Blake's 7 – Production Blog

Benedict Cumberbatch (Townsend), writer Simon Guerrier and Carrie Dobro (Jenna) © B7 Enterprises Ltd

On 1 February 2008, script editor Ben Aaronovitch emailed out of the blue asking if I’d write a half-hour Blake’s 7 play. I’d employed him for a book and some short stories, and he was returning the favour.

He wanted a play for two voices, covering the early years of one of the main Blake’s 7 characters. “I’m doing Gan and Villa and a Servalan one,” he said. “That leaves Jenna as smuggler or Avon/Ensor.” And he needed the play very quickly.

The original plan was to make the story part of a special, 30th anniversary release for late 2008, so I had until 12 February to write my first draft. Managed to do that, and then jetted off to a Doctor Who convention in Los Angeles, where producer Andrew Sewell announced I was on the team.

Ben sent me notes on the script on 13 March, including the note that, “the big crime amongst spacers is putting other people’s life support at risk.” I sent him a revised version two days later.

I wrote a blurb and author notes for the story on 24 March, and on 3 May Ben let me know he and producer Andrew Sewell were happy with the script but wanted actress Carrie Dobro to give her approval. On 19 May, I was asked to explain Jenna’s age in the play – we meet her at three different points in her life.

On 5 August, Ben offered me the chance to include a third character in the play. A week later, I let him know,

“I’ve had a think and written some notes, but I can’t think of a way to have a third character in my Jenna play that makes it any better. Different, yes. But not better. If there’s things you’d like me to incorporate, I’m happy to work them in, but I can’t think of anything I’d like to do to improve it.”

On 19 August, I attended the recording of Young Travis, and had a chat with Andrew and Ben in the pub afterwards about where the series was going and when we’d be recording mine. No, The Dust Run wouldn’t be out by the end of the year.

On 21 April 2009, Ben emailed me, asking if I’d write a second Young Jenna episode, to go on the same CD release. Over the next day, we knocked some ideas back and forth, to which Ben concluded:

“Heroic, sad and ultimately futile – Blake’s 7 in a nutshell”.

On 27 April, I revised he blurb and notes from more than a year previously to incorporate the second story.

I sent Ben a revised version of The Dust Run on 12 May, now including stuff that set up the second episode. I sent another version of this on 31 May, along with the first draft of The Trial.

On 21 June, I provided the same scripts to Ben, this time using the scriptwriting program Final Draft instead of Word. I received notes back on the scripts on 1 July. “The important thing,” he said, “is to make sure that Jenna doesn’t come across as being weak.” I provided revisions on 5 July.

Producer Andrew Sewell then provided additional notes on 14 July. “Think that the sex scenes are too long,” he said. The hope was to record the episodes on 10-11 August. Later that day, Andrew also sent me some notes from director Alistair Lock. I delivered rewrites at 23.49 that same day.

On 3 August I provided character notes for the casting of Townsend and Nick. Andrew sent round final, locked versions of the script on 21 August. On 27 August, I attended the first day of recording for the story – 18 months after The Dust Run was first commissioned.

As I’m signing in at reception, a familiar voice behind me says, “Blake’s 7? Really?” It’s Steven Grief – evil Travis in the first year of Blake’s 7 on TV. He’s working in the studio next door. This, I decide, is a good omen.

Simon Guerrier

Choosing Cally from the cast of misfits who make up Blake’s 7 wasn’t really making a choice at all. When her character was dropped at the end of the third season, I was properly insensed. Cally is the strangest and least human of all of them, and consequently for me, by far the most interesting.

Before the Blake audio adventures, we’d planned a series of animated stories, somewhat in the style of Sin City. I’d bagged the story set on Auron. I wanted to recreate the place in far more detail than we had ever seen on Cally’s only tv return to her home-world in Children of Auron. The concept of a clone society readily lent itself to the stylised graphic visualisation of the series and Cally’s family could expand to a whole army of identical sisters. But I wanted those sisters all to have identities of their own, and not all be the same age. There’d be distinct generations of siblings: youthful Callys, middle aged Callys, older and wiser Callys. There was even a hover-coachload of pre-pubescent Callys on a school outing.

But I also needed to flesh out the sort of society where they grew up. In the original series, the truth about Auron, filtered out in tiny teasing gasps. People were cloned, telepathic and human (or not); Auron was politically neutral, independent and/or isolationist. Cally was a freedom-fighting envoy or a rebel, or both. Loads of contradictions to choose from.

So what would a cloned society be like? A teeming anthill threatening the existence of any individual thinker? A dank Communist state complete with collective farms and compulsory military academies? It had to be a believable society, created out of the isolated circumstances in which it found itself. The Auronar started off as humans and then set off on their own diverging path; a route that scares Auron’s belligerent and disdainful Earth Mother. They don’t want those sort of ideas getting round – particularly if they work.

The Auron Unity began as a small breakaway colony. Its Government of Founders, faced with the need to survive on an uninhabited world and under constant threat from the Federation, started cloning their workforce. Since the small colony lacked a broad gene pool, each original worker had thousands of cloned descendants, born and raised in batches; and that’s where the telepathy started.

On Auron, the sense of family is everything. The Cally family, all sisters, are linked by their telepathic family bond. In a clone’s head, there is the constant wash of family opinion. No-one is alone. Everyone’s nosey. If you want privacy, you learn to shut your sisters out. Without exceptional mental discipline, dissenting rebels have a tough time.

On film, all the Callys can be played by the same actor, but not on audio. That’s a sure way to give the performer/director/sound engineer and the audience nervous breakdowns. But audio stories offer their own angle. I can explore the inner telepathic world of the cloned society in far greater depth.

Down amongst this vast throng of family brothers and sisters, there are also Auronar twins: special case clones bred and raised for joint tasks such as deep space Pilot and Pilot’s Operative back on a patrol ship. Twins have an instant telepathic link which, when employed in space manoeuvres, is more reliable and quicker than radio communication. That special link is what Flag and Flame is all about. It explores the bond between Merrin and Skate, two Cally sisters, living their lives in each others’ heads, faced with the over-powering military demands of the machine that Auron society has become. It’s the individual voice against the all-subsuming Greater Good. What they learn from each other leads one of them to a future far beyond the safety and familiarity of her sisters and their home world.

Flag and Flame was written as a one-off 30-minute play, not enough for a stand-alone CD release, and there were thoughts that we might double its length. Ben Aaronovitch and I both felt that an expansion might dilute the story, so Ben opted to write a prequel, Blood and Earth, set much earlier in Auron’s colonial history, introducing the planet’s bizarre society and the dual worlds of what goes on inside and outside clones’ heads.

We’re back on Auron again in the next set of Blake’s 7 Audio Adventures – more clones, more families, more Callys and a deeply nasty truth at the heart of the Auronar government, which suggests they aren’t quite as isolationist as they want everyone to think.

Marc Platt

Carrie is running around in circles, she runs for at least two minutes before the director (Alistair Lock) asks her to stop. Through the studio window she gives the director a hopeful glance, everyone in the booth holds their breath – finally the director nods and says ‘that’s fine.’

Everyone relaxes, another wild track is ticked off the list and away we go. Wild tracks are a vital component in what we are pleased to call Widescreen Radio and what Alistair, our sound designer and director calls; weeks and weeks of hard work. They’re used to create the layers of sound that our characters move through giving the audio illusion of depth and reality.

Listen to the sequence in Eye of the Machine where Avon and Anna Grant duck out of a gig to have a ‘conversation’ in a nearby corridor; notice the way the background sounds change as they head for the door, it’s practically subliminal but creates a feeling of solidity.

Back in the studio Carrie is choking for the microphones. ‘Could you choke a bit slower?’ asks the director…

Ben Aaronovitch

Rule one for script editors… Always make sure that the writer arrives before you do on the first day of recording.

Why?

Because the actors are always ready with a tricky question the moment they see you. Carrie Dobro wants to know why Jenna is being interrogated about her past. Still in the midst of some serious coffee deprivation I cobble together a plausible sounding answer.

Carrie, a seasoned and intelligent woman who, as a native New Yorker, is blessed with a sophisticated bullshit detector is having none of it. I turn to my producer for help but Andrew’s attitude is that as Script Editor I should know the answer to these things.

I stumble about blindly throwing out explanations at random in the hope that one will satisfy Carrie until finally it’s time to rehearse and I can slink off into the corner and recover. Ten minutes later Simon Guerrier, the writer, arrives.

I put the question to him. ‘It’s all explained in the second script,’ he says. I want to tell Carrie this but she’s already focused on her performance. Hence the lesson – make sure the writer arrives at the studio before you do. They usually know the answer to those difficult questions and even if they don’t you can still use them as a human shield.

Ben Aaronovitch

Welcome to the Blake’s 7 Production blog where, from time to time, members of the Blake’s 7 production team will regale you with tales from the production coalface. We’ve made a decision to try and avoid the bland, public relations inspired, pre-digested, pre-spun, corporate… stuff – that appears on other sites but that means you’ll have to put up with certain things.

1. Sometimes bugger all is happening; writers are writing, producers are negotiating, directors are relaxing on the yachts of Russian oligarchs and actors are in Hollywood becoming major stars. This is the dull grind that makes up 90% of audio and TV production and we’ve not going to inflict it on you. If updates are a bit thin on the ground, it’s not because we’re not working, it’s because what we’re doing is incredibly dull.
2. Many of you are desperate to know about the TV series and we’re desperate to tell you but we can’t – at least not right now. As soon as we can talk about it we will but at the moment we can’t – sorry. However there are many exciting things in the wonderful world of Widescreen Radio coming up in the near future, a new Blake’s 7: Early Years release and another Audio Adventures season under active development so it’s not like we’ve got nothing to say.

That said; we’re going to give you an insight into how Blake’s 7 gets made, as it gets made, by the people who are making it and I promise you we shall do this with as little bullshit as we can get away with.

Ben Aaronovitch