That sort of attitude is hard to cultivate today.

  2. Tim Hall says:
    August 2, 2013 at 6:01 pm

    Indeed. Old Who went downhill towards the end where they took out the darker stuff that owed a lot to Hammer Studios and Lovecraft, and replaced it with too much camp humour.. Nu-Who had it’s moments, but again it suffered from too much camp humour and “knowing” in-jokes, and what appears to be contempt for the very concept of internal consistency. Probably reached it’s nadir with the excrable “Love and Monsters”.

    Torchwood had potential, especally when it went darker and Lovecraftian, but again suffered from bad plotting that forgot the way cause-and-effect is central to good SF.

    Also been pointed out that Star Cops was the work of Chris Boucher, not Terry Nation.