Terry Nation was a screenwriter for British television. As well as creating the Daleks for the long-running science fiction television series Doctor Who, he also created his own science-fiction shows, Survivors and Blake's 7.
Nation's big break came in the early 1960s when he was commissioned to write material for stand-up comic Tony Hancock, initially for Hancock's new television series and then later for his stage show.
The two rowed in later years over script issues, and Nation was fired. Before this he had turned down an approach from David Whitaker to contribute to a new science-fiction series that the BBC was setting up.
Now jobless and with a
family to support, Nation contacted Whitaker and took up the
offer, penning the Doctor Who serial 'The Daleks' - and thus
creating one of the Doctor's most feared adversaries. Nation
suddenly found himself a telefantasy writer at the centre of a
media frenzy, and went on to contribute several further scripts
to Doctor Who.
He also contributed episodes to such shows as The
Avengers, The Baron, The Persuaders!, The Champions, and The
Saint.
In 1975 he created a new sci-fi drama series called Survivors, which was a post-apocalyptic tale of the few remaining humans, the population having been devastated by a plague. His next sci-fi creation, Blake's 7, was even more successful.
The show told the story of a rag-tag group of freedom fighters/outlaws on the run from the sinister Terran Federation in a stolen alien space ship of unknown origins. It ran for four seasons from 1978 to 1981, earning a huge following in the United Kingdom. Nation wrote the entire first season of the show.
His input decreased as time went on with Nation not writing at all for the fourth and final season. In the early 1990s Nation shifted his focus onto American television, where he was a producer and writer for the first two seasons of MacGyver, a series dealing with a former Special Forces agent who solves crimes through the use of resourceful engineering and tinkering tricks.
He was still living in Los Angeles when he died from emphysema in 1997.
