CHRIS BOUCHER 1943-2022
Remembering a key voice in Brit SF TV
“I PREFER MY HEROES and villains a little more nuanced,” said writer and script editor Chris Boucher, whose taste for moral ambiguity and gift for acid banter found a perfect showcase in Blake’s 7.
Born in Maldon, Essex, Boucher was an only child whose imagination was stoked by such pulp magazines as Astounding Science Fiction. Raising a family while working for Calor Gas, he took to scriptwriting to earn extra cash, selling a “three-line quickie” to BBC consumer affairs show Braden’s Week in 1969.
Boucher broke into TV SF with three Doctor Who commissions in the late ’70s. “The Robots Of Death” and “The Face Of Evil” demonstrated a knack for world-building along with a fascination for artificial intelligence, while the spooky “Image Of The Fendahl” evoked Quatermass with its tale of an ancient skull influencing human civilisation.
“The Face Of Evil” saw Boucher create one of the show’s classic companions in Leela, a knife-wielding alien savage inspired by Palestinian terrorist Leila Khaled and played by Louise Jameson. “The character was originally conceived as a reaction against the little screaming companion type,” he recalled.
Boucher served as script editor on all four seasons of Blake’s 7 and wrote nine episodes, including “Blake”, the memorable 1981 finale that saw the mismatched heroes massacred. Originally shadowing series creator Terry Nation, Boucher became the show’s key creative voice, shifting it from “Robin Hood in space” to “Che Guevara and The Dirty Dozen”.
Star Cops followed in 1987, a near-future police procedural that spliced Boucher’s love of crime drama – he was script editor on Shoestring, Bergerac and The Bill – with SF. Blake’s 7 remained perhaps his proudest achievement: “At its worst it was awful, at its best it was as good as almost anything around,” he reflected in 2008. “And from worst to best I loved every bloody minute of it.” NS