How the hell was Blake’s 7 commissioned?
The BBC green-lighting a space adventure series for a ‘kidult’ audience seemed as odd then as it would seem now. They didn’t and don’t, after all, commission ‘genre’ shows - Westerns or battle-heavy historical epics.
Of course they have one (nominally) science fiction property. You can just about see why they commissioned that in 1963, as what it swiftly became was not what it was envisioned as; the Doctor Who of Sydney Newman’s conception is an adventure serial, yes, but his stipulation was that it would absolutely, definitely not be at the Flash Gordon end of the scale - no monsters, sexy girls and schlocky alien invasions. And we all know how that turned out. (Though a sense of those loftier ambitions lingers for its first three years until squashed by Shaun Sutton’s very clear directive to Innes Lloyd and Gerry Davis to can the satirical or cerebral elements, such as they were.)
At the time of Terry Nation’s initial meeting at the BBC to discuss potential new series ideas in 1975, what was on the BBC’s slate for the early evening drama slot?
Here we find Z Cars, Barlow, Colditz, and The Venturers - two police procedurals, a POW saga, and a ‘damn you, Marjorie!’ boardroom power struggle, all of them mostly videotaped in studio with telecine film inserts. They all - even Colditz - rely heavily for their drama on talking indoors, with only occasional bursts of physical action. None of them could be classified as an adventure, or designed with children anywhere in mind (though an average nine year old would be able to follow along without too much trouble). The BBC relied for their evening adventure series on buying in shows and films from the States - in 1975 we find repeats of Star Trek and Mission: Impossible (two series it is as well to keep in mind when thinking of Blake’s 7), and several American films.
Even at the time, even when I was 9, I was a bit surprised by Blake’s 7 coming out of the BBC. As with Doctor Who, they seemed a little embarrassed by it - it never appeared on the cover of Radio Times (then much more strongly connected with the BBC). Its cast never appeared for promotion purposes on adult TV shows - they were treated as kids’ tv stars; you might find Gareth Thomas on Swap Shop, Jan Chappell on Star Turn or Paul Darrow on Ask Aspel or The Adventure Game. The cast of Secret Army dropping in on Noel Edmonds would’ve been unthinkable. Where Blake’s 7 was mentioned in other BBC output it was always with at least a wry look to camera - Wogan’s Tuesday morning discussions of the last night’s episode, or Rowan Atkinson demanding ‘Put to death whoever thought of Blake’s 7!’ on Not The 9 O’Clock News. (There’s a great moment in Kenny Everett’s Thames series in 1979, broadcast against Series B, when he cries ‘Why aren’t you doing something normal, like watching Blake’s 7?’ to hoots of laughter from the crew.)
The gestation period between the BBC commissioning a pilot script from Terry Nation to them giving the final go-ahead in 1977 also coincided with ITV’s extremely public and very costly flop of Space:1999. For decades I wondered why the BBC had said GO to a project that they couldn’t feasibly produce, and which was highly unlike any of their other shows. And then I found out.
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