The Man Who Invented the Daleks by Alwyn Turner

complications come from the aristocratic and alcoholic father of one of the women accompanying Faith, who mistakenly believes that she’s eloped (though Loch Ness is a considerable overshoot by anyone aiming at Gretna Green). Much comedy confusion, many mistaken identities and some simple knockabout humour ensue.
    The film’s producer, Teddy Joseph, was later to declare that What a Whopper was ‘a marvellous family comedy’, though that was a little over-generous. More accurate was Variety’s comment that ‘the British appetite for this type of unpretentious, slapstick comedy appears to be insatiable.’ Faith himself, who celebrated his twenty-first birthday during filming, was apparently not too taken with the end result, for he managed to avoid any mention of it in his autobiography; his 2003 obituary in the Independent was more forthcoming, dismissing the movie as ‘dire’. That was unkind and not entirely accurate, for there is much that followers of British comedy can celebrate, as one would expect from a cast that included Sid James, Wilfred Brambell, Terry Scott and Clive Dunn, accompanied by Freddie Frinton giving his customary portrayal of a drunk. There is also a cameo by Spike Milligan, as a tramp fishing for trout in the Serpentine in Hyde Park, and best of all a brief but fabulous appearance by Charles Hawtrey as an artist who is developing a technique of flinging paint off his palette-knives at a canvas, titled ‘Daphne in the Nude’. When he’s described as a painter, he bristles at the suggestion:’ ‘Not just a painter,’ he insists haughtily. ‘A flicking painter.’ The opening sequences meanwhile foreshadow what would soon become clichés of Swinging London, with a depiction of artistic types sharing a house in Chelsea; virtually the first words uttered by Faith are: ‘I saw a couple of fabulous birds on the King’s Road.’
    It was not quite Nation’s first foray into the cinema, for he and John Junkin had provided what was described as ‘additional material’ for the 1959 film And the Same to You , a similarly patchy movie that is saved by its cast: Sid James, Tommy Cooper, Brian Rix and – a man who would soon loom large in Nation’s story – William Hartnell. Nor was it quite his first solo venture, for in 1956 he had written a fifteen-minute sketch for his old Cardiff friend Harry Greene and his wife, Marjie Lawrence, who were fresh from staking their claim to television history as the stars of the soap Round at the Redways , the first show made by ITV. Booked to appear in a revue titled Off the Cuff at the Irving Theatre in London’s West End, they had approached Spike Milligan for a sketch; when his contribution was turned down by the show’s producer, the job was passed on to Nation, who delivered within twenty-four hours a routine parodying the movies, drawing on his love of Hollywood. ‘Howard and Marjorie Greene performed with as much carefree zing as though the small, cool audience had been huge and enthusiastic,’ commented The Stage , ‘and after their delicious demonstration of the growth of the film industry, it had at least become enthusiastic.’
    But What a Whopper was Nation’s first big solo project and his first full film screenplay. And it revealed some of his strengths as well as some of the flaws that would become familiar to television viewers. On the positive side, there was his Welsh fondness for ornate verbosity, as Wilfred Brambell describes his sighting of the Loch Ness Monster: ‘A terrible sight it was. A yellow mist hung over the waters, and a great brooding silence filled the loch. No breath of wind stirred the air, and as I looked towards the black waters, I saw it! Its terrible head rising slowly and turning towards me, its jaws open …’ There was, too, his refusal to develop a simple situation in a straight line, instead adding new complications at every opportunity, heaping up the material in a way that would find better expression in