Interrogation Division investigates… The Collection Series 1

[00:03]

Maximal power.

Hello and welcome back to Maximum Power, the Blake 7 podcast.

I'm Cy.

My name's Chris Chapman.

My name is Chris Thompson.

And I'm Pete, and yes, we are sticking with our podcast tradition of having fewer names than we have people just to keep people on their toes.

We're really pleased and very thrilled to have 2 very special guests with us today in the shape of Chris Chapman and Chris Thompson.

What are we going to do?

Chris, did you, one of you Chris's had a nickname?

Well, I was saying that my friends call me Chap.

So if you'd like to do that, then you're all my friends tonight.

And for symmetry, I can be Tom, but honestly, just refer to me as anything you'd like.

Well, between you, you've basically got the dream jobs of pretty much all of our listeners, and I'm sure the vast majority of science fiction fans of classic things from the 20th century in particular.

[01:05]

And the thing we wanted to know from you, but you both really was what led you to this pinnacle, not speaking to us, but actually finally getting your teeth into Blake 7 and doing the roles that you did do.

Chris Champ.

How did that how did it start for you?

Wow.

I mean, I guess we've been, we've been doing, I've been making Doctor Who documentaries since about 2000 and eight, I think it was when we started that and so blimey that 16 years of doing that.

And it's always been kind of my incredibly pleasant side hustle, really, uh, the i.e. directs uh, factual and documentaries for telly uh, for ranger shows and I'd always, from an early point thought, Ooh, they make these for DVDs, don't they?

They make special features.

Why can't I do that about my favourite shows?

And that eventually led to me doing Doctor Who documentaries.

And we did like about 40 or 50 of those on DVD.

[02:07]

And then Blu-ray happened and we got to go back to the well in the nicest possible way and do another 40 or so.

And that's on going.

And alongside Doctor Who the collection, I think that has been getting such a lovely warm response and this lovely sense of community that's kind of formed around those sets, I think, of people being excited and devouring them when they come out and giving us really good feedback. about what they enjoy and what they want.

And I think, really, it was Russell Minton at BBC Studios, who's been the exec on all those Doctor Who collections, who is a big Blake 7 fan and just thought, actually, why can't we do this collection thing on another show as well?

And wouldn't Blake 7 be the perfect testing ground to see if it, that can work, to give the 1st series of Blake 7, the best possible treatment we can, not just the restoration of the episodes and going back to as much of the original elements as they can to make it look and sound beautiful.

[03:09]

But helping out, you know, creating special features.

And so we've done a big, I think it's like, how long is it?

It's like 80, 85 minute long documentary called Liberation, uh, which is very much, this is what happened behind the scenes on the 1st series of Blake 7. you know, episode by episode, chunk by chunk.

This is what went into the show, and that's got 29 interviews from the cast and crew.

I think 17 of which we filmed ourselves, 12 of which are, sadly, people who have passed away, that Kevin John Davis very kindly let us return to the rushes of earlier Blake 7 documentaries.

So people like Gareth, like Gareth Thomas, and people like Jacqueline Pierce, and Stephen Griff, and song, can still be a part of it.

So I hope that will be the definitive Blake 7 series A Doc.

And we've also been sneaky and also thrown in a very warm, very sincere tribute to Stephen Griff because I thought this is the only place we can do that, really, isn't it?

[04:12]

So we've done like a 35 minute biography of Stephen with a lot of his friends and family weighing in on why he was such an interesting man, really, and certainly deserving of a proper tribute.

So it's been an awful lot of good fun.

But what I'm really interested in seeing is the work that Chris T, or Tom, has been working on, which is the special effects that amazingly not just in a couple of episodes across the season, have been redone as optional versions, which I want to hear more about right now.

Thank you, Chris.

And yeah, just to say, I've not had a chance to see the Travis, the Stephen Grief documentary yet, because I'm currently in a move, and the last thing I've watched before sending my TV off to the new place was Liberation, which I greatly enjoyed.

We saw some a glimpse of it at the BFI preview and yeah, talk about wetting appetites.

We cannot wait to get our hands on it.

[05:13]

But, um, yeah, so my name is Chris Thompson, I, uh, I sort of got into this by, I did about 30 trailers for Big Finish, like animated trailers and that had sort of got the interest of Pete McTee and Russell, uh, Minton, uh, who asked if I could help out with some of the trailers for like Doctor Who.

I think the 1st one I did was, um, the Davros trailer that they did for, uh, Destiny of the Daleks.

And that ended up leading to more and more as time went on.

So eventually Russell was like, do you want to start doing the optional special effects release?

And I did enlightenment and snake dance on series 20.

During, it was at the after show for the 5 doctors where we were in the pub and we'd already started talking about season 25 at that point.

And Russell kind of came over and was like, have you ever heard of Blake 7 before?

And, uh, it was a show I'd grown up with.

[06:17]

Um, there was uh, I used to watch on UK Gold.

I hadn't revisited that much since.

I've seen a couple of episodes in the interim, but because I've, like, I've been working for about 10 years on various Doctor Who, Thunderbirds, Space 1999 related projects, and I love them all deeply, but sometimes you just want something different, and Blake 7 really represented that.

I just absolutely was ready to grab this one with both hands and it was really cool as well because I've been trying to shift the optional special effects from being pure CG to a combination of CGN models.

So on horror fang rock.

We had our practical rooting model puppet on season 25.

We'd done almost all the spaceships as models, and that ended up intersecting with Blake 7 quite nicely, which they'd already planned to do it with models, I think, but I kind of came on, was able to supplement half the model shooting on over in Belfast while we had a separate shoot over in England.

[07:19]

Yeah, it ended up being a pretty massive project.

I think it may have been a bit of a bigger project than may have initially been anticipated.

By the end of it.

I think there was 435 shots across all the episodes and that represented spaceships, screens, teleports, other fun bits and bobs.

Okay.

And so for you, were you both coming on board at about the same time, because we were curious how long it took for the ball to get rolling on, ever since, was it ever since the Doctor Who one started?

Was this always a glimmer that was slowly building momentum to do Blake 72?

or from your perspective?

Has it just cropped up, you know, in the past years?

Right.

I think behind the scenes it's probably only been a flicker, a glimmer in Russell's eyes in Russell's eye for a while.

I mean, I certainly, I think I was commissioned about this time last year, so kind of October 2023, and Russell probably would have only got the green light earlier that year.

It's certainly not been like part of like a master plan or anything like that.

[08:22]

And, but, no, it's been, certainly about a year.

Uh, and we did most of our filming for liberation around last Christmas and New Year, kind of certainly into Jan, we were filming, uh, and then we edited, uh, kind of springtime.

I think.

So the docs actually been ready for a while.

Stephen Griff Doc was commissioned, I think, I think, I think very much that, that was the case of, of Russell realising, oh, there's a little bit of extra cash if you'd like to go and, and do something.

And I suggested, let's do something about Stephen because he's, he's such a presence in his interviews and liberation, I thought.

This is a chap who would be very interesting to understand a bit better.

And so I think the Stephen Griefdock would have been done more so in the summer.

And then it's just been waiting, really.

I imagine for, for, uh, for Chris T's work.

It's been it's been a kind of been perhaps a more extended extended process than for us.

I got commissioned around the same time, like 5 doctors would have been around late.

[09:27]

It was probably about September, wasn't it?

Um, and yeah, I think the thing on my side was the fact that we basically did season 25 and Blake 7 series one together and season 25 already is record smashing a manta shots.

So I think it was, because we had a month of pre-production, and then season 25 had to be wrapped by March, and Blake's Blake nearly had to be wrapped by May, and then ended up being quite a lot of overlap.

Chris was very sleepy.

Because yeah, because some people, you have seen people speculating, is this coming out instead of a Doctor Who bot set, but I imagine that's not quite how it works.

You can juggle.

No, I think the helpful thing here is, for instance, one of the biggest jobs on the Doctor Who collections is obviously the restoration of the episodes and that's done on the Doctor Who ones by Peter Crocker.

And I think quite fortunately, on the Blake 7 restoration side, it's been Paul Venesis, who's been working on those episodes.

[10:32]

So although Mark Ayres kind of straddles both, uh, you know, that that heavy lifting work of the visual restoration is done by different people.

And certainly we, you know, the documentaries we make, we make them for lots of different people and for television as well.

So it's not taking up slots in our work at least.

So hopefully there are 2 things that can go nicely together and can play nicely with each other, I hope.

Well, let's hope so sort of going forward.

That could work out quite nicely.

So, I mean, we sort of wondered, but did it make a difference with Blake 7 sort of not having been on the air for the best part of 40 years, make that easier to work with than Doctor Who?

Was there less sort of scrutiny around the show?

I don't know if it was necessary our side.

I think in terms of people don't necessarily know you're working in a Blake 7 stuff, though I do, like, we sort of have to be careful about posting anything anyway, just because people are always watching.

[11:34]

Uh, but, um, if, if anything, since the announcement, I'm kind of surprised how many more people remember Blake 7, that it's sort of in my casual surrounding community, then Doctor Who, which has been quite interesting, like a lot of, um, just sort of regular off the street people would be like, oh, yeah, I remember Blake 7.

It seemed to have been quite big in the day.

I think the pleasant thing from the documentary point of view. has been that, you know, we love doing Doctor Who stuff, but there's such a culture around Doctor Who for the people who are in it.

So if you're, say, a companion actor in Doctor Who, you have been to, you know, 100s, possibly 1000s of Doctor Who events or conventions in your life.

If you're like Fraser Heinz or something like that, you've been dining out quite rightly on these, on these wonderful stories about covering Deborah, Deborah Watling and foam on the beach or whatever, you've been telling these stories for, for kind of 50 years plus. and that's great.

[12:37]

But that does mean that when you do the Doctor Who documentaries, sometimes you have to say to people, I know you've told the story a lot.

You might need to tell it one more time, so this feels complete as a story and it might need to feel like it's the 1st time you've told it, you know?

And the nice thing about Black 7 is although there was a culture, Blake 7 documentary on BBC 4, I think 20 years ago now, and Kevin Davis had shot interviews for his DVD, Blake 7 docs, not all of which were finished back in the E-shot, some in the 90s, some in the early naughties.

Really, you know, the convention circuit around Blake 7 isn't, isn't as large, I would say, as the one around Doctor Who.

So we've certainly found, we've interviewed a large number of people who have never been asked these questions before.

You know, whether that's cast or crew, we're reuniting, we're refreshing people's memories with the episodes, and then saying, tell us everything you can about how this came together.

[13:38]

And it kind of is the 1st time they've been asked.

And that's really lovely.

We've had a similar thing on the box of delights that we've just been working on a documentary for for the BBC.

It's sometimes really, it means there's less of a framework, an infrastructure, uh, of research.

We've luckily had Jonathan Helm on board as a consultant for the doc to kind of to keep us right with the factual stuff.

He's done some very good books on Blake 7.

But it does feel a bit more like uncharted waters, and that's a really exciting thing.

I think not just for us, but for the contributors, for the people who made the show, to revisit it.

That's been quite exciting, really.

And hopefully for the audience, for people watching, we'll feel like, oh, wow, I didn't know that, you know, and we'll feel very fresh.

I hope, even though, as you say, it's not a recent show, you know, it's been around in the world for a long time.

When did you both 1st Encounter Blake 7, by the way, do you mention it was UK gold for you, Chris T?

[14:38]

Yeah, it was, well, it was, it was one of those top 10 best TV shows of all time or best sci-fi shows of all time.

And immediately it was like, Blake 7, here is how it ends.

I think it must have been about, I think it must have been about 7 or 8 at the time. and I think that heralded being put on to UK gold. and it was on Sundays, I think, and it was, I think my little child brain was like, oh, this looks like Doctor Who.

Like I'll I'll happily watch this.

Um, yeah, and then the DVDs came out and my brother got all the DVDs and I remember watching some of them, but I think by then I'd sort of got into my, I need to spend all my time filmmaking so I can be a successful filmmaker one day, sort of career path.

So I ended up not watching quite so much stuff through my youth, which is why Blake 7 sort of dropped off the radar a little bit.

I'm probably slightly weird on this, that I've, you know, been watching Dr. Huthy is, and I've always thought, like, many people.

Oh, Doctor Who's got a lot in common with Blake Severn, isn't it?

Maybe I'd like that too.

[15:38]

And I'd never really gotten around to actually watching it.

You know, we didn't have UK gold.

I never got the VHS.

I'm born in 81, so I missed it originally.

Wilderness years for Blake 7, but the Doctor Who ones.

It's shame.

Long wilderness years, yeah.

Long time.

And basically, I'd seen, I think, the 1st 3 episodes and got a lot out of them, but I hadn't really pursued the liberator kind of any further at that point.

And so actually, when I talk about it feeling fresh, when I was commissioned to make the documentary, I sat down and I watched Series A for the 1st time, you know, for the 1st time.

I watched it through and I'd never seen it, but I was watching it thinking, uh, this show's fascinating and shares so much of the DNA with Doctor Who, and with, you know, everything we know about BBC television making in the 70s.

So to actually watch it for the 1st time thinking, I'm going to make a film about you, who's that?

Who's this actor?

Are they still they're still alive?

[16:39]

Oh, where do they live?

Okay, we can interview that.

And that set's interesting.

We should get the designer, yeah.

And watching it with the knowledge that you're going to dissect it, you're going to explore it on telly is quite a kind of exciting thing to do.

And I hope that means, I hope that's a really positive thing because I have no idea what the fan preconceptions are of series 8.

I have no sense of which stories are the favourites and which stories aren't.

I know what my favourites were, which is not really important when we're making the film because it's not about that.

But it should hopefully mean there is no bias of any kind in the film, that it's purely how did this happen?

You know, what went into this, the, the, the personalities that put this together, who are they and why did they do it and how did they do it?

So I hope, again, that hope, hopefully it will feel like a really fresh take on, on Blake.

Yeah, well, it certainly sounds like you've rounded up quite a lot of people to come and talk about the series, which was one of the things I think fans were a bit worried about because we've lost so many of the main cast, but you obviously have found sort of contributors from across the series.

[17:51]

How did you go about sort of tracking people down?

Mostly stalking, really.

I mean, you know, as I say, we had, I think, 12 archive interviews that Kevin Davis had shot in, I think, early 90s, early naughties, with a range of cast and crew.

And obviously that means people like David Maloney, you know, some people like David, who's such a key figure, no longer with us, amazing, lovely, lovely gentleman, that we can still have David's voice, you know, that the film can still be David's story, thanks to those interviews, and we were able to go back to the Russians so that it's very much my take on Kevin's interviews, if you so what I mean.

So that even that should hopefully feel quite fresh.

And then, you know, we obviously wanted people like Sally Novette and Jan Chappell to be involved and they, we brought them together in Sally's garden actually with a bit of champagne and some props and models from the show just as a kind of an interaction to act as a spine to lead you through the film to give it something real.

[18:53]

Because their relationship, their friendship is really genuine and has really endured and means something.

So that's kind of the heart of the film.

And actually, then that's where my Doctor Who bias probably comes through because if I saw anybody's name connected to this show that I knew from Doctor Who, I was very much drawn to them.

So, I mean, that obviously you have people like Michael Lee Bryant who directed, I think, I think 4 of that 1st year, so certainly directed the pilot.

You know, Michael, we work with a lot on the Doctor Who's, Michael has such an amazing memory and such a vitality.

Um, and then I would look at at the castle list and the, at the cruel list of an episode like Duel and think, oh, I didn't know Tony Virgo was the production assistant, you know, essentially the director's assistant on this show, and Tony directed the King's Demons on Doctor Who, and we'd interviewed him about that.

And then I thought, oh, well, and also Isla Blair is very memorably in dual.

[19:54]

And she's from the King's Demon.

So we can have a little king's demons reunion, you know, of sorts on that one.

But, you know, we'll go through people's agents.

Sometimes people have an online presence themselves and you can approach them through their their own websites or through social media.

Sometimes we've already got a relationship with them.

You know, someone like Michael Lee Bryant, I can just email and say, you know, we'd love you to come and do this.

Sometimes it's a lot of searching and people finding, and we have people like Richard Bignall, who are very good with the electoral role and the phone book and trying to track where people are moved to over the years.

And so we stalk people in a very pleasant kind of we want to give you some money to come and have a nice time kind of way.

But there definitely is, there's a lot of like me going, looking on Facebook and going, oh, you look a bit like so-and-so, you know, you might have got married since you were in it, so your name's different, but you know, there's a lot of that kind of stuff.

And almost always we get, you know, we do tend to find the people that we're after, and then they don't think we're too weird for coming after them, I hope.

[21:03]

Who's the hardest person you've ever had to find?

Well, the hardest ones are the ones that we failed on.

All the ones that you got so far, and then you thought, and then you realise, oh God, it's the worst, you know, this person's no longer with us.

I know we really tried to find Henrik Hirsch on the Doctor Who range for who was the director on the Reign of Terror, and Henrik had quite famously had a had a bit of a breakdown in in the gallery during the recording of one of the episodes, and we managed to track Henrik down to Australia, and a very helpful friend of ours in Australia actually went and knocked on his door.

Uh, made quite a drive, I think, to go and knock on Henrik's store, and then only to have a neighbour say, oh yeah, I think he passed away a few years ago.

So we definitely had that.

On a recent dock, I've had somebody that I tried and tried and we just couldn't find, you know, that sometimes you think, particularly if it's a younger person, somebody like under 50 or so, uh, in the modern age, You know, if somebody is just not trackable on the internet.

[22:12]

I think it's often now because they've decided they've made that decision.

You know, it's not just that you haven't looked hard enough.

It's that they don't want to be found and that's completely fair and legitimate and understandable.

So I had one of those recently where I thought, oh, we've tried everything and it's just not happened.

But when you find somebody, and particularly maybe when you find somebody who's a bit nervous about taking parts and you try and explain why it's worthwhile and how gently, you know, how gently we're going to tread.

And somebody then says, yes, you know, that can be a lovely thing that can, you know, the idea that somebody might not have contributed, but decided to.

I mean, to be honest, on Blake 7.

We didn't really have that so much.

I think pretty much everybody that we, that we approached, had, had vivid memories.

I know that someone like Roger Moe Leach.

I mean if anything, The doc is probably Roger's story.

I think, you know, although, although Sally and Janet there as the heart of it, I feel like it's Roger's through line, this Rogers arc, that he, you know, such an amazing designer.

[23:16]

You're talking about somebody who created like the best sets that have ever been in Doctor Who, things like the jungle of Zita Minor on Planet of Evil, and then had this great movie career, you know, you know, designed a fish called Wonder and things like that.

But for Roger, he designed not only the liberator set, but controversially designed the liberator model, which Ian Scones, who was on the special, on the visual effects side of things.

I don't think was particularly happy about.

But for Roger, it was such a tough year.

And I think he really had a nightmare dealing with unions and just lack of money, lack of time, and he would be the, what he says, you know, in the film that it was the closest he's come to having a nervous breakdown.

And yet I think he emerges from the film with his head held high, really, having maybe a new appreciation of that work, because I think it's stellar work.

I think if Roger.

I think if the liberator didn't look the way it does inside and out, then the identity and personality of Blake 7 wouldn't wouldn't be anything near what it is.

[24:17]

Uh, and Roger only does that 1st year, but I'm so glad, uh, he, you know, he wasn't reticent to be really open and honest with us about that and take part.

So I really respect that he didn't think.

I'm not going to talk to you about this awful time in my life, you know, that he was happy to share that, which I'm very pleased with.

I would actually say, uh, on that, the, because you can see uh, in Jonathan Helm's book, the production diary, you do see Ian Scoon's design for the Liberator.

I do like the way that the liberator that we got is nothing like the federation stuff.

Um, like it does, it works the fact that 2 different people designed it, which is, uh, I think it really, really helps the show.

That said, it's not the easiest thing to film in the world.

Did you run into all the same problems as the BBC special effects team did in 77.

Oh, that goddamn pole.

No, I love it to bits.

It is just the fact that like if you're shooting under it, you've got to contend with that poll and there's a number of ways you sort of have to get around it because like we didn't, we had Phil Stevens, uh, had graciously lent us as liberated for the project.

[25:29]

But like, obviously you don't want to string it or do anything particularly precarious. make a hole or 2 in it.

I imagine that wouldn't go down too well.

Well, you seem pretty open to that kind of stuff, but yeah, anytime you're under the liberator.

I've even manually painted out the pole or I've just taken that in the cell. and CG to just to kind of because you're sort of working on a bit of a timeline with this.

So sometimes you've got to be a bit creative.

Did you get much advice from the people who are working it back in the day, then?

Um, so we had Matter of Vine and Mike Tucker there on the, the England shoot.

They were great, particularly when it came to flying to London, uh, because we didn't have a chance to build a set, like, uh, I only found out that we didn't have a landing pad until a week before the shoot.

So I tried to scratch build one, but it just wasn't logistical to get it over from Belfast, really.

So in the final version, you would have seen it in the BFI screening whenever it launches, like that is just the model on blue screen, like lifting off like a little light to simulate the lights from underneath.

[26:34]

But that's Mike flying it.

And it was really nice because, like, whenever you look back at the rushes, like, I, I, I grew up with this.

Like, whenever I saw that, I was for the 1st time I was a kid and it's just incredible that he got to do it.

But yeah, no, a lot of it was just kind of watching documentaries, but also trying to have to come up with her own sort of way of doing things because I think we have probably roughly the same amount of money. like these are Blu-ray special features, but compared to like an actual top tier shoot, because we didn't have motion control rigs and we didn't have time.

So there's a lot of instances where the background will just be, I'd make a 3D model, overlay it on the actual model, not use the 3D one, but use it as a guide to work out what the background should be doing and stuff like that.

Just basically, just coming up with a new way of doing things that sort of looks like it was shot in the, in the 70s and 80s.

I guess you're facing the choice every time about how modern do we want this to look?

We want it to look brilliant, but we also want it to look 1979.

[27:37]

Well, there is, there's sort of an element of, you have to be, you have to go in this and this sort of goes with the Doctor Who stuff too.

You don't want to be like, oh, yeah, like I want to change all this and I want to kick it all out and like disrespect it.

The truth is, is that we're lucky we got any effects at all.

And it's down to the ingenuity of the original model makers that they're as good as they are.

Particularly on these Blu-rays.

Um, like, the brief is essentially, like, just imagine what they could have done back then with slightly more money.

So for Blake, we looked at what ILM was doing, we were looking at Star Trek, the Motion Picture, Star Wars, Alien, those things, but then you've got to bring it back to Blake 7 because Blake 7's pretty unique and you don't want it to just look like something else.

So, and that really was sort of dictated the shot composition and how the liberator travelled because liberators always either flying at you or away from you because of the Bob Blagden effect sequences.

[28:38]

So there's a lot of that, but then we do sort of reverse engineer a couple of shots.

So, uh, it was another shot that's in the, uh, the effects reel was the Liberator flying past the planet, uh, the start of breakdown.

And, uh, I really wanted to capture something not unlike what happens with the Nostromo, whenever it's about to land on LV426, when the pursuit ships are in orbits above the planet in dual.

The sun is literally taken from Star Trek 6.

Like, it's a painted on sun, like, in terms of inspiration, just so that it looks like everything's practical, everything's map paintings.

Yeah, and you're making that decision all the time about what's going to be seen.

Well, is it a decision about what's going to be CGI or what's going to be practical or is it actually, or is that actually driven by practical?

The hope was for everything to be practical at one point, but with the time we had to, particularly with the England shoe, we only had 2 days and we had to get through everything with the Liberator, everything with XK 72, uh, a couple of bits with the original pursuit ship, Spacemaster from Deliverance, and other stuff.

[29:44]

And we didn't have, we were sort of limited on time and technology as well.

So we could sort of only really orbit the liberator and fly around it and stuff.

Uh, so, basically, whenever there's a shot that we couldn't have done with a model, it becomes CG, and in those instances, it tends to be like fly pasts, or if there's a particular lighting for a planet that we didn't quite get on the day, that was one of the reasons why I did the reel for the BFI screening, because the 2 episodes were quite CG reliant as opposed to the model stuff, but what you tend to find is for episodes like, uh, for bouncing, not bounce.

Yeah, yes, bounty, breakdown, which is an absolute, like, goliath of an episode.

It's got 60-ish effect shots across it compared to when everything else is about 30.

Uh, yeah, the Battle and Duel, uh, Space 4 tend to favour the Practical Liberator and the Web.

And then, uh, episodes like Seclogate Destroy and uh, Project Avalon and those ones would tend to use the CG one a bit more.

[30:44]

And yeah, there was a lot of trying to keep it consistent.

But yeah, again, it's also a time thing.

Like you have to remove the poll and be very careful about what angle to use on it.

In regard of everything else, though.

Like the pursuit chips are almost always practical.

And then we got to do some completely practical shots like in camera, which was the rocket at the start of in the middle of deliverance.

I built a launch tunnel out of B&Q shelves, and shot it in my backyard, and then the flying robot from Aurac, is literally just in a car park at Harlan or Wolf Harbour where the Titanic was built. lineage.

That's proper lineage.

Pretty much.

Yeah, Blake 7 and the Titanic.

But at a very confused people on their lunch break, looking at us with this little flying robot going like, you all could put down your weapons.

Um, so yeah, no, um, it's pretty cool.

[31:48]

Chap, when you're out on location.

Do you have much capacity for taking things, like, for example, turning up with the Liberator model and as well as your champagne for Vasali and Jan?

Yeah, yeah, well, we did.

We did.

When we shop with Sally and Jan. I mean, I'm not spoiling too much. trying to think if this was in the trailer.

Certainly it was in the clip that was shown at the BFI.

Uh, you know, we, Matt Irvine has been like the custodian of the liberator model over the years and and Mike Tucker, again, was able to bring it along on the date.

So that in the middle of this champagne garden, garden party with Sally and Jan, you have the liberator there wobbling away on its own.

And the pole spider.

I remember watching that and just that my heart was going a bit like...

I quite like that.

I quite like that kind of added jeopardy, but it's also honest, you know, it's just, it's just, that's what it, that's what it's like.

And it looks so beautiful.

[32:48]

We had quite a sunny kind of winter's day.

So there's a lot of like of the liberator kind of silhouetted against the winter sun.

We had teleport bracelets and guns and a few other surprises for later in the dock, which will make an appearance.

And, you know, it's just anything that can make it tactile.

Really, that's not just partly that's to give us something to shoot, you know, to, you know, where we don't want to start the film with kind of 10 different shots of the flower beds in Sally's garden. you know, much nicer to start it with 10 shots of the liberator and then bring Sally and Jan into that.

And equal, it gives them something to react to and gives them something that is provocative, that's going to provoke memories and it's going to connect them to it and make it feel like a special day for them.

You know, I think that that's something we were really keen to do.

So yeah, I'll always use anything, any artefacts.

Again, in the box of delights recently, we had a lot of artefacts on that one.

And it's, I think it feels really special to think, I love that we can go back to locations and say, this location is still here.

[33:56]

You can still go to this planet from Blake 7.

It's still there for you.

And equally, when you go, this model, or this prop, is still a concrete thing in space and time.

I think that's quite powerful, even if it's chipped away and faded.

Uh, it, you know, you know, these things will outlive us.

You know, we'll outlive the people who worked on the show.

And I find that kind of remarkable when you can say, this is a piece of history, just like we might look at, like, at a Roman uniform or, like, or, or, or, or, a dagger or something that we might find in a, in a dig.

I feel like it's a modern version of that, really.

Did you have any problem with people's memories being rusty because they haven't had that familiarity of rehearsing their anecdotes over the years?

Or was it more like cracking open something fresh?

Yeah, I mean, you always get some bits that you kind of, you know, it all depends how geeky you go.

[35:00]

I think that generally the people we spoke to had really good, vivid memories of Blake, but, you know, for every 10 questions you might have in your head to ask.

Uh, you probably find that only 4 or 5 of those will provoke something specific.

And what we always like in the docks is that you don't want anything that feels woolly or vague or like you're kind of regurgitating the thing the interviewer has asked you about.

You want the memory to feel incredibly specific and to put that person back in the, in the socks and shoes that they were wearing at the time to tell you about a moment in their lives.

So, And then inevitably, you know, I might speak to someone like Sally, uh, for an hour or so and ask her about every episode and I'm going to chop that down to maybe only, you know, kind of 5 or 6 minutes in the show.

So I'm going to focus in on the most vivid memories that she might have given us.

But that's always, that's always the process.

And what you realise, what we all know is human beings, is, you know, some people you meet and they will swear to you that they have total recall.

[36:07]

But I think the average human goes through their life kind of realising, oh, shit, we're not very good at remembering things, are we?

You know, I like forgetting and being forgotten, things being forgotten is such a continued creep of just being a human being, you know.

I've got a 6 year old and the awareness that, uh, you know, all the things we did when she was three. you know, 99% of those are gone now and she's only six.

Uh, so I think I'm used to, I I'm always delighted when a memory turns up and I'm never sad when somebody says, I don't really remember that.

It's understandable, it's human.

Yeah, yeah.

It's hard to imagine somebody interviewing oneself about, you know, do you have that funny day you had at work 45 years ago.

The fact that anyone can remember them at all is really impressive.

It's madam, particularly when, you know, if you're, say, a cast member and you did another 12 episodes like this that that year.

I mean, I'm always, but I am often startled that someone like Mitch Mitchell, who worked on the, on the kind of video effects on things like the teleport effect and so on in that 1st year, Mitch was a very key figure and we'd worked with Mitch on the whole of Fang Rock documentary that we did.

[37:19]

And Mitch, I say people don't have totally recall.

If anybody comes close to having totally recall.

Mitch Mitchell. who just, you know, can zoom in to an insane laser degree on this is how we achieve this particular special effect from, you know, 40, 50 years ago.

So there are people like that that are very helpful.

Actually, with Mitch, the other trick is cutting it down is being able to say, okay, that's enough. that's enough.

He's down.

He's down.

But we're so happy to have someone like Mitch on it because you just, you know, there's that precision, that specificity I'm talking about, you can't get anybody more specific than Mitch.

So I love that.

I suppose sort of speaking about the teleport effect.

Chris, Chris T. This is one of the big things that has been adjusted with the sort of special edition.

So how did you approach revamping the teleport effect?

Because that's something that's so well identified with the show, I think.

Well, it's probably the most controversial thing we've done, to be honest.

[38:22]

I've seen I've seen some of the forums.

So...

The teleport effect and the screens are the 2 kind of like ones I zeroed in on.

The teleport effects.

I actually, I think it's iconic.

I think it's really cool.

What I wanted to do was integrated a bit better with the surroundings.

So I like, I think the whole, for the planet side version, having the person form with the line around them is cool, but I'm always aware that that's very much the camera POV, so it feels a bit 2D. So for that, we just made it a bit 3D. So instead of uh, the uh, like a line, it's more of a sphere, that kind of like forms and then the person glows and then it comes together.

In some instances, uh, we had the film for that, but half the time we uh, didn't.

So it's got to integrate with what's already there.

On the ship side, I wanted to keep it quite faithful because I liked the way it shows the person turning into a wave and being transmitted.

[39:23]

But you have the situation where the camera will always like cut back to the other side and this big, big orange light will shine on the crew and then it will cut back and there's no light and then the person wibbles away.

Except sometimes the wall goes orange, sometimes it doesn't.

I tried to like standardise it across.

It's almost like every director had a different way of doing it.

But I added a little bit of orange, like, sort of orange glow transform, like, transferring between the 2 paddles, um, and that changes direction to whether they're beaming up or down.

It seemed to go down okay on the BFI.

I might, like, if we get an opportunity, like, for a next one.

I might like dial it back a little bit, but yeah, no, people seem reasonably happy.

The screens was one as well.

I remember actually it was an Aurac whenever Aristo sort of appears on the screen.

Somebody in the background did go, woo.

But so in the show, they would use the sort of a portal kind of a vision portal kind of method, which didn't always line up with the screen or was sort of a bit, like it wasn't necessarily accurate.

[40:33]

And I think they could only like shrink it a certain degree.

So it didn't always come.

It didn't always come from a small amount.

It was like half of it would appear and then form.

So what I did was I have it kind of wibble.

Um, it's a bit like in the 1st season of Sequest DSV, uh, Captain Bridges hologram.

I have it appear kind of like that.

And it just sort of comes into, sort of a ghostly visage comes into view and then you get the traditional round portal.

And I just thought that might be quite something that's quite nice.

You're going to start rumours that there's a sequest DSV collection coming out next now.

The BBC just decides to go hard left to emblem entertainment.

We have got, actually, we've got a list, actually, of what we want you to do next, but, you know, you might have your own plans, the 2 of you.

Moonbased 3.

Um, but um, the other thing what we did was uh, the Liberator and the Federation, both of the same vision portals thing.

So they standardised it across the series.

And also often the thing that it would be showing would be square, whereas the screen would be circular.

[41:40]

So for the Federation stuff, I changed them to screens.

Sometimes it'd be like a round screen just to kind of fit with the shape of the thing.

But the idea was to show the disparity in technology.

So I won't the liberator have these fancy holograms and then the federation are like screens with like lights and knobs and whatever matches up with the rest of the set and you would have seen that in Seaclocate the story with Travis's interrogation of Cali whenever he's in this like little glass screen as opposed to just a hologram.

So, and there's other stuff.

Like, a lot of it ends up being quite faithful.

Like, whenever the liberators, like, tracking screen comes up.

It's basically the same as it was originally, it's just Roud now.

Yeah, stuff like that.

Like, another thing that we had quite a lot of fun with was with planets, um, like when Blake will describe a planet or like ask Zen to show us this planet, it'll show us this wonderful library footage of somebody with a camera, like recording that part, that one par station that isn't all the episodes.

[42:42]

Um, and obviously with what we know later in the series, like, uh, about the system, it didn't quite line up with how they, like they're much more like Borg like or like less like, they wouldn't really want to explore.

So everything would probably be more orbital scans.

So you see a lot of, like, I ended up building a couple of things from orbit, so you'd get, like, a nice orbital, like, satellite view of what something would be.

It's still the same power station.

I want all the effort of modelling it, but just from above with some Federation ship's docked around it, that kind of thing.

In fact, that is the galactic standard power station, obviously, that's why.

It's fantastic.

The standard design for all federation installations.

Is there anyone who sadly isn't with us that you would really have loved to interview for for your documentaries?

I'm really happy with what we've got, really, because I think if Kevin Davis hadn't shot the interviews that he did, it would have been a really tricky job.

[43:48]

I think it would have definitely worked and you would have still had a doc with 17 new interviews, which is more than, you know, we've done on most things ever.

But I think you would have missed certain people.

I think you would have missed not having like David Maloney involved or Gareth Thomas or, you know, and Stephen Griff and people like that.

And I think that's all really valid.

I would have loved to have spoken to David Maloney, just because I think he's a really interesting man, and I think he, this was his 1st producer job working on Blake 7.

He directed before very successfully.

And he, understandably, he gets offered this slightly poisoned chalice of, can you make this incredibly ambitious science fiction series that for some ungodly reason we've decided is comparable in budget to softly, softly task force, you know, because of course, you know, you're just going to use them in the liberator set the whole time, aren't you?

So that's like having a police station. just the same.

And I think the fact that David kind of kind of realises that, but knows this is my chance, this is my opportunity, and makes it work, and I think probably felt like he was walking over hot coals to bring particularly that 1st year together.

[45:04]

I would have loved to have had David.

But we kind of have.

You know, that's the thing.

I can't feel sad because we've got such a lovely interview where it gives all the answers.

I would hope he would have given.

So I don't feel like there's anybody that we miss.

I guess you always want more, but I'm very happy with what we've got.

You know, I'd love a chance to do more.

You know, I'd love a chance if if things go well, you know, if if sales have been good, they seem to have been good.

I think we'd all love to continue and to do more Blake 7 and to be able, you know, from my point of view to be able to go and look at episodes from series B or whatever and say, right, 1st time I've seen this, let's make a film about it.

Or you've got some treats ahead of you.

It'd be such a shame if like the seriousest end of the liberator exploding.

I know.

Like, well, I guess that's it.

Funnily enough, one of the other people who's on the podcast, he's in Australia, his husband always says for him, Blake 7 ended with the liberator exploding at the end of all rack, because they were all obviously dead.

[46:11]

So it never came back in his mind.

Yeah, if you were just watching it on TV.

Nobody told you that that wasn't the end.

It's a funny, it's an interesting cliffhanger, is it?

Because I watched it, you know, and thought, well, there's no way, you know, it's very clear that they're watching it on a screen, isn't it?

that they're watching a vision of the future.

But you are supposed to possibly think that they have just exploded.

Well, I think immediately.

It reminded me so much of, I mean, there's a lot of Blake Severn and Red Dwarf, isn't there?

And it really reminded me of that cliffhanger at the end of Red Dwarf season 6 when they've met their unhealthy, overweight future selves, I think, and then it ends up being just Rimmer, kind of running through the ship, and then he blows up like Starbucks engine or drive or something, and it explodes, I'm sure.

And I just, I got real red dwarf vibes from the end of season F series A and Blake 7 in a really good way.

Very happy to have them.

It's an interesting finale, but seeing as all the other finales for all the other seasons are so good.

[47:13]

It does stand out quite a bit.

It's traditional for every interview with you, Chris Chapman, to end with someone saying, so I know you can't tell us, but can you give us a hint which season you're going to do next?

But it's not quite like the Doctor Who ones with these.

See, it's an key, obviously.

But it is interesting, isn't it?

It's weird how perverse it would feel.

If we were to do more Blake 7 and we said, right, next we were doing series D, you know, we were going to go to the 4th season.

And you think, well, that is what we do on Doctor Who, really?

that we just do it like a chocolate box.

But, you know, Blake Severn is such a serialised show. with such a kind of through line that we'd have to be pretty evil not to proceed chronologically, wouldn't we?

You say that, Chris, but like literally day one of the England shoot.

We're sitting there having dinner and Mike's like, someone, are we crashing the Scorpio?

It's like, no, you have to have your vegetables, which is everything else.

Yes, then we can crash the Scorpio.

Keep cool, Mike.

[48:15]

Keep cool.

All good things.

Fingers crossed.

We get there. absolutely.

But we're hoping very much that we do.

Thank you both so much for making the time to talk to us this evening.

We can't wait to get our hands on our copies, which should be dropping next weekend.

All the best for the future as well.

Let's hope there's many more, well at least 3 more to come.

No problem.

Thank you.

Thank you for having us.

And yeah, I hope we get to do this again.

Or let's hope so.

Fingers crossed. you.

So, again, we'd just like to say thank you so much to Chris C and Chris T for their time, just taking us behind the scenes of what's going to be a really exciting Blu-ray set for Blake 7 fans.

Me and Pete are really excited and we're not, hopefully after listening to this, you will be as well.

And if you're on the fence about buying it, I think this hopefully has sold you on it.

Yeah, I mean, I mean, there's so much stuff that we've sort of taken for granted that we've known about Doctor Who because we've been seeing these things since we were kids, we've been seeing interviews, we've been seeing, but here we're finally getting the equivalent for Blake 7 all in one place.

[49:25]

And it's been so long awaited and finally, it's getting the release it deserves.

Yeah.

But we would say.

We would say that.

Right, guys, it's in safe hands.

That's the most important thing.

It's very safe hands.

Absolutely.

And speaking of releases, I know everyone listening is eagerly awaiting series D and we can reveal we will be back at the end of December for the start of series D with rescue and we are very much looking forward to talking about series D a lot.

Series D?

or is that are they going to re- are they going to rename if they're going to rename the series for the Blu-rays like they did for the Doctor Who?

Is it going to be Gareth Thomas series one?

and then maybe if they do more, It'll end up with Paul Darrow series 2 in America. don't think so.

Well, we can treat.

Just making us Tom...

We've already had to put up with the series A. We never going to win that argument, are we?

[50:26]

Never.

I'm putting a sticker on mine.

Join us again in December.

Look out for information about when we'll actually be releasing.

Hopefully we're not going to ruin your Christmas, like the end of series D did for so many people back in 81.

Thanks for listening.

And goodbye.

Bye bye.

Switching to manual.

Maximum power on all drives.

Maximal power.

Well, that's not quite the end.

Chris Thompson very kindly gave me and Pete a bit more time to talk about the models that he created for the new Blu ray set, and a couple of other general bits and pieces as well.

So we present that here at the end, especially for you.

[51:29]

Enjoy.

You'll probably recognise this little chap.

Oh, Spacemaster Series 5.

Yeah, well, this is the bullet craft.

So it's before it was the space.

Okay.

Basically, we didn't know if we were going to get the space master.

So I did have the windows removable just in case.

Yeah, in the cases we need to repaint it.

But the advantage of having Jonathan's book is that we actually, we had the specifications for the original set.

Oh, wow.

So this is a one-to-one of what they built in the studio.

And then you're probably going to recognise this one.

So, yes.

One of the key things, uh, for me about doing this was I went to a convention, the SFX convention in Cambra Sands, like in, I think it must have been 2012.

It was one of the 1st ever conventions I ever went to on my own, and there was a screening there of duel with Sally Nevette, Q and A. And I remember whenever the lights went down, episode started, and then you have that shot of the 3 pursuit ships in the sky.

[52:38]

Oh yeah.

Yeah, and the audience burst out laughing.

I felt really like, oh, come on, guys.

That's why, and you see the shot in the BFI trailer or the little reel that we did of all 3 of them, like sort of hanging and like pans up from the or tilts up from the planet.

And that was my sort of like, screw you guys, like the...

This was built by a friend of mine, Richard Ashton.

It's quite a bit bigger than the original because I knew it was close to it and it's got like 2 mounting points and we made the antennas removable just for transport.

But also it's to future proof it as well.

So, for instance, like if we got to do season 2 or three, we could have them with different antenna and different things to kind of denote them being all different.

And also it means it doesn't break in transit.

Yeah.

What was the one that you said you had a crisis with the BFI when he was Doctor Who ones?

[53:42]

Did Money Doctor Who ones come a cropper?

during your travels?

Oh, so, um...

I brought the cyberwarship, the Dalek shuttlecraft and the Akers Patrol shuttle to the 1st BFI thing and EasyJets baggage claim.

They just eat their suitcases around.

Like no matter how much packaging you get, you're going to get some casualties and they all did get broken up a bit, but they're all fixed now and we're able to bring the happiness shuttle, happiness patrol shuttle back for the 2nd viewing and it looks a bit healthier.

This little guy, you will remember.

So this is the flying robot tomorrow rack.

Yeah, that's a fantastic model.

And is that, did...?

Is that, is that done from?

That is just a, one...

It's just a torch.

And again, how big, how does that compare to the original, what was the original, like, half the size of that or something?

The was about the same, I think.

Somebody saw a pretty good one-to-one model.

[54:43]

This isn't a perfect representation of the original because the original had more of these bits.

Uh, more of, I guess for the purposes of an audio podcast, apologies, listeners.

Oh, yeah, sorry, I forgot my podcasting.

I'm just kicking out.

It's got these little like hinge bits that sort of form on the side.

This one only has them on the underside where it's supposed to have them on the top as well.

And it's an actual little...

Is that just an ordinary torch?

Small metal torch you've got, Chris?

I didn't I couldn't find any red gel or anything like that to put on the light because I think they must have had some sort of a red lamp in the original.

So I had some leftover silicone from the rooten.

So I just poured that in and coloured it red.

But yeah, we just hung this from a crucifix and just out, just went on location and shot with it.

And it ended up working quite well because in the original, I think the original one of these in Aurac, it's just on a pole and it can move like that.

And then they use the camera to simulate its movement, but you can always tell by the lens distortion when they do that.

[55:44]

It's just twisting.

It's not actually moving.

Yeah.

And like Paul had the original film that they showed up the sky, but it didn't really match what was on location.

So I just took it out to, like, like, Belfast lock and shot it there and confused some workers at Pricewaterhouse Cooper's.

I brought these little guys along.

To the screening.

Oh, done.

So, if people remember Federation Space Command, and us talking about the cat trying to knock it over and stuff.

Oh, well, we've got to tell that story.

We got to tell that story.

So yeah.

I understand you had an issue.

One second.

I'll just go get it. one second.

Okay.

What, the cat?

Federation Space Command was like the biggest thing that we made for series.

Oh yeah, that's big.

It's a very large sombrero.

[56:46]

So, um, how big is that?

So like a metre?

No, rubbish.

Maybe just under a metre.

No, it's diameter.

We only really ended up detailing one side properly as well, just because we had so little time.

And are you thinking HD the whole time about better put, or have you just always worked in HD?

So that's not something you've had to adapt to yourself. sort of.

Like, there's an element of, obviously, time when working on these, but also, you want to be able to get as close as possible.

So you kind of have to put as much detail in and maybe go overboard, uh, at certain times.

But one of the things that if you look at the original Ian Scoon's concept art, it says that it's specifically supposed to be under construction, because it's modelled on 2001 Space Odyssey.

So, There are little um, like cutouts in the side of it, where you can see they're still putting panels in, whatnot.

I'm just being quite careful with how I hold it because there's a lighting rig inside that keeps falling out.

And we noticed, uh, it looked I mean, it looks spectacular on the big screen. and there were little ships coming and going and things like that.

[57:52]

You've got the whole busy Deep Space 9.

So, yeah, I wanted to feel like the centre of the Federation.

So, and also in Seatlocate Destroy, they specifically mention in dialogue that the pursuit ships aren't there because there's only 3 of them than you.

Yeah.

So I designed this.

Which is like a Federation cruiser kind of thing.

Oh, right.

And the idea would be that we'd use these in the 1st half of the series and then we'd phase them out for whenever the Starburst client comes in.

Right.

And then a few people have picked up on this, which is...

The point behind that was that we were getting through, we were coming into like the last couple of weeks and I used the CG Liberator a lot and like, I'm a proud CG artist.

I think it's a really cool medium and it lets me do lots of wonderful things.

But on a project such as this, I did kind of want to equalise, like see if I can get another model liberator to use as a miniature one that we can use sort of for distant shots.

[58:57]

Yeah.

And the guy on Facebook, we're selling off some model kit.

I bought.

It's in bits in the minute because I wanted to change the lighting for them.

But I bought this, which is just a 3D printed kit of the Liberator.

And not even knowing what I was using it for.

The guy threw in a Scorpio for me.

Oh, wow.

Did you just give it as a freebie?

So that liberates what, about a foot long?

Less than.

Oh, right, yeah.

Yeah.

And like, it's really basic.

Uh, like even in terms of painting, like I absolutely just put through this thing together.

But we use it for about 4 or 5 shots just whenever it's in orbit.

There's a shot of the trailer of it just above Aristo.

And sometimes when it's flying in the distance, like you, I did a shot of the pursuit ship, sort of looming on XK 72, and then you can see this little liberator just in orbit.

Oh, cool.

So, uh, Yeah, no that was good fun.

[59:58]

And last but probably least.

We have the most fragile of all them.

Which is the Ortega.

From Mission to Destiny.

Yeah.

Yeah, oh, look at that.

She's definitely got eagle overtones that one.

Well, that's because it's made from Eagles.

So the really funny thing about so I did the Space 1999 technical manual a couple of years ago.

So I have loads of just random space 1999 bits and bobs.

And I have kit bits lying around and whatever, and they used eagle parts all over space 1999.

So the spine of the Ortega is just Nigel's spine flipped upside down.

Um, there's eagle pods all over the, or like eagle landing leg pods, all over the launch bay for deliverance.

Oh, right.

In the new model as well.

[1:00:59]

Uh, speaking of which, um, So, because the original, um, Ortega used a bunch of Saturn 5 parts, I thought I'd buy a Saturn 5.

Yeah, well, help with it.

It meant that I had a bunch of 75 bits left.

Yeah, that's where the rock and deliverance comes from.

And I think the original one was made by the set team as opposed to the model team.

So, and how they did the shot was they put a diorama in a window at the back of the set, which worked quite well, but it meant that it doesn't parallax correctly.

But they said, it does make it look kind of small and they didn't dirty it down.

So what we did was I put all this rust on it.

And then there's like foliage coming in through the through the single skylight where there's a shaft of light coming through.

It's a bit more Post-apocalyptic.

But again, I was really proud of it because...

[1:02:00]

Yeah, we got to do it in camera.

Like that's always the good fun.

But that's whenever a filmmaking becomes a bit of more of a magic trick. is what I quite enjoy.

But yeah, so that's what I have to hand.

And then, obviously we had Phil Stevens's XK72 and Liberator, and Matt had brought down pretty much everything else.

Yeah.

Yeah, fortunately, he kept so much that it was all available.

Yeah, some of it, Mike Tucker did some restoration on it.

They needed a bit of love.

Yeah.

And like, we only use the original pursuit ship in a couple of shots because it's missing a lot of the antenna and stuff.

Yeah.

But no, I got a really nice shot of Mike and Matt working on the original pursuit ship together and it was just a nice memory.

Yeah, yeah.

One of our original questions that we didn't get around to asking.

We wondered, is there a lesson you learnt on a previous project that particularly came useful to you here with Blake 7?

[1:03:04]

Um, I guess it all kind of accumulates, really.

Um, Doing the season 25 special effect stuff did make this better.

Because a lot of the lessons we learned on that project, because effectively, we did the season 25 shoot on, I think it was like the 1st week of February, and then 2 days later I jumped on a plane for the 1st Blake 7 shoot.

And, uh, then from that. it went to more Blake 7, more season 25, more Blake 7.

Um, and each shoot we did, we got better.

Like we got better trying to work out where to put the lights and stuff.

Basically, you need to make Supercar before you make Thunderbirds.

And I think that's kind of what happened.

Like, I think if we get another opportunity, like if we get a season two, the potential is there for it to be even better.

Like, there's a ton of, if I could go back and do season one again with more time, I think it could look, it could get a good magnitude better, and I think I'm hoping we get that opportunity.

[1:04:07]

So if, say, you were doing series two.

Is there any, any, yeah, whichever.

Is there any effect shot that you'd really be excited to be working on, do you think?

Well, the thing about Sort of the way I kind of think of it is that I don't like being like, oh, that's a really cool effect, Sean.

I want to redo it again.

Whenever I see stock footage, that's where I'm like, hell yeah, that's my time to shine.

And for that reason, actually, the opening of season three.

The big stop, I'm going to tackle with the Andromedan War.

Because hypothetically, would probably come up with a more unified Dunjoman fleet that we'd still have for the next season.

And then just an entirely new sequence.

Like... plastic cutlery has advanced so far since those days.

Things that you could make at...

Oh, this mitry plastic cutlery.

I know they're sports now.

Can have a sonic spork amongst them.

But yeah, that would be lovely.

[1:05:10]

We would all love to crash the Scorpio one day.

Uh-huh, but for season two, uh, I keep thinking back to uh, when Blake teleports onto the asteroid in voice of the past.

Oh, yeah, well, you couldn't make that any worse.

Oh, well, I can try that.

Um, but uh, I think there's some, there's opportunity to do something cool there.

I need to do a proper season 2 rewatch, to be honest, but I think it would just be quite fun.

If we had more time and just inability to do more of a pre-production period to just be able to take our time with it and do some really cool stuff.

Absolutely.

Have you had any involvement in the Box of Delights?

We've already talked about that.

No, unless they need, unless there's spaceships.

Yeah, it's...

And that it's actual...

Godzilla turns up in the background.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

No, I'm, at the minute, I'm very much limited to Doctor Who and Blake 7, though I think I'm getting a break on Doctor Who for a little bit, because I never, I never like to assume I'm always working on it because we've had so many effects artists work on them in the past.

[1:06:24]

And, uh, like, I don't want to get pressures about it.

I know I'm one of many.

Our other questions were going to be around, um, what other series might be coming out soon.

Like, have you been approached to do any Japanese fighter planes from World War 2 in a Tenko kind of vibe, possibly, or any Belgian cafes for secret army?

I don't know, like I think like, so I've not heard anything.

So, uh, But I think you would like to think that with Blake 7 doing quite well, they would open the gauntlet up to other things.

Like, I would love to do Starcops.

Um, and I think there's like, it's got great effects, but I think there's scope to do stuff with uh, the CSO and what that kind of thing.

Tripods, put some tripods into all those episodes that don't have any tripods in them.

I made the joke, but Moonbase 3 is always there.

It is.

Um, yeah, yeah, but we'd we'd snap out.

But someone, somewhere has got to make the judgement, but apart from 2000 podcast listeners, not launching, you know, 2000 people who go to conventions and listen to podcasts, et cetera.

[1:07:32]

How many units have we actually got a shift to make this viable?

And Doctor Who clearly has cleared that hurdle, whatever it is.

Well, I think it's, it sort of goes to speak of the, um, the physical media market because they need to appeal to collectors now because I think the, the normies don't really engage with it anymore as much.

Yeah, I use the norm- the term normies, the non-fans, the, uh, but, I hope.

Yeah.

The reasons why Doctor Who does so well is because the team cares so much and like, I'm going to say a bunch of nice stuff about Chris while he's not here.

But, uh, um, that you've got people like Chris that do these amazing documentaries.

You've got people like Paul Venesis, who is an absolute perfectionist and will resupply Aurak over some interlacing issues and shot 24.

Um because he's that keen to make sure it gets across in the best way possible.

You've got Lee doing like his incredible artwork and the amount of thought he goes that goes into those, like he does.

[1:08:36]

He makes it look easy, but I know it's not.

You've got Russell that's constantly trying to work out how to make these things better, but also absolutely take takes care of all of us.

Uh, this whole thing and you've got Pete, who is an absolute perfectionist and it's very has very strong opinions on what space looks like.

The most common node is like, can we make the stars look a bit more like Star Wars?

But not like new Star Wars, like old Star Wars.

And funnily enough, I had the chance my local cinema showed the original Star Wars trilogy in their like 1970s forms.

Oh, wow, this rather sneakily.

Illicited versions, yeah.

It was like, oh, I get that.

Like, um, yeah, that's what the stars look like.

Fine.

Like that makes sense.

And so you talked about how, so your operations are split between, well, your base is in Belfast and then you'll come over to England sometimes for some shots.

Is that because you've got, Well, you mentioned having a barn that you could use for the, um, for Servoland's spaceship, but with occasional interruptions by Ripley the cat.

[1:09:47]

Yeah, so I haven't, because of all the Doctor Who stuff.

I've assembled an effects team locally around me, so we've got around Wade, who does our 3D printing.

We've got Connor and AC who help out on the shoots.

We've got Ben Page, who's actually from Scotland, but he flies over for them as like our DOP.

And we've sort of got used to making stuff over here and we've built a little bit of a framework where we can do it quite cheaply because, yeah, Belfast is really known for this sort of thing.

So you can actually get spaces for it quite easily.

Um, but obviously on the Blake 7 stuff, uh, if you want to use the original props, you got to kind of fly over to England for it.

And then obviously, if you do that, you've got slightly more resources in the shape of uh, sort of the Doctor Who teams, DOPs, and we had Matt Patrick on, uh, for the England sheet of the Blake 7 stuff.

But, uh, yeah.

Yeah, the generally split.

Yeah, so, well, like, again, if we get the call for season two, we would split it just depending on what survived and what's still about.

[1:10:55]

Yeah.

And do you get any indications about what the quality of the masters that they've got?

I guess is that not your the remastered versions of the normal episodes?

That's not your department, is it?

But do, do...

That would be Paul Venesis that you'd need to chat to.

We'll try.

We'll try.

I think you've answered all of our questions and more.

Thank you.

You've been really generous with your time and your collection.

Thank you so much.

It was lovely to see those models.

I hope that makes for an interesting audio experience.