Free The Man Who Invented the Daleks by Alwyn Turner

spring of 1956. Made by Associated-Rediffusion, which held the ITV weekday franchise for London at the time, it was directed by Richard Lester, starred Spike Milligan and Eric Sykes as well as Sellers, and was the first time that the Goons’ humour was explored on screen. The writing was credited simply to Spike Milligan and Associated London Scripts, giving no indication of who was responsible for what, but the fact that Nation, Junkin and Freeman were invited to contribute at all was an indication of their acceptance within ALS. Junkin even appeared in one episode, deputising for an ill Sykes.
    The BBC offer that emerged from the failure of The Fixers was to write a new series titled Floggit’s , starring Elsie and Doris Waters in their long-running Cockney characters of Gert and Daisy. The Waters sisters (their brother was Jack Warner, best known as the police officer George Dixon in the television series Dixon of Dock Green) had been working as a double-act since the 1920s, and for twenty-five years they had been big stars, appearing regularly in films, on records and on stage, but particularly on the radio: they were regulars on Workers’ Playtime and headlined series including Gert and Daisy’s Wedding Party and Petticoat Lane. The sisters had even received OBEs in 1946 in recognition of their contributions to the war effort. Much of their work has survived better than that of their contemporaries, for their rapid crosstalk sketches were mostly written by themselves, as were their songs, and their focus on finding humour in the everyday lives of women, together with the quiet, detailed observation of their character studies, was among the most advanced comedy to be heard.
    By the mid 1950s there was a feeling that the homeliness of the act was perhaps turning into blandness, but there was life left in Gert and Daisy yet, and it was proposed that taking them away from their familiar setting in Knockhall Street, London, might help find new comedic possibilities. Nation, Junkin and Freeman were asked in May 1956 to produce a trial script, and when that proved satisfactory, a further fifteen episodes were commissioned. Committed to four months’ employment, the trio rented an office in the ramshackle Shepherd’s Bush home of ALS and set to work. ‘They cleared the potato sacks out of the spare room and put in a table and three chairs, and Terry, David and I moved in there,’ remembered Junkin.
    They were now firmly part of the ALS world, a convivial society in which the pressures of meeting deadlines didn’t interfere with having fun. ‘You’d go to lunch when you wanted, you’d go home when you wanted. You knew what you had to do, but how you did it was up to you,’ said Junkin. ‘There were days when some of us never got much work done before lunchtime,’ remembered another writer, Brad Ashton. ‘So in Terry Nation’s office – which was quite a long office with a long strip of green carpet down the middle – we might play golf for about an hour or so, then we’d go into Lew Schwartz’s office – he had a big dartboard on his wall – where we’d play darts for another hour, and then we’d go to lunch.’ Lunch itself could stretch out until, fuelled by cigarettes and alcohol, the writers would resume a work programme that might last well into the evening; Milligan in particular was known to work so late that he ended up sleeping in his office.
    Floggit’s , the series created by Nation, Junkin and Freeman during those late nights and between those long lunches, was based on the premise of Gert and Daisy inheriting from their Uncle Alf a general store – after which the show was named – set in the fictional village of Russet Green. There was, however, a snake in this rural paradise: ‘We expected life to be a bed of roses, and what turns up but deadly nightshade in person, Old Mother Butler.’ The gossipy, small-minded Ma Butler, played then as now by Iris Vandeleur, had been a regular