The BBC’s cheap’n’cheerful late ’70s/early ‘80s space opera Blake’s 7 seems to be having a bit of a moment in the sun lately. Last year, Big Finish released a hardback box set of brand-new novelisations of each of its first-season episodes. The show is finally getting a Doctor Who-style bells-and-whistles release on Blu-ray, its ‘official magazine’ has been resurrected as a fan publication, and now fans can explore the making of the show’s second season in extraordinary, forensic detail in Cult Edge’s latest entry in the Blake’s 7 Production Diary series. Running to a chunky 300+ pages, this lavish, beautifully-designed and lavishly-illustrated book follows the format of the edition covering Series A and is not only the last word on how the second series of Terry Nation’s popular space adventure series was brought to the screen, but it’s also a fascinating and valuable historical document chronicling just how low budget BBC dramas were made in the 1970s and even into the 1980s.
The level of research and detail presented in this book is genuinely staggering. Writer/researcher Jonathan Helm has put together a chronological diary (hence the title) of the genesis, development, filming, and recording of the show’s second batch of 13 episodes. With so many of the core creatives involved in the series – creator Terry Nation, producer David Maloney, script Editor Chris Boucher, actors Gareth Thomas, Paul Darrow, Jacqueline Pearce – no longer with us, Helm has gone above and beyond to source quotes and comments and commentary from everyone – absolutely everyone – involved in the making of this show. The provenance of these quotes isn’t referenced (although there are clearly new contributions from actress Sally Knyvette – Jenna in seasons one and two – and FX staffers Mat Irvine and Andy Lazell, amongst others), but Helm has assembled them into an ‘unfolding story’ of the making of season two. It’s often warts’n’all stuff, too, with tensions and disagreements and pressures candidly discussed. Stars Gareth Thomas and Sally Knyvette were keen to leave the series and move on to pastures new but the production team hoped they’d be able to change Thomas’s mind at least and persuade him to stick around for season three – Thomas’s quotes make it quite clear that this was never on the cards. Elsewhere actor Brian Croucher, drafted in to replace the unavailable Stephen Grief as Blake’s tireless enemy Travis from season one, talks of his discomfort in taking over the role and how he clashed immediately with director Vere Lorrimer who helmed his first episode and took an instant, inexplicable dislike to him. Script problems are openly discussed – the famously dilatory Terry Nation was keen to shape the direction of the series but not so keen to actually write the scripts he had been commissioned to provide, necessitating often last-minute replacements by the script editor. It’s a genuine, rich treasure trove of facts and details, gossip, grumbles and gripes laced through with anecdotes that show how well the cast gelled, how frustrated some of them – the often sidelined female members of the cast in particular – were and how sometimes ruthless decisions had to be made (the axing of actor David Jackson as the group’s genial giant Gan in the fifth episode of the season) to keep the series ticking over. The illustrations are extraordinary, too: behind-the-scenes shots of the actors between takes, images from photoshoots, newspaper cuttings, special effects sequences being filmed, and candid pictures from location filming in one of the numerous quarries so often chosen to represent alien landscapes in the show. There are dozens of deleted and amended scenes, an aborted script from Pip and Jane Baker; every page seems to offer up some new visual treat to complement the engrossing text as the show trundles through its production process, its second season starting to air even as the last few episodes were in production – something that seems pretty unimaginable in today’s fast-paced, high budget, perfectionist TV world.
And this is perhaps where the book excels above and beyond being “just” the story of the making of 13 TV episodes in 1978. It’s a reminder of a way of producing TV that now seems positively prehistoric – props and costumes made out of bits and pieces (Mat Irvine is rightly apologetic for the spaceship in the series finale, famously made by glueing two commercially-available hairdryers together!), hurried location filming blocks, studio sessions that had to finish by 10pm or all the lights would be turned on in a ferociously union-dominated TV landscape. Fans of Blake’s 7 will rightly adore this fantastically revealing and beyond-thorough deep dive into how it was made but more than that, students of the history of TV in the UK will relish the incredible level of intricate detail presented in Helm’s no-nonsense text, topped off by Grahame Robertson’s stunning and gorgeous design aesthetic that makes the book a beautiful presentation in its own right. Utterly sensational and, of course, essential for B7 aficionados.
BLAKE’S 7 PRODUCTION DIARY SERIES B is due for release in November from Cult Edge
