Terry Nation was one of the most consistent writers of British genre television, having had a lasting impact on the development of science fiction and action-adventure programs. Nation’s contributions to such series as The Saint, Doctor Who, Blake’s Seven, The Avengers, and MacGyver built him an international fan following. Although most of his television credits were for hour-long dramas, Nation got his start in comedy. At the age of 25, he made his debut as a stage comedian, receiving a poor response. If his performance skills were found lacking, his original material won an admirer in comedian Spike Milligan, who commissioned him to write scripts for the zany British comedy series The Goon Show. Nation soon was developing material for Peter Sellers, Frankie Howerd, Tony Hancock, and an array of other comic stars. In all, he wrote more than 200 radio comedy scripts before trying his hand on television in the early 1960s.

Some of his first work was for ITV’s Out of This World, a science fiction anthology series in 1962. The following year Nation was asked to write one of the first storylines for Doctor Who, then making its debut at the BBC. Nation’s most important contribution to Doctor Who were the Daleks, the most popular (and heavily merchandized) villains in the series’ history. Citing a childhood spent (in Wales) during World War II, Nation remarked that he modeled the impersonal and unstoppable Daleks after the Nazis, seeing them as embodying “the unhearing, unthinking, blanked-out face of authority that will destroy you because it wants to destroy you.” Nation continued to influence the development of the Daleks across a succession of storylines and through two feature-film spin-offs of the series, writing many of the Dalek scripts himself while serving as technical adviser on the others. He was subsequently responsible for the introduction of Davros, the wheelchair-bound mad scientist who created the Daleks to serve his schemes for intergalactic domination.

Building on his success at Doctor Who, Terry Nation created two original science fiction series: The Survivors, a post-nuclear apocalypse story, and Blake’s Seven, a popular series about a group of freedom fighters struggling against a totalitarian multi-planetary regime. Blake’s Seven, which he initially proposed as a science fiction version of The Dirty Dozen, remains a cult favorite to the present day, popular for its focus on character conflicts within the Liberator crew, its bleak vision of the future and of the prospects of overcoming political repression, its strongly defined female characters, and the intelligence of its dialogue. The series sought an adult following that contrasted sharply with the Doctor Who audience, which the BBC persisted in seeing as primarily composed of children. Nation wrote all 13 of the first season episodes of Blake’s Seven and continued to contribute regularly throughout its second season, before being displaced as story editor by Chris Boucher, who pushed the series in an even darker and more pessimistic direction.

Nation’s contributions to the detective genre are almost as significant as his influence on British science fiction. For a while, it seemed that Nation wrote for or was responsible for many of ITV’s most popular adventure series. He wrote more than a dozen episodes of The Saint, the series starring Roger Moore as globe-trotting master thief/detective Simon Templar. The Saint enjoyed international success and was one of the few British imports to snag a prime-time slot on U.S. television. Nation served as script editor and writer for The Baron, another ITV series about a jewel thief that built on The Saint’s success. He was script editor for the final season of The Avengers, shaping the controversial transition from popular Emma Peel (Diana Rigg) to the less-beloved Tara King (Linda Thorson). He was script editor and associate producer for The Persuaders, another successful action-adventure series about two daredevil playboys who become “instruments of justice” under duress. He also contributed regularly to ITV’s superhero series Champions.

Near the end of his career, Nation shifted his focus onto American television, where he was a producer and writer for the first two seasons of MacGyver, an original and imaginative series dealing with a former special forces agent who solves crimes and battles evil through the use of resourceful engineering and tinkering tricks. MacGyver seemed to fit comfortably within the tradition of British action-adventure protagonists whom Nation helped to shape and develop. Nation died of emphysema in March 1997.

Most of the best-known writers of British television are recognized for their original dramas and social realism, but Nation’s reputation came from his intelligent contributions to genre entertainment.