Kevin Jon Davies is a television and video director who has directed and produced a number of documentaries and spin-off videos associated with Doctor Who & The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. He was responsible for the special features on the recent release of Blake’s 7 on DVD.
SA: Why were the DVDS delayed so many times?
KJD: The delays in the Blake’s 7 DVDs being released were essentially because Joe Mahoney, who commissioned the DVDs at BBC Worldwide back in May 2002 hadn’t actually sought the proper permission from the copyright holders in the first place.
This was a project which for me had begun with an abortive attempt to make a Blake’s 7 documentary for a BBC VHS release in 1993. Mahoney and I first discussed reviving the idea in late 2001, after I had worked on the DVD of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy TV series. I wrote a report for him listing all the existing archive Blake’s 7 material and this sat on his desk for about 6 months. In May 2002 he gave me the go-ahead to start researching but asked me not to say anything to anyone for “a week or so”, whilst he got the necessary permissions in place. A month later, having heard nothing, I asked him if it was okay to start contacting people yet and he said: “Oh, yes!” almost as if he’d forgotten all about it! Much later, I discovered he hadn’t got a signed contract with Terry Nation’s widow Kate, nor his agent Roger Hancock Ltd, nor indeed the newly formed Blake’s 7 Enterprises run by Andrew Mark Sewell, a man who also happened to work at BBC Worldwide at that time. Oblivious to all this, I had begun work on the DVD extras in earnest around the July of 2002, with a fast turnaround of 8 weeks allotted per series.
Having delivered the Series 1 extras in a tearing hurry and then series 2 by Christmas, I began to smell a rat. There were rumblings that all was not well, contracts-wise. In early 2003, after delivering series 3, I was asked to halt production, having just started editing the series 4 documentary. The project remained in limbo for months and months while the arguments raged between Mahoney’s office and those of B7E. Allegedly Hancock’s office had said they couldn’t agree anything until B7E were satisfied with the situation. B7E wanted control of the project, claiming they had “interactive rights” to the original series as part of their deal to make a new series. The legal debate was over whether the “interactive” clause covered DVDs and their menus. I must point out that I was not party to any of these unhappy negotiations which continued long after Sewell’s eventual departure from BBC Worldwide. The delay was also down to BBC Worldwide’s own internal reasons, to which I was also not party. Eventually Joe Mahoney left to work at Channel 4 International. His assistant Felicity Buddell, who had been my main contact throughout, and who really seemed to run everything in Joe’s office, held the reins solo for a while. Eventually the BBC decided to release the DVDs without the main 4-part documentary. At least the other featurettes and extras were allowed to remain. They then experienced some authoring problems which added further delays to the releases. I had long since been paid off in full.
SA: Can you tell us why they objected to the 4-part documentary? A lot of fans are dying to see it!
KJD: I think the short answer to this one is that Sewell and B7E have their own ideas about how the story of The Making of Blake’s 7 should be told. They have a lot of time invested in the new series concept and naturally want to control the story of the original in the way they see fit to promote or indeed finance the new show. Paul Darrow was then part of the B7E project, and was asked not to take part in what I was doing, which also made my job rather difficult. My concerns were merely to fulfil the original brief and tell the story utilising all the rare archive material and my original 1993 interviews as part of that project. Despite the awkwardness, Andrew Mark Sewell and I actually met several times in 2004 to discuss how this situation might be resolved. We wrote a new proposal together, before the series 3 and 4 DVDs had been released, but BBC Worldwide turned down this opportunity.
SA: Your documentaries on Hitch-Hikers and Doctor Who were shot in the style of the respective shows – was this the case with the Blake documentaries?
KJD: The Making of The Hitchhiker’s Guide was a deeply personal project for me, as I had been an animator on the original TV series in 1980/81 and had kept in touch with Douglas Adams ever since. He kindly allowed me to use his characters and write new dialogue for them as part of the linking material for the 1993 VHS documentary (now also on the TV series DVD). Later that year, I used a similar framing device for my broadcast debut, Doctor Who: Thirty Years In The TARDIS – which was no problem, since the main elements were either BBC copyright (like the TARDIS) or shared (like the Daleks, Cybermen and other monsters) with freelance authors, who all gave their permission.
The problem with Blake’s 7 was that another company had certain rights to the entire concept and the series title for their new project. So, no, my trademark “dramatic links” device was not possible
SA: Can you tell us a bit more about what was in the documentaries?
KJD: The Making of Blake’s 7 – Part One was a 42-minute documentary telling the story of the creation and first year of the show. It contains “talking heads” interviews which I shot in June 1993 with Vere Lorrimer, David Maloney, Jan Chappell, Jacqueline Pearce and others. These are intercut with clips, taken largely from the first series only. I was instructed to stick (as much as possible) to only using clips on any given documentary from the series on which it would appear. So, Part One should only have clips from Series One, Part Two should only have clips from Series Two, etc, etc… This was due to a clause in the BBC’s agreement with Equity which allows clips from a given show to be utilised in a variety of ways within the same package. Extra payments have to be made when clips are used out of season, if you see what I mean. I had the same restrictions on the mini-docs I made for the recent Dad’s Army releases.
The programme was broken into several segments, with chapter headings like “What was Blake’s 7?” and “Who were Blake’s Enemies?”. This rather leaden sounding device was to make it very accessible to casual buyers who might not be familiar with the show, in accordance with the original brief from BBC Worldwide. Ever since 1992, I have had this argument with producers who seem to fear that a fan like myself might make programmes which are too “in” for a general audience. If you look at the classic Doctor Who range, I think they seem have relaxed that particular rule.
The Making of Blake’s 7, Parts Two and Three were each of 59 minutes duration, as would have been Part Four. Again, each covered the making of a single series as part of the ongoing story. My friend and colleague Stephen La Rivière has recently made a very similar 5-part series for the Upstairs Downstairs DVDs.
SA: B7E have said that they did not feel that the documentary provided a proper tribute or fresh retrospective of the show. How do you feel about this?
KJD: My first instinct was to say that this is surely a matter of personal taste, but I think other factors must also be considered. Andrew Mark Sewell certainly wanted to have major input into the documentary, naturally, but at the time his office was viewed as a rival department to that of Joe Mahoney within BBC Worldwide. I think internal BBC office politics has a lot to answer for.
As far as I am concerned, I made three parts of a planned four-part documentary which combined to tell the story of the making of a much-loved, yet cheap BBC series; a thing of its time; warts and all. My favourite section is the pre-credits of Part Two, where the cast read out their worst reviews of Blake’s 7 Series One. It’s hilarious, yet ends on a positive note as Gareth Thomas explains, “…and yet we were so popular!” Maybe there was a note of irreverence in my approach which wouldn’t necessarily be conducive to someone trying to raise funds to make a new, grittier version of the series? When I look back at the existing three documentaries, I see so much that I would do quite differently nowadays. This is largely hindsight, of course, but it’s also due to the fact that I now edit my own programmes solo and have developed new techniques and approaches. In 2002/3 I was working with three different offline editors: Paula Baker (Part 1), Janet Taylor (Parts 2 & 3) and Blake’s 7 fan, Jackie Ophir (3 & 4). Each of these women were terrific company and very talented; totally different in character from one another, each with their own working methods. Collaboration is fun, but BBC Worldwide were paying for both the edit suite and editor per hour and that gets very expensive, so you have to work very fast. Now that I edit at home, I can try out different ideas and take my time! I am happy to stay up all hours, tinkering with edits, which in previous years would have been far too expensive.
SA: Wasn’t this the second time that you had tried to put together a documentary on the series?
KJD: The story of The Making of Blake’s 7 actually goes right back to early summer 1993 after I had finished my first live-action commission for BBC Video (part of BBC Enterprises, as it was then). The Commissioning Editor in those days was a very nice man called David M Jackson (no relation to Gan!), a mild-mannered Scot, who nowadays I believe is Head of Music at BBC Cardiff. He asked me if, despite all the hassle I’d had on The Making of Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy (that’s another story!), would I like to consider making a similar VHS release about Blake’s 7? I admitted I didn’t know the series that well, despite having visited the set as a student in 1978, and again, working on the Series 4 graphics in 1981. I did my homework and drafted an outline called The Making of Blake’s 7 with the subtitle Good vs. Evil – which was readily accepted by David M Jackson and we got started. The idea was to have a double VHS cassette release. When you opened the box, one tape would have the Federation logo in white and the word Good, the other in black with the word Evil. It would be up to you, which to put in your VCR first. Each would have had a 50-minute documentary examining aspects of the series, one told from the rebel point of view and the other from the Federation. A linking drama on each would knit the programme together. On Good, two Federation soldiers would be seen on guard outside a doorway to a room aboard a space station, much like that in the episode Trial. The older guard would be telling the younger man the story of the terrorist Blake and his exploits, from the point of view of a seasoned campaigner who fought against them. Federation Officials would arrive from time to time and pass through the doorway to the inner room.
On the tape marked Evil, an interrogation of a prisoner would be taking place. This would probably have been an older version of Avon, played by Paul Darrow. People like Federation officials would have come and gone from the room as the drama progressed, interwoven with further documentary material. Eventually, the viewer would have come to realise that the one event was taking place on the other side of the doorway to the other, and that the two programmes were totally interlinked. The linking drama would end in a jail-busting rescue of Avon by other members of the crew, suggesting that at least a few had survived the events of the episode Blake. I even suggested we try to match the timing of the two tapes so that they could be run simultaneously on two VHS machines and two TVs, and so the characters would seem to move from one screen to the other! David M Jackson likened that idea to an Alan Ayckbourn play, with two events happening on opposite sides of the same stage.
We managed to shoot nine interviews in 1993 with various cast and crew, happily including producers Vere Lorrimer and David Maloney (since both are now sadly deceased) before the project was halted for the first time. We had an approval in essence from Terry Nation, who had discussed the project with his agent Roger Hancock. BBC Video wanted to hit the Christmas 1993 market with this package, which meant meeting an autumn deadline. For certification purposes, this meant I had to deliver by the end of August, and it was already early June. We ran into the problem that Hancock was in no mood to be hurried onto an agreement, and we needed Terry Nation’s script input and approval, so after some very awkward conversations, the whole thing was shelved. The real crushing disappointment was that we already had the tacit approval of the Channel Controllers of BBC1 and BBC2, via producer John Whiston, to make shorter edits of the two Good vs Evil programmes for broadcast simultaneously on both channels, late at night on the then-planned themed evening for Doctor Who’s 30th anniversary. What an event that would have been!
SA: Do you think the documentaries will ever be released?
KJD: I seriously doubt they will ever be released in their present form. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a complete series box-set at some point in the future. I would really like to have one more go at The Making of Blake’s 7, as it feels like “unfinished business”.
SA: The DVDs have various short and not-so-short interview snippets – were these from the ‘Making Of’ documentaries?
KJD: All the accompanying featurettes and easter eggs which did make it onto the B7 DVDs were supposed to expand upon elements covered within each of the documentaries. This was also an attempt to use up interview material left over from the main documentaries. These featurettes, as you have seen, covered the various creative departments in more detail; Visual Effects, Design, Make-Up, Costumes, Special Sounds and Stunts.
SA: Can you tell us a little about the trailers for each season?
KJD: I treated those as the fun part at the end of each series’ edit, really. They were done fast; taking only a day each to assemble. The first one was cut to music by Mark Ayres from our 1994 Doctor Who spin-off film Shakedown: Return of the Sontarans (which had starred Jan Chappell and Brian Croucher, amongst others). The inspiration was good old fashioned Space Opera in the style of the original trailer for Star Wars: The Return Of The Jedi, which I had always admired.
The second was my attempt at a glamorous old-style Hollywood trailer in the grand tradition, due to the romance element in Series 3. Despite the often pantomime nature of Series 4, I decided to make something overtly operatic to reflect the darkness of the finale. Mark Ayres had produced his best work as a composer for the 1996 thriller The Innocent Sleep with a haunting aria sung by Lesley Garrett. It made the perfect accompaniment.
I was criticised online for not adding a spoiler warning to the Series 4 trailer, and I now admit that was a mistake. It does giveaway much of the denouement of the series, if you are new to the show. I guess this is exactly what was meant by making something too “in” for the fans. I had forgotten to keep the content broad enough for the casual purchaser. I addressed this in the Series 4 extras, by adding warnings to various featurettes.
SA: The extras package for Series 4 is rather more substantial than the previous three. Why was this?
KJD: Conventional wisdom has it that Series 4 has always been considered the least popular, so perhaps it would need a strong extras package to make it more attractive to buyers. In any case, there has always been more material existing for Series 4, such as raw studio recordings and a lengthy blooper reel. In 1993 we had the full co-operation of the film editor Sheila S Tomlinson and her assistant Tony Radford, who had supplied us with all the original 16mm film cans. Amongst several versions of the blooper reel, I found a can of off-cuts from the outtakes; lots of separate snippets of 16mm negative which must have been the bits hanging in their trim bin in 1981. I had BBC Enterprises assemble them into a single reel so that one day we would be able to telecine the reel. Luckily, after a bit of a search, Felicity Buddell tracked the reel down in the BBC Worldwide film library. Amazingly they hadn’t been thrown away in the intervening years, and I finally got to make the transfer to videotape in 2002. These afforded us things like the crew stomping around in muddy quarries and other candid moments from the location filming, mostly from Series 4.
SA: What was it like filming the Paul Darrow interview?
KJD: As I said earlier, B7E had prevented Paul from taking part in the project due to their dispute with Joe Mahoney’s office. I must admit I had taken both their names in vain a few times, and had pretty much given up on ever having Paul’s involvement. I finally met Paul properly for the first time at the 2003 Cult TV convention, about a week after he had rather publicly split from B7E. He was utterly charming and won me over completely in an instant. He promised me on that weekend he would henceforth be available, if ever I could revive the project. Finally, two years later, just before Christmas 2005, we got the go-ahead from Felicity’s replacement, Ian MacKenzie at 2Entertain (the new name of the BBC’s DVD department, a joint venture with Woolworth’s VCI) to shoot the long-hoped-for interview. It went like clockwork. A couple of phone conversations beforehand led to Paul’s idea of using the Science Museum as a backdrop. He is a very easy-going interview subject, amusingly self-effacing, with lots of stories no doubt accumulated and refined over years of taking part in Blake’s 7 convention panels!
This article originally appeared in Scorpio Attack fanzine by Jonathan Helm
