The Annotated Blake’s 7 - Duel

What a difference a Doug makes

Is ‘Duel’ the best episode of Blake’s 7?

No more money has been spent. This is Series A, remember, with its tight budget and impossible schedule, and the cash injection that never comes. There is the same kind of cheap, tiny planet set and obviously painted backdrop, not much bigger or more impressive than the kind William Hartnell was stepping out from the Tardis to explore in Lime Grove fifteen years before. There is the same very ordinary kind of location, some woods conveniently close to TV Centre. The script? It’s good, solid stuff, with the usual snappy dialogue, but its main conceit is obviously cribbed from an older source - a source that was itself cribbing from an even older source.

So why is ‘Duel’ so special? Because everything is attended to. All the potential locked up in the script is unpacked and ruthlessly exploited. All of these little extra details, and special pains taken, add up to a lot.

There is oomph and conviction in every scene - in every shot. The reactions of the actors are precisely calculated and properly weighted. Every moment has been deeply thought about.

The difference, then, is its director, Douglas Camfield.

Camfield was working at the very limit of what is achievable and affordable, which is always dangerous, and he ran over schedule - but these things are true of the other three directors in Series A, who are all working flat-out.

(Despite the stories about them falling out, this is the only reason Dudley Simpson didn’t provide the score for ‘Duel’ - the studio remount of the flight deck scenes took place on the evening of February 1st, and transmission was on the evening of February 20th. That is cutting it very fine. ‘Orac’ only just squeaked to meet its transmission date, the tape delivered with literally hours to spare).

The difference between Camfield and the other directors is the amount of prep - and the kind of prep - he did with a script before it got into the rehearsal room, let alone the studio.

This became clear to me reading ‘Directed By Douglas Camfield’, Michael Seely’s excellent biography, which I highly recommend and which you can buy as an ebook from Amazon for a tenner. (The book also revealed to me the existence of ‘Catherine The Great’, a 1974 episode of Special Branch that features Tony Beckley as a drag queen who uses the naked breasts of his girlfriend Jacqueline Pearce to enhance his act, and murders both her and his male lover, Michael Sheard.)

What else did I learn?