From Dreamwatch Issue 109 (October 2003).

A quarter of a century after its debut, BLAKE’S 7 remains one of the most fondly remembered and influential British science fiction TV dramas ever produced. As the show celebrates its silver anniversary, dreamwatch charts the making of a legend. Words: Joe Nazzaro

Twenty-five years ago, on 2 January 1978, the BBC aired the first episode of a new sci-fi action-adventure drama. The show was called Blake’s 7. Created by veteran TV writer Terry Nation (of Doctor Who and Survivors fame), Blake’s 7 became a classic of the genre and influenced many latter-day sci-fi series, including J. Michael Straczynski’s Babylon 5 and Farscape.

Not even Nation himself knew what he had on his hands when, back in mid-1975, an off-the-cuff pitch to the BBC to make ‘The Dirty Dozen in Outer Space’ was green-lit for 13 episodes. “I said to my wife, ‘I think I’ve got myself in deep trouble – they like the idea!’” recalled Nation, who died in 1997. “Ronnie Marsh, who was head of drama at the time and bought the idea, called my agent and said, ‘We will do the series if Terry writes all 13 hours of it.’ I said – and this is born of ego and super-confidence – ‘Yeah, I’ll do them all!’ and that’s when I said goodbye to my wife and settled down to write them.”

The job of producing the series went to then-director David Maloney, who was on location in Twickenham, England filming the Doctor Who adventure The Talons of Weng Chiang when he received a message from Marsh. “He said he was going to be doing this very cheap space series that only had the budget of Softly Softly, and there was no extra money put aside for special effects, and asked if I’d be interested in producing it,” reveals Maloney. “It was only after I agreed to do it that we got together with Terry and worked forward into more ideas and scripts for the series. Terry had a very fertile imagination, but it was an enormous job for him. Fortunately, we had Chris Boucher as script editor.”

Seven Up

With 13 scripts to finish within a relatively short period of time, it was the script editor who took Nation’s first drafts and polished them. “Terry said on at least one occasion, ‘You can have the next script or you can have the rewrite, but you can’t have them both,’” states Boucher, “which to me seemed to be a perfectly rational response. Terry was a terrific storyteller, but not a very good dialogue man, and I certainly did dialogue work on his scripts.”

Ironically, although the arrival of Star Wars in 1977 would generate a lot of interest in Blake’s 7, it wasn’t initially a source of encouragement for the show’s makers. When Maloney and his production designer Roger Murray-Leach went to an early screening of Star Wars, they were quite daunted by what they saw. “Here we were, with insufficient money, about to start a space series, and we’d just seen something that was absolutely mind-blowing,” admits Murray-Leach. “We were very depressed, having seen something that was so successful.”

The production team need not have worried. The first episode of Blake’s 7 aired on 2 January 1978, picking up 7.4 million viewers – a number that continued to grow over the next 12 weeks. By the time that the final episode Blake aired in December of 1981, over 10 and a half million people were watching the series.

When a second season was ordered, it was obvious that Nation couldn’t write another 13 scripts, even as first drafts.

“I didn’t think I could, and felt we should have other people in,” he explained. “We did talk about the shape of the show and where we would be at the end of 26 episodes, so there was a broad framework of where I wanted the thing to go. But I should have kept my hand in that much more.”

“I wouldn’t want to slam Terry, but his mind was on other things,” notes former production secretary Judith Smith. “He was continually jumping from one project to another, and should never have committed to writing scripts if he couldn’t fulfil that commitment. He was not a [J. Michael] Straczynski, [who] had total creative control. He was much more the ideas man.”

One of the biggest shocks early in season two was the unexpected death of Gan (David Jackson), who sacrifices himself in the episode Pressure Point. As Nation recalled, “There was a meeting with the head of drama, David Maloney and myself, and by that time, I think we knew clearly that Gan was least important to our general group, so he was the one who had to go.”

Jackson wasn’t the only actor to leave Blake’s 7 that season. The final episode, Star One, saw the death of Travis (then played by Brian Croucher), as well as the departures of Blake (Gareth Thomas) and Jenna (Sally Knyvette). “These were the problems of a running series,” notes Maloney, “that some of the characters are going to be killed off, while some of the actors are planning not to come back, which is what happened with Gareth Thomas. Everyone kept saying, ‘How can you have a series called Blake’s 7 with no Blake?’, which is why we’d occasionally produce him in a dream or for an episode, whereas, of course, people knew he’d gone off to do other things.”

Without Blake and Jenna, the production had to find new characters to fill the void in season three. “What I was looking for in Tarrant was the [spirit of] the Spitfire pilots of World War II, who were young and crazy and didn’t know the meaning of fear,” stated Nation. “I wanted him to be a daredevil – dangerously daredevil in fact. Dayna was the weapons expert. I thought it would be interesting to have a girl who was aggressive.”

After a good deal of discussion, the role of Tarrant eventually went to Steven Pacey. Meanwhile, for the role of Dayna, Maloney decided on Josette Simon, who was just out of drama school.

Season three ended with Terminal, a cliffhanging episode in which the Liberator is blown into a million pieces, leaving its crew stranded on a distant planet. “I felt quite guilty about coming in and blowing up their lovely ship,” admits director Mary Ridge. “But at the same time, I did enjoy it, so perhaps it was easier for me because it was my first episode and I hadn’t become devoted to it.”

Blake’s Four

When the BBC finally confirmed a fourth series of Blake’s 7, it came as a surprise to just about everybody, including the show’s cast and crew. By the time a decision had been made, Nation was already working in Hollywood and Maloney had moved on to other projects, including Day of the Triffids. His suggested replacement was one of the show’s directors, Vere Lorrimer.

“It was a less relaxed relationship, certainly,” reveals Boucher. “Vere was less of an appeaser; he wasn’t as concerned to have everybody happy. I did the last series because I loved the show, and I think given a little longer, we could have made it work.”

“We had some artistic arguments,” Lorrimer concurs. “But Chris was a very witty man, and I respected everything he said, because in the end he was the one who had to produce the goods.”

The fourth season was a major departure for Blake’s 7, with a new ship (the Scorpio), new costumes, a new cast member (Glynis Barber, whose character Soolin replaced Jan Chappell’s Cally) and a very different direction. Some of those changes didn’t go down well with everybody, including the show’s creator. “We came up with some ideas about the way we wanted it to progress,” remembered Nation, “but I was now 6,000 miles away, so it was up to them. I think they lost direction, and there was a lot of tacky writing, but what can I say? I should have been responsible.”

By the season’s end, the production team had come up with the idea for a cliffhanger that would stun their audience. In Blake, the eponymous hero returned once again (Thomas had made a brief appearance the previous year), only to be killed by the show’s current lead, Avon (Paul Darrow). Then, with the exception of Avon, the remaining characters were all shot by Federation troops. Their fates were left unknown.

“It could have any significance that you wanted to give it,” says Boucher. “Once we started the script for the next season, then it would mean what we chose it to mean.”

“We left the way open, and I always hoped the management would do one more,” adds Lorrimer, “so you could see they weren’t killed at all. Chris and I thought that if we could end it in such a way as to startle people so they could never forget it – which is certainly what happened – it would give us an opportunity for the public to want a fifth series, which they did. But management apparently thought not.

“Blake was killed off because this was the actor’s wish,” he states. “But the others felt as though they were in a dream.”

“I know where we would go if we ever came back,” Nation once declared. “I know I could get them out of that dumb situation they were put into at the end, although I admire enormously the dramatic moment of Avon standing over Blake’s body, raising the weapon and starting to smile.”

In the years since the final episode aired, there have been several attempts to revive Blake’s 7. But no matter what the future holds, the series has certainly made a lasting impact on audiences.

“There’s never been another show like it,” insists Lorrimer. “I think the strongest thing of all was that it contained almost no violence, no sex, no bad language, and a complete story that was shot through with jokes galore and always ended with a bang. That’s what Blake’s 7 was: it was about a crew of people, who were not necessarily all that honest and decent, being placed in a position where they’ve got to fight and protect the world, and indeed themselves.”