BLAKE’S 7
It came to TV the same week Star Wars opened in the UK but Blake’s 7 was epic space opera on a shoestring. On its 40th anniversary, Jonathan Helm talks to the effects team that went up against the Empire…
Forty years since Britain’s answer to Star Wars, we celebrate the effects team that made magic on a shoestring budget. Possibly a Shoestring budget.
The brainchild of dalek creator Terry Nation, Blake’s 7 was the BBC’s first attempt at an all-out science fiction space opera. Contrary to popular belief, it was not an attempt to cash in on the Star Wars phenomenon; the series was in development years before George Lucas’s blockbuster was released. Unusually, Terry Nation was responsible for writing all 13 episodes of the first series. Nation had a reputation for writing on an epic scale and made no allowances for BBC budgets. Blake’s 7 was no exception.
David Maloney was appointed as the producer on Blake’s 7 towards the end of 1976. A veteran director of many Doctor Who episodes, Maloney was used to working miracles with tiny budgets but he soon discovered that Blake’s 7 was seriously underfunded, even by BBC standards. After attending a trade showing of Star Wars in May 1977, he pushed for a higher visual effects budget: “Here we were, about to start a space series with insufficient money, and we had just seen something that was absolutely mindblowing.” Maloney’s requests for more money fell on deaf ears, and attempts to secure a co-production partner were unsuccessful. An incredibly shortsighted memo from managing
director Alasdair Milne perfectly illustrates the prevailing attitude within the BBC at the time: “I do not accept that there is going to be a great surge of interest in science fiction series in America.” A few weeks later Star Wars smashed box-office records in the US. Piling on the pressure for Maloney and his team, the blockbuster movie was set to premiere in the UK in the same week that the first episode of
Blake’s 7 was due to be broadcast.
Ian Scoones (Hammer, Thunderbirds, Doctor
Who) was appointed as the visual effects designer and would handle effects for the entire first season. Scoones was alarmed to discover that he’d be working with the same budget as the recently cancelled BBC police drama series Softly, Softly: Task Force, with only £50 per episode! Scoones’s colleague Mat Irvine was in the initial briefing meeting. “I remember sitting in a meeting with the head of the effects department, Michaeljohn Harris, and the producer, David Maloney,” he says. “David was a lovely guy who’d directed many episodes of
Doctor Who, and he said, ‘I’ve just seen this movie’ – he didn’t say what the movie was, but we all knew it was Star Wars – ‘and I’d like all the miniatures done like that.’ I looked at Ian, and Ian looked at me, and we said, ‘Well, give us the money and we’ll do it like that.’ We never got the money, so we had to compromise.”
With the shadow of Star Wars looming, Scoones fought to have the early effects work filmed at Bray Studios, where he had worked during his time with Hammer Films and, more recently, on Doctor Who. “I’d been filming at Bray Studios to at least get the model work photographed well on Doctor Who,” he recalls. “David Maloney said, ‘Okay, let’s do that with
Blake’s 7 too. How much is it going to cost?’ I said, ‘Never mind, let’s just get it done!’”
Model filming started at Bray on Monday 15 August 1977, weeks before the directors appointed to work on the series were available. Accustomed to directing visual effects sequences on Doctor Who with minimum input from the director, Scoones carried on regardless. Over an intensive few days, the visual effects team filmed a variety of complex models for the first three episodes. This included the impressive Dome City from the opening episode, the transport ship London and detailed model landscapes representing the surface of prison planet Cygnus Alpha. Footage of the Liberator was also shot at Bray, including a number of “beauty shots” which would be reused in the first three series.
The end results were impressive, but Scoones managed to blow the effects budget for the entire series on just the first few days’ filming. The visual effects team was working from draft scripts, which resulted in sequences having to be scrapped after the scripts were rewritten. To make matters worse, a number of directors refused to accept material that had already been shot before they began working on the series. This led to reshoots and inferior model sequences that were badly lit, shot by in-house BBC cameramen who were unused to working with miniatures. A lot of top-quality footage was junked in favour of blatantly inferior shots.
To add to his stress levels, Scoones would find himself working on multiple episodes at once, and there were ongoing disputes with the directors on the series. Michael E Briant, in particular, was keen to direct all the visual effects sequences himself, which caused friction with Scoones and his team. “My cameramen were unsympathetic to Michael Briant. They soon threw him into a panic and he quickly reverted to the usual set-up.” As well as the extensive model filming at Bray, effects
were also needed on location and in the studio. Scoones would often leave the recording studio at 10pm and travel down to the filming location on the same night.
Mat finish
As the season progressed, Mat Irvine was brought in “full-time” to share the workload with Scoones. Even with their combined efforts, Irvine recalls that there were limits to what could be achieved: “Give us the facilities and the money, and we’ll do those kind of effects. You had to make compromises. The shots looked good but weren’t sophisticated because we just didn’t have the time.”
Scoones and his team managed to complete the whole season on time ( just!) but they went massively over budget. The first series of Blake’s 7 used 1,898 more hours of labour and £4,433 worth of materials than had been budgeted for. Despite concerns from BBC top brass about the overspend, Scoones was praised by the production team. Before he left for a well-earned holiday, Scoones fired off a long memo to his bosses at the BBC: “We now know that Blake’s 7 was planned and given allocations as another police series – £50 per programme! Audiences are getting more sophisticated, especially in the science fiction areas of entertainment with such epics as Star Wars and Close Encounters on the big screen and TV series backed by the US on the competitive channel (Man From Atlantis, Logan’s Run)… We cannot even attempt to compete.”
In many ways, Scoones was right. The first episode of Blake’s 7 aired just five days after Star Wars premiered in the UK. As predicted by the production team, the effects work was sometimes unfairly compared to the epic spectacle of Star Wars, but Blake’s 7 was still an instant smash hit. The production team had survived a baptism of fire and they had a hit on their hands. And the BBC had learned that you couldn’t make an epic space opera on the same budget and schedule as a standard police drama. The visual effects budget for the second season was increased but an exhausted Scoones declined to return.
Ian Scoones photographs courtesy of Anastasia Scoones and Steve Cambden.