Blake's 7

Blake's 7 (sometimes spelled Blakes 7, as this was the title shown at the beginning of the series) was a science fiction adventure drama television series in the space opera sub-genre which had a considerable cross-over between its crew and that of Doctor Who, which was airing at the same time. Some Doctor Who Universe stories have featured crossovers between elements of Blake's 7 and Doctor Who.

Overview

Premise and tone

The series was set an unspecified time in the future. The first two seasons concerned the adventures of the experienced but still idealistic rebel Roj Blake and the crew of the Liberator, an alien starship which they had acquired who fought the despotic Terran Federation, represented by Servalan, aided by Travis.

In the third season, Blake vanished and was replaced by his second in command, the vengeful genius Kerr Avon. The Liberator was destroyed at the end of the season and in the next replaced by another starship, the Scorpio.

Blake's 7 was a less fundamentally optimistic series than Doctor Who. The majority of the protagonists met violent deaths during the course of the series, and the dystopian setting remaining basically unchanged or even, perhaps, got worse as a result of the actions of the rebels.

Aliens and "monsters" did appear, though rarely, with the arguable excpetion of Cally, a telepathic crew member who either came from a telepathic non-human species or from a race of biolgoicaly modified humans. The Human Terran Federation was, apparently, the only major power structure throghout the sector of space visited by the crew.

Production history

Blake's 7 was first broadcast on BBC 1 between 1978 and 1981. Its characters, setting was created by, and, for the first season, was entirely written by Terry Nation, the creator of the Daleks. Prolific Doctor Who director David Maloney produced the first three seasons of the series (sometimes referred to as Season A, Season B and Season C) and Chris Boucher, the writer of serveral Doctor Who serials, acted as Script Editor and writer on all four seasons. (Former Doctor Who Script Editor Robert Holmes, on declining the job of script editor of Blake's 7 had suggested Boucher as a subsitute.)

The last episode of Season B of Blake's 7 featured an invasion of the galaxy by aliens, called Andromedans, from outside the galaxy. The aliens were so powerful that the crew of the Liberator pitched in with the Federation to repell it. Terry Nation had wanted to feature the Daleks. who Nation had created, as the invading force. Chris Boucher recalls the idea was strongly rejected by the producer and himself.

Cast and Crew connections

Production personnel common to both series

Writers and Script Editors

• Terry Nation - Series creator and chief writer of the first three series
• Chris Boucher - Script editor and writer
• Robert Holmes - Writer

Directors and Producers

• David Maloney - Producer of first three series
• Michael E. Briant - Director
• Douglas Camfield - Director
• Pennant Roberts - Director
• Derek Martinus - Director
• Fiona Cumming - Director
• Mary Ridge - Director
• Gerald Blake - Director

Miscellanous crew

• Dudley Simpson - Composer of theme music.
• Mat Irvine - Special effects work.

In other media

• Barry Letts - Writer of two BBC Radio 4 plays set during the fourth series.
• Tony Attwood - Author of Afterlife, a sequel novel to Blake's 7 set after the last episode of the series.

Actors

Actors from Doctor Who in Blake's 7

Regulars

• Colin Baker - Bayban in City at the Edge of the World
• Richard Franklin - Federation Trooper in Aftermath
• John Leeson - Pasco in Mission to Destiny and Tolse in Gambit.

Others

• Peter Miles - Played the recurring role of Rontane, much in the "coldly efficient" mold of his Doctor Who character Nyder.
• Richard Hurndall - Played Nebrox in Cancer, inspiring John Nathan-Turner to cast him as the replacement First Doctor (a character originally played by William Hartnell) in The Five Doctors.

Blake's 7 Regular Cast with Doctor Who and Torchwood connections

• Gareth Thomas (Roj Blake) played Ed Morgan in the Torchwood episode Ghost Machine, Lord Tamworth (Storm Warning) and also had the regular role of Kalendorf, a recurring role in the Dalek Empire line of audio plays from Big Finish Productions.
• Paul Darrow (Kerr Avon) played Captain Hawkins (Doctor Who and the Silurians), Tekker (Timelash) and Iago in the Kaldor City series of audio plays.
• Michael Keating (Vila Restal]) played Goudry (The Sun Makers) and Major Koth (The Twilight Kingdom).
• Jaqueline Pearce (Servalan) played Chessene (The Two Doctors), Sherilyn Harper (The Fearmonger) and Admiral Mettna (Death Comes to Time).
• Jan Chappell (Cally) played Captain Lisa Deranne in Shakedown.
• Brian Croucher (the second of two actors to play Travis) played Borg (The Robots of Death) and Kurt (Shakedown).
• Peter Tuddenham the voices of the talking computers Orac, Zen and Slave also leant his voiceover talents to The Ark in Space, The Masque of Mandragora and Time and the Rani.

Production Materials

• Many generic science-fiction props appeared in both series. For instance, ray guns carried by Bayban's men in City at the Edge of the World were also used by the Fosters in The Keeper of Traken.
• Model footage (of explosions and so on) was also occasionally recycled (for instance, the same footage is used to show the destruction of a DSV in Redemption and Mawdryn's ship in Mawdryn Undead).
• More specifically, Federation trooper uniforms were reused as Orderly uniforms in Frontios.
• Sea Devil costumes were cosmetically altered and used to represent Phibians in Orac and Dorian's former associate in Rescue.

In-Universe Crossovers

A few crossovers were proposed or have occurred in other media.

• Chris Boucher's novel Corpse Marker, a sequel to The Robots of Death, features the psychostrategist Carnell, a characte who had firstt appearing in the Blake's 7 episode Weapon. (Presumably, then, Corpse Marker happens before "Weapon", given that that episode features Carnell's death.) Carnell's background was left vague in the novel. The character appeared again in the Kaldor City series of audios.

Two references also exist to the existence of Blake's 7 as a television series in the Doctor Who Universe.

• Tegan Jovanka mentions the series in Cold Fusion, saying that she understood the concept of transmats (or in Blake's 7 terms, teleportation) from the show.

• The Least Important Man by Stephen Moffat from the anthology The Dead Men Diaries Bernice Summerfield anthology features this quote:

"I managed to find him two entire episodes of Blake's 7, on the original video tape. I found them to be a wonderful insight into the literature of Gavin's era. He taught me how to do the 'maximum power' thing. With the arms."

Bernice Summerfield comments on occasion that Roj Blake seems to exist both a fictional character and as a real person, "which can't be right". (source?)