Blake's 7 was interesting to make
and I was delighted when David Maloney asked me to direct the first
episode of the first season and 3 other episodes - almost 1/3 of the
opening series.
I directed the first episode
THE WAY BACK,
It is always interesting to direct the first
episode of a new series. You set the style and truthfulness of the show -
the acting level...
then
THE
WEB
Shot just outside Pinewood studios - Think the balloons work
well...
PROJECT AVALON
DELIVERANCE
All the filming in this episode was done by the
producer who intended to do the studio direction as well but he realised that
the demands of producing this brand new series were too demanding so he asked me
to do it for him...
David Maloney the producer involved me and the other 2
directors - Pennant Roberts and Vere Lorrimer, in the basic decision making from
the very beginning. The casting went very easily and I think we had a good
different team of Actors. Certainly Gareth Thomas was an excellent choice
for Blake - A very clever and imaginative actor he gave the series a gravitas it
would not have had with a lesser artist.
My visions for the Liberator were somewhat
different from that of the others, including the talented set designer Roger Murray
Leach. I really did not want to see steering wheels, or buttons or
levers. I couldn't believe that space travel would have 'hands on control' - for
goodness sake even today you can land an Airbus entirely by computer and they
frequently do.
I didn't want a StarTrek type
control room - I had this idea that the flight crew would sit or stand in a
quiet isolated place possibly surrounded by darkness and communicate with
the flight computer mentally or at worst by voice control. Inputting
requirements and negotiating with the flight computer.... Although Roger M-L
created a very imaginative flight deck and on the same budget that SOFTLY
SOFTLY, the police series we were replacing had, I was a bit disappointed
how hands on it made Blake's 7 appear when 'driving' the Liberator.
However, I was absolutely in a minority of one and the set was certainly
striking and effective. I was pleased to see that later on 'talking computer
control' became the norm - never quite got to 'thinking' control but I bet that
happens one day.
For Episode one THE
WAY BACK there were something like 9 or 10 studio
sets required and all of them meant to be in this huge artificial dome of a
city. - Not to mention a court room, a tunnel to the outside world and a prison
cell - none of them to be present day but something out of the future and never
to
be used again in the series - all very expensive and way beyond our police
series budget -
The set designer for the
first episode was
Martin Collins and when he asked me what I wanted I said really anything that
did not look like a semi detached in Balham or an office block like the TV Center - I felt that to make the model of the city look huge the interiors had
to be big. The corridors should look like streets. The court room vast. Maybe we
could just have 3 or 4 big sets and change their appearance by re-dressing
them? All this was a bit unlikely for the resources we had available.
A few days later Martin came to see me
clutching a tatty cardboard box and a studio plan with nothing on it. He unrolled
the empty plan and placed weights on each corner to keep it flat. Then he
produced a cardboard rectangular pillar but V shaped on one side and placed it on the plan. then another
and another till there were 6 or 8. 'Look' he said 'if you put them in a
circle round the studio and add a big desk on a rostrum and some sort of dock
you have a courtroom. If you move them into two straight lines across the length
of the studio you have a wide street. If you move them closer together and
put a door at the end you have a tunnel to the outside world. If you put 4 in a
square and put a set of bars between them you have a prison! To stop 'shooting
off 'you put a white cyclorama all around the studio - paint the floor
white and with a few spare flats and bits we can make every set we need from
these building blocks on wheels'!
Brilliant!
What ever else it may have been, the set
design of episode one was very, very clever and would probably never have happened
without the very tight financial restrictions that trying to do a space si fi
series on a standard police series budget imposed.
The rest of the series was interesting to
do but smacked of Dr Who a bit. Nothing wrong with that - they both have been
amazingly popular series. I quite liked the small video cam which are 10 a penny
today but unheard of when we made Blake. I was pleased with the matt shot of the
dome city and the folks running in the darkness beneath it - The old war time
caves from Project Avalon were a good location and worked well combined with the
Wookey Hole caves. I liked the side of Avalon???s head coming off and the space
ship that flies past and you can see the driver -
Cannot say how pleased I was
to give Glynis Barber her first television part - in an artificial snow storm
then see her come back to the same series as a lead. She later appeared in my
feature film Tangiers and starred for London Weekend in Dempsey and
Makepiece and later in Emmerdale
The little people and the
balloons with tinsel around in Burnham Beaches is also memorable. |I remember
that in the rehearsal room we would use wood cut-out guns for practicing the
fights - slightly tongue in cheek I asked Sally Knyvette playing Jenna to say
'bang' every time she fired so I could count the rounds etc. I was rewarded
in the studio recording when Sally, in full gear brandishing a (blank)
loaded UZI, jumped round the corner pointed the gun at the villain and screamed
Bang Bang! - and why not it was what we rehearsed!
Chris Boucher was a wonderful script
editor - without him we would have been lost. David Maloney having his
first stab at producing was a pleasure to work for. Star Wars was released
whilst we were preparing to Blake's 7 and I know Pennant went to see it - his
office was next to mine and I am certain I could hear the occasional sob and
sigh from next door. When all my episodes were finished I went to see Star Wars
- I will never understand why Pennant didn't jump out the window. I mean how can
you compete with that. We couldn't of course but somehow Blake worked for a lot
of the audience a lot of the time.
We bravely went where others had been
before.
Recently I had the opportunity
to re-visit my episodes and many of the eps by the directors of Series One and
was very pleasantly surprised. It stands up very well - some visual
effects excepted - and is very reminiscent of Marvel Comics stories in
it's presentation. If there was ever a series just asking for a re-boot it is
Blakes7. Would be a real hit and with modern Vis effects a rival to many
Netflix/Prime productions -
When the publishers Classic TV Press asked me to write
these memoirs I was very flattered but somewhat unsure. The title sums
up the question I have been asking myself for years.
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The book is available from
here
More about it
here |
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