by Alwyn Turner
Then there is ‘Mission to Destiny’, a stand-alone episode that is essentially a murder mystery story of a man beaten to death on board a spaceship. There are no witnesses and the only clue is a number, 54124, written by the victim in his own blood as he lay dying. It takes the intelligence of Avon to recognise that what looks like a number is actually a series of letters: SARA, the name of one of the crew members. ‘We wanted to show that we could do an Agatha Christie story in space,’ reflected Nation. ‘It had all the mystery elements in it, and years later I thought, “What a dummy! I could have made a first-class movie out of that.” It would have been the first space murder mystery.’ He might also have mentioned that it bore a strong resemblance to a Leslie Charteris story that he had adapted as ‘The Inescapable Word’ for The Saint, which likewise features a murder victim leaving behind a cryptic message written in his own blood, in this instance the letters COP. Suspicion is directed at a former police officer, until Simon Templar learns that the dead man was of Russian origin and deduces that he had in his death throes reverted to his native alphabet. The Russian letters COP translate to the English SOR, thus pointing the finger at a character named Professor Soren. Even that was not strikingly original, being rooted in the first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, in which a dying man scrawls the letters RACHE in blood; the police assume he was trying to implicate a woman named Rachel, until Holmes points out that ‘rache’ is the German word for ‘revenge’.
In the final episode of the season, ‘Orac’, the crew of the Liberator triumph over Servalan and Travis in the race to acquire the ultimate computer from its creator. At the age of eighteen Professor Ensor (Derek Farr) invented a component called a Tarial cell, which became an integral part of every computer in the known universe. Now in exile, he has developed a supercomputer named Orac, in a rare outbreak of futurology by Nation. ‘It is a brain, a genius,’ enthuses Ensor. ‘It has a mind that can draw information from every computer containing one of my cells. Orac has access to the sum total of all the knowledge of all the known worlds.’ But Ensor is a dying man, and possession of the computer passes to Blake, who only then discovers that it also has the personality of its creator: a crotchety, impatient old man who has little but contempt for those less intelligent than himself. ‘This wasn’t a polite computer,’ as Nation pointed out. In fact Orac (again voiced by Peter Tuddenham) is not far off being a rebirth of William Hartnell’s Doctor, always Nation’s favourite incarnation of the Time Lord.
If the first season of Blake’s 7 sometimes feels like a run-through of Terry Nation’s greatest hits, it’s none the worse for that. Since his move from comedy to drama, he had written more than 120 television programmes and his ability to tell a good story had not deserted him. The characters, as rich as those in Survivors, included some of his most memorable creations, particularly Servalan and Travis, but also Vila who has a good line in jokes about his own cowardice: ‘I plan to live forever. Or die trying.’ Most intriguing of all is Avon, whose professed lack of concern for anyone else, maintained throughout with a straight face, is steadily undermined by his interactions with the others. He banters with Vila and, although he makes no secret of his desire to take over the Liberator, he tends ultimately to defer to Blake, seemingly aware that he is not yet ready for leadership. When, in ‘Deliverance’, Blake asks him what it felt like to be treated as a god on Cephlon, he throws back the question with a tone of studied neutrality: ‘Don’t you know?’ And Blake replies, with some insight: ‘Yes. I don’t like the responsibility either.’
When the BBC conducted an audience research report after the first season, Avon emerged as the most popular character among the Liberator crew, followed in order by Blake, Jenna, Vila, Cally and Gan. The same research showed an impressive reaction index rating that averaged at 67, and a definite interest in having the show continue; asked whether they wanted to see a second season, 73 per cent of the sample replied positively. While not a spectacular ratings success, it had been solidly successful, averaging an audience of 9.2 million and reaching the weekly top thirty in the final episode; scheduled against Coronation Street on ITV, hardly the most desirable time slot, it had managed steadily to build an audience.
Less impressed were the critics, though this came as no great surprise. Doctor Who had become acceptable by virtue of its age, but still popular science fiction was seldom the recipient of critical praise, and Nation’s new show was no exception. ‘Blake’s 7 has turned out to be rather a run of the mill space adventure,’ said the Daily Express, while Peter Fiddick in the Guardian thought it was ‘a mix of olde-world space jargon, ray guns, Western-style goodies and baddies, and punch-ups straight out of The Sweeney.’ Stanley Reynolds in The Times was more enthusiastic, though his comments came after just four episodes, before the arrival of Servalan and Travis: ‘Terry Nation’s new series is straight with real villains, and it is nice to hear the youngsters holding their breath in anticipation of a little terror. Television science fiction has got too self-consciously jokey lately.’ And there was one comparison that could not be avoided, whether for good or ill. ‘I suppose the Star Wars boom sparked it off,’ reflected Clive James in the Observer. ‘Suddenly it seemed like a good idea for the Beeb to have its own space opera. Well, here it is. Activate main garbage tubes! Stand by for gunge disposal!’ Or, in the words of Shaun Usher in the Daily Mail: ‘For all those adults who pretend not to watch Doctor Who, and find it a shade too jokey and cliff-hanging, Blake’s Seven will have to do. And considering that it has the kind of budget Star Trek devoted to coffee breaks and Star Wars spent on trailers, it could be a lot worse.’
George Lucas’s film Star Wars had been released in Britain the month before Blake’s 7 debuted, having already been a runaway box-office hit in America. Its huge budget and ground-breaking special effects raised the bar for subsequent screen treatments of science fiction, far beyond a level with which the British film industry, let alone British television, could compete. ‘I enjoyed and admired the film, but came away from the screening green with envy,’ admitted Nation, after attending the press preview. He recognised that his own work had to take a very different tack. ‘When we did Blake’s 7 we realised we had to have interesting stories because our effects would win us no friends. When the space ship went through a black hole it was someone shaking a piece of black card.’ David Maloney, who went with him to the screening, concluded, ‘Well that’s us finished, we can’t possibly match that, we’re dead.’ The possibility of achieving higher production values had in fact been raised early on, when the American media company Time-Life approached the BBC, seeking to put money into the show in return for world rights, but the option was rejected by Alasdair Milne, later to be become director general of the corporation but then the director of programmes. ‘I do not accept,’ he wrote authoritatively in a memo, the same month Star Wars was released, ‘that there is going to be a great surge of interest in science fiction series in America.’
For many of its fans, part of the appeal of Blake’s 7 was precisely that low-budget production, a defiantly British response to American overkill. Some of the design and special effects were as good as anything the BBC had yet produced – particularly the Liberator itself, created by Roger Murray-Leach – but the approach to television drama had not essentially changed from the early days of Doctor Who. This was still ‘a kind of strange, bastard medium,’ in the words of David Maloney, ‘which lay between the theatre and film’. Maloney, who had earlier directed ‘Planet of the Daleks’ and ‘Genesis of the Daleks’ and who produced the first three seasons of Blake’s 7, was another who had come to Doctor Who with a background in theatre. As he suggests, there remained a certain staginess to the series.
Within its limitations, however, the first season of Blake’s 7 was a personal triumph for Nation, whose resolve to write the whole thing had been entirely vindicated. There were weak moments, but he had avoided the problems he encountered on Survivors of having his image of the show diluted by
others. The volume of work this entailed meant he had even less involvement in the actual production than normal, but he did this time have a sympathetic producer and the result was exactly what he had set out to create: ‘a modern swashbuckler’. In many ways it was the ultimate Terry Nation creation, a variation on the ITC action adventure stories set on the alien planets of Doctor Who and with the more subtle characterisation of Survivors. There’s also Servalan, a monster almost to rival Davros, there are good jokes, the plot developments and action are relentless and a fight is seldom more than a few minutes away.
Equally characteristic of Nation, there is, running underneath the romping fun, a vein of pure pessimism in its depiction of the future; there’s no sense of hope or progress in this vision of things to come. ‘With its drugged, dejected masses crushed by tyrants,’ noted Shaun Usher, it ‘seemed to picture the future as being much the same as the present, Lord help us, only worse.’ And, while not straying from his wish to entertain the audience, Nation was developing a new sense of moral ambiguity. In Survivors he had begun to introduce a little shading to his villains, suggesting that there might be a need in extremis for the authoritarianism of Wormley and Knox; here he left the arch-villains pure at heart in their evil, but created a cast of ‘heroes’ that included a murderer, a thief, a smuggler and an embezzler. Blake may have been framed, but there is no suggestion that any of the others were anything but criminals.
The season ended on a note of negativity that seemed perfectly in tune with the preceding episodes. Blake and his comrades bring the all-seeing computer Orac on to the Liberator and find that it’s so powerful and has access to so much information that it can effectively predict the future, extrapolating from the present to see the ensuing chains of events and their ultimate consequences. And, in a wonderful cliff-hanger of an ending, Orac reveals to the crew images from the future of the Liberator exploding in space.
Chapter Fifteen
The Story Continues
The experience of the Dalek craze had convinced all parties – Terry Nation, Roger Hancock, the BBC – of the value of merchandising, and approaches were made early on in the development of Blake’s 7 to more than a dozen companies with ideas for everything from a video game to ice cream, from colouring books to jigsaws. However proud Nation had been of his work on Survivors, he was aware of the limited spin-off opportunities involved in that series and was keen to remedy the situation. ‘I knew I wanted to do another science fiction show,’ he said later, ‘because of having had all sorts of ancillary successes with the Daleks and Doctor Who, like merchandising and so on.’ Unlike Doctor Who, however, Blake’s 7 was not primarily aimed at children and few such opportunities materialised; many of the licences that were signed were never followed through, foundering on a lack of available imagery at an early enough stage. There was moreover little public appetite for those products that did make it to the shops: jigsaws, a two-inch-long replica of the Liberator from Corgi Toys, and the Blake’s 7 Neutron Space Rifle, the latter capable of firing table tennis balls.
More encouraging were sales of related literature. There was now clearly a market for novelisations, as demonstrated not only by Nation’s own Survivors, but even more by the success of the Doctor Who books published by Target. The first of these had been a reprint of David Whitaker’s version of the first Daleks serial, and a further twenty titles had been added by the time two other Nation stories, The Genesis of the Daleks and The Planet of the Daleks, appeared in 1976. Nation had no involvement in either – both were written by Terrance Dicks – though of course he benefited from their sales. ‘Basically you get half the money and do none of the work,’ observed Chris Boucher, whose Doctor Who serials were also adapted by Dicks; ‘which sounds reasonable enough to me.’ Suitably inspired, Roger Hancock had, by December 1976, negotiated deals for a Blake’s 7 novelisation, to be published in hardback by Arthur Barker and in paperback by Sphere.
Nation was by now committed to writing all thirteen episodes for the first season and had no time or appetite to add a book to his workload, so instead Sphere turned to an established science fiction writer, Trevor Hoyle, who had just completed his Q Trilogy of novels. ‘Terry was happy to have someone take the chore off his hands,’ remembered Hoyle, who worked from draft scripts of the first four episodes, augmented by phone conversations and meetings with Nation, to produce Blake’s 7. He followed that with Project Avalon, published by Arrow Books, which rounded up a further four first-season scripts, and with Scorpio Attack, taken from the fourth season, which came out under the BBC’s own imprint, completing a hat-trick of publishers. There were also three annuals, starting in 1979, from World Distributors, the company responsible for the successful Doctor Who annuals, and a monthly magazine from Marvel, that lasted for nearly two years from October 1981.
What was notable about all these publications was that they identified themselves on their covers as being part of ‘Terry Nation’s Blake’s 7’, with Nation’s name rendered in a facsimile of his signature. This was even true of Scorpio Attack, which contained none of his plots at all. The same styling was not used on screen. Indeed David Maloney rejected a suggestion from Hancock that, from the second season, the credit ‘series created by Terry Nation’ should be changed to ‘series devised by Terry Nation’; after consultations with Chris Boucher, this was felt to give too much recognition to Nation’s continuing contribution. But the trend was evident elsewhere. When, in 1979, Target brought out a cheaply produced paperback about the Daleks, edited by Terrance Dicks (it contained a history of the species, various puzzles and games, and a reprint of the 1974 short story, ‘Daleks: The Secret Invasion’), it was titled Terry Nation’s Dalek Special, with his name again in his own handwriting. Similarly World Distributors brought out a series of four Dalek annuals from 1976, and they too were billed as Terry Nation’s Dalek Annual.
‘People knew about Terry and the Daleks,’ reasoned Dicks, ‘so there was a commercial value to having his name on the books, although he had very little to do with them.’ But there was something more deliberate at work here, a conscious attempt to turn Nation himself into a brand. ‘I had a very good agent and he insisted on it. I wanted to associate the name with the product,’ Nation explained. ‘It was a calculated effort really, selling a product. I was the product.’ It’s hard not to see this as preparatory work in a planned campaign to try again the recurring dream of conquering America; by identifying Nation so overtly with his successful creations of the Daleks and Blake’s 7, it was hoped to raise his profile, enabling him to approach the US television industry from a position of strength.
Meanwhile there was a new series to write, and this time Nation was no longer to be responsible for the whole thing. ‘I wanted the weight off me a little,’ he was later to comment. ‘I was tired by that time.’ Instead he was contracted to write five episodes, the remainder being split between Chris Boucher, who also remained the script editor, and a trio of other experienced writers: Allan Prior, Roger Parkes and Robert Holmes. Three scripts were duly delivered, but when it came to what was intended to be the double-part season finale, Nation found he’d simply run out of steam. ‘Terry said that he had made several efforts to write part 12 but was defeated,’ recorded David Maloney in an internal memo, ‘this being his seventeenth script for Blake’s 7.’ Instead the season finale was written by Boucher, who was now more involved in shaping the series.
Born in 1943, Boucher was – like Nation – an only child who had started his professional career writing jokes, in his case for Braden’s Week, the BBC consumer show that spawned Esther Rantzen’s That’s Life, and for the comedian Dave Allen, before moving into sitcoms with, among others, a pilot, Slater’s Day (1974) for Yorkshire TV, that starred Nation’s old friend John Junkin but didn’t get commissioned as a series. By the time he came to Blake’s 7 as script editor (after Robert Holmes turned the job down), he had had three serials screened on Doctor Who, but his new role was a major step forward in his career and h
e ended up writing nine episodes as well as remaining on the production team throughout. The pressure on Nation to produce the first season meant that Boucher had a greater involvement in rewriting than was normal for a script editor, but it was a relationship that seemed to work for both men. ‘He didn’t seem hugely protective, but then he was a pro from way back,’ observed Boucher, while Nation was more generous in his praise than he could sometimes be for those who changed his work: ‘Chris Boucher did a splendid job overall. I would not have approved of every change he made, but that was what he was being paid for. I think he did it terribly well.’
Nation did, however, retain considerable influence over the direction of the series, and for the second season Hancock negotiated payments of £240 format royalty for each episode written by anyone else, plus a script consultancy fee of £50 per episode – the result was that of the money Nation received for the season, nearly 40 per cent came from episodes written by others. There was also a payment of £500 for a concept and theme for the season, and Nation produced a document summing up what had been done thus far and outlining what should happen next. ‘Blake’s 7 is a space adventure,’ he emphasised. ‘It is filled with action and adventure. This must be our yardstick by which we judge all future stories.’
