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assignment of ‘What I did on my holidays’. Having done nothing much, he wrote instead a fictional tale of a holiday on a barge. ‘The teacher looked at me and said, “Were you on a barge, Nation?” I said, “No,” and he said, “This is all bloody rubbish then, isn’t it?”’ The lack of encouragement seems to have done little to dissuade him. A friend, Harry Greene, who met him in 1945, recalls him telling stories that were ‘often stretched beyond what was credible’, as when he deliberately set out to scare Elsie White, wife of the verger Bob, with a tale about seeing a ghost through the window of Llandaff Cathedral.
    His view of the schooling he received was to be seen in a passage from his original script for ‘The Daleks’ (though it was cut from the final version), in which the Doctor berates his companion, Ian Chesterton, for failing to understand the significance of the metal floors in the Dalek city: ‘Chesterton, your total lack of imagination appals me. When I remember that you were a schoolmaster, it makes me glad that you are now here, and can no longer influence the minds of those poor unsuspecting children who were once your pupils.’
    Nation’s childhood absorption of influences was to change markedly following the 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor and America’s subsequent entry into the war. However remote those events may have appeared, it wasn’t long before GIs were arriving in Britain, and with them came a new note in the cultural life of the country. Signs of an interest in American culture had already been apparent when the BBC Forces Programme began to air bought-in comedy shows such as The Jack Benny Half Hour, The Bob Hope Programme and The Charlie McCarthy Show , but the real breakthrough was the appearance of the American Forces Network (AFN), which started broadcasting from London on 4 July 1943 and was relayed around the country. ‘They did transmissions of all the American shows,’ remembered Nation, ‘and I’d hear Bob Hope, Jack Benny and all the big stars of that time. I loved the American sound, the jokes, the feel. ’
    He wasn’t the only one to fall under the spell, for a whole generation of future writers was to find its tastes affected. ‘We listened closely to American comedy shows transmitted on the American Forces Network in Europe,’ remembered Frank Muir, one of the first new comedy writers to emerge after the war. ‘We had a lot to learn from American radio comedy in those days.’ Another of the coming men, Bob Monkhouse, would later talk about ‘our personal pantheon of comedy gods like Bob Hope, Bing Crosby, Jack Benny and Phil Silvers’, and the Welsh comedian Wyn Calvin similarly recognised the impact made by AFN: ‘Youngsters with an ambition to be amusing were glued to those programmes. It gave them a new comedy, away from the variety programmes.’
    The memory of those shows was to remain with Nation all his life, long after their direct influence had evaporated. Well into the late 1980s he was still jokingly claiming to be thirty-nine years old, a running gag in Jack Benny’s routines that he had first encountered in his childhood. But even more important was the stationing of large numbers of American troops in Cardiff. ‘Suddenly there they were,’ he recalled, ‘with their ice cream, their chocolate and their comic books. Those wonderful American comic books became an influence, too. Superman , maybe Batman too. They were a great breath of fresh air after the Dandy and the Beano.’ For the first time, the transient images of America that had illuminated the cinemas for the last decade and more were acquiring a tangible, physical presence; now there were holy relics of the promised land that could be handled and taken home, cherished and consumed.
    The luxury of those items, the lavish size and quality of the comics in