A Voice from the Past

Here’s a little story that begins more than a quarter of a century ago. Back in the early 1990s, as young actors not long out of drama school, my partner Barnaby Edwards and I were fortunate enough to land some lovely jobs in theatre and television – but the career path of a young performer is fraught with uncertainty, and to make ends meet during the inevitable gaps in employment we took on all sorts of other interesting commissions. One such source of occasional work was the London Institute, which nowadays goes by the name of the University of Arts London. Among its departments is a highly regarded film school – and there we were lucky enough to bag a few thoroughly enjoyable acting gigs with the film students who were shooting their various media projects.

At the time, the Institute’s senior lecturer in film and television, overseeing those budding student filmmakers while continuing his own career as a freelance director, was an experienced television pro called Desmond McCarthy. Charming, erudite, well versed in art and literature as well as in film history, he was a delight to work with – and for those among us who might just possibly have carried a candle for the classic BBC science fiction series Blake’s 7, he also happened to be a bit of a legend. For back in the day, Des – as he was known to one and all at the Institute – had directed two memorable episodes from the show’s third season, originally airing in 1980: Volcano and Dawn of the Gods.

Why am I telling you this now? Well, here’s the thing: just a few days ago I was having a bit of a clearout in my study, and at the back of a drawer I came across a long-lost and almost forgotten audio cassette, labelled ‘Des McCarthy interview 1995’. And it all came rushing back. In my youthful shamelessness, one day at the London Institute I had asked Des if I might pick his brains for his memories of working on that glorious show, and he said he’d be happy to oblige. At the time, the programmes we were talking about were only 15 years old, and Des remembered everything as if it were yesterday. From his involvement in the casting of Josette Simon to the unfortunate vetoing of a fishy walk-on, he had some fine tales to tell of his days at the helm of the Liberator.

The original plan was that the interview would appear in the short-lived Blake’s 7 poster magazine which was then being published by Marvel Comics; but before this could come to pass, the magazine was cancelled, and that was that. The interview never saw the light of day. The cassette found its way to the back of that drawer, and set about gathering dust. Until last weekend.

Vaguely aware that the world of Blake’s 7 fandom is not exactly knee-deep in Desmond McCarthy interviews, a couple of days ago I dropped a line to Jonathan Helm, an expert on the series who runs the splendid ‘Making Blake’s 7’ account on Twitter. If you don’t follow it, you really must – it’s a treasure trove of fascinating trivia and beautiful photographs. I asked Jonathan whether he thought that an ancient interview with this chap who directed two episodes of Blake’s 7 would be likely to float anyone’s boat. Straight back came words like ‘exciting’ and ‘mouthwatering’ – apparently I was sitting on something of real interest.

Back in those days I was a more meticulous diarist than I am now, so I next pulled down from the shelf my 1995 diary, and discovered that my interview with Desmond McCarthy was recorded on February 9th. What are the chances? February 9th? That was literally yesterday. Well, that clinched it. Time, surely, to launch the pursuit ships.

As Servalan herself might have said, it’s an old interview – it waits. So for all my fellow Blake’s 7 fans out there, precisely 27 years and a day since Des and I sat down to chat about the challenges of conjuring up volcanoes in Yorkshire and black holes in Television Centre… here it is at last.

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Des McCarthy’s route into television production was a familiar one during the 1960s. “I read English at Cambridge University, and then I got into the BBC as a studio manager, and eventually transferred to television as an assistant floor manager. I learned to be a director through working as what’s called a production assistant, or PA, on a great many serials. David Maloney, the producer of Blake’s 7, also went by that route.”

It was while learning the director’s craft that Des worked as a PA on the 1967 Doctor Who serial The Moonbase. Among his responsibilities, he found himself tasked with finding the technology to create the ‘Mark II’ Cybermen voices – one of the defining sounds of sixties Doctor Who. “The director, Morris Barry, said to me, ‘They’ve got to speak, so that’s your job,’ and I had carte blanche. One influence was Jean-Luc Godard’s film Alphaville. I liked the idea of that computer voice, and I went through records of people with speech disabilities, to see how synthetic voices were created. I don’t really remember much about the story, except that it was with Patrick Troughton. I was only just starting, and most of my work was on the classic serials. I did A Tale of Two Cities [in 1965] with Patrick. He was Dr Manette in that, so I knew him already. I think I only did that one Doctor Who story, but one would pop into the studio now and then, and see the Daleks whizzing around.”

After earning his spurs as a director, Des worked on BBC series including Z Cars and The Newcomers, and a 1970 edition of The Wednesday Play entitled Season of the Witch, which he co-wrote with Johnny Byrne. Not long afterwards he left the BBC to go freelance, branching out into ITV series like Coronation Street, Crossroads and Crown Court. “I directed a lot of outside work for Granada, Yorkshire, ATV and so on. By this time I was already teaching at the London Institute, which I was combining with work outside, and as it happened my agent was called up for Blake’s 7. David Maloney knew me because we’d worked together as PAs in the early days, and so I was offered two episodes of the third series.”

The production of Series C of Blake’s 7 was structured so that the first six episodes’ worth of location filming would be completed before any of the studio work was undertaken. This arrangement meant that the show could make the most of its limited budget by concentrating its location outings in efficient logistical blocks. Producer David Maloney had set his heart on the dramatic setting of How Stean Gorge in North Yorkshire as a location for the episode Powerplay, which he would be directing himself, and this in turn influenced the choices of location for the other five episodes in the block. “There were four directors working in parallel,” Des recalled, “and all the location filming was done in one bash. Since David Maloney was directing one of these episodes himself, and his piece involved some fairly barren scenery, he decided he was going to film his stuff near Ripon in Yorkshire. Now, once you go filming, your working day starts from base, so the farther away you go from your hotel, the less filming you get done. As a result, we were all asked to find our locations within a circle of about twenty miles around Ripon. One guy had something which involved a sea planet, so they went off to the beach [this was Vere Lorrimer for the season opener Aftermath]. Now I, of course, had a volcano. I’d lived up there for six months directing Emmerdale Farm, and I knew a place not far from Leeds called Arncliffe Crag, which had an outcrop of stone which I thought I could use to create close shots of the volcano. I went through a lot of stock footage of volcanoes at the BBC, and found some stuff from Iceland which matched up.

“Special effects had many grandiose ideas about how we could create a shot with two actors in the foreground, and a volcano erupting behind them. It’s what’s called a glass shot, which means you paint in the background scenery on a piece of glass just in front of the camera, and you align the skyline on the glass. The idea was that a piece of magnesium would be let off at right angles to this pane of glass. It would reflect in the glass, and so would appear to be emanating from the volcano, with Steven Pacey and Josette Simon in the foreground. When it came to it, the wind was so strong that the magnesium flame blew horizontally, and then the wooden frame which was holding the glass fell over. The whole thing was ruined – so there was only one thing I could do. Special effects had a lot of explosives which we had been using for the later scene when a character falls into the crater. There’s a lot of stuff near the end of the episode where we needed explosions and smoke to give the illusion that the fight scene was close to the edge of the volcano. So I said, ‘How much have you got left?’ The effects man said, ‘Well, we’ve got quite a few,’ and I said, ‘Right, you stay up on the top, and everybody else off! When I give you the cue, you just let off everything you’ve got.’ So we turned over, and cued the actors, and I said, ‘Right – go!’” At this point in his account, Des paused, his face assuming a rueful ‘Oops’ expression. “Well, you could have seen it from Leeds, I’m sure. For a brief moment, Arncliffe Crag did become a real volcano.”

Although Volcano was the third episode of the series in transmission order, the Arncliffe Crag filming marked the first appearance before the cameras of Steven Pacey and Josette Simon in their roles as the show’s new crewmembers Tarrant and Dayna. “Steven had already been cast by David Maloney. Josette was a special case, because she’d only just graduated from drama school. The actors’ union Equity was very concerned at the time that Black actors should get opportunities for work. It was the producer’s idea that this character should be Black, which I thought was a good idea, and he had seen Josette and thought that she was potentially a very good actress. But since I was the first person to work with her, we auditioned her together. We were required by Equity to prove that we’d tried every Black actor in the union before we could get her an Equity card. David managed to convince them that for the character he wanted, she was the only one.”

Des was full of admiration for the way the two newcomers established their characters, coping well with the vagaries of out-of-sequence filming. “On location the actors had to work on characters which were not going to be rehearsed and shot in the studio for another two months, so you were already setting the character which, later, you might want to develop during rehearsal, and you’re restricted because you won’t have that latitude. On location the voice projection is greater, and that’s another problem because you tell the actor, ‘Look, you’re on the top of a volcano, you have to imagine the sound effects and the music we’re going to add later,’ so sometimes it’s difficult for the actor to get precisely the right level. But Josette got it absolutely right. She was very professional throughout the show. I remember a studio scene which we did in one take, and when Michael Gough was a little bit rocky on the dialogue, Josette was absolutely rock-steady and she kept him going. She kept him on track, so I was very impressed with her professionalism – and of course by the fact that she brought the character to life. And as we know, she’s gone on to do great things.”

Michael Gough, who played the world-weary ruler of Obsidian, was among the biggest names to take a guest role in Blake’s 7. “Yes, even then he was quite well known. He is a lovely actor, and I’d worked with him before. What I enjoy most in directing is working with actors. I do believe that the most important element of the piece is what the cast are doing on the screen. You can trick it up with effects, but if it isn’t truthful and hasn’t got resonance and depth of playing, then the piece is going to be that much shallower. In this particular character, there was this mixture of pacifism with inner strength and determination. I think the writer, Allan Prior, was taking his cue from the CND movement of the time. One could see those kind of characters around – a Michael Foot type person walking in front of the demonstration, as it were – so I wanted to find someone who could make it credible. You have a budget, and you have to choose where you put your money: on the effects, the scenery, or the casting. Luckily Michael was available and interested. I adored him, and we became quite good friends afterwards. I felt he brought a very important quality to that piece.

“Allan Prior I knew because I’d worked on Z Cars, and in fact some people used to say that Blake’s 7 was just Z Cars in space. Allan obviously had that sense of cops and robbers, as it were, and I think that’s a good quality in the writing. When I was contracted to do his script, I ran into him in the BBC bar, and I said, ‘There’s a couple of problems I’ve got with it.’ In the story, the son betrays the cause – he is a traitor in a sense – and in the original script the president eliminates his own son because he’s betrayed him. And I felt there was a conflict here: if this person was a pacifist, and the whole point of it was that he was against violence on any terms, how could we have him killing his son? He could order it done, but to actually do it himself? So I said to Allan that I wanted to introduce a kind of robot character who would take that over. This would then remove the act one stage away from Michael Gough’s character. Allan said, ‘Fine, good, do what you like!’, so that’s where this servant character came from, this robot who gives him his pills and so on.

“Often in television, there have been occasions like that when I’ve known the writer, and one is able to solve something straight away. But quite often in those days one was working through a story editor, and sometimes they feel a bit protective and are reluctant for directors to change too much. Ultimately, though, the director has quite a lot of power because you have to produce a piece of work to an exact time. Blake’s 7 had a lot of scenes and lots of inserts, so it was only in the editing stage sometimes that one realised one may have to cut a whole minute or two of a writer’s work, without any recourse to story editors. I do prefer to predict before that, because I don’t like cutting stuff out after I’ve rehearsed it.”

As a newcomer to Blake’s 7, Des found himself not only introducing the new regulars but also having to get to grips with the show’s format and the history of the Liberator crew. “I think that I started from scratch. What Blake himself represented didn’t really concern me, except when he was referred to in the scripts. The Pacey character came in not, as he actually said himself, as a substitute Blake. Gareth Thomas’s character had a different type of ethos – as I understand it, he was more to do with some kind of social idealism. Tarrant was more of an opportunist, a mercenary. There certainly wasn’t any feeling of a dominant star in the show. Paul Darrow’s character, Avon, was a sort of substitute perhaps, but really I felt very much that it was a crew without a leader. That’s the difference, I think, compared with the earlier stories, and it was actually quite effective. Each character contributed their individual quality, and it created conflicts, but there was nobody to resolve it. They had to resolve it as an ensemble.”

Volcano also saw the return of Jacqueline Pearce as everyone’s favourite villain, the incomparable Servalan. “Jacqueline is rather larger than life,” chuckled Des, “although she’s not at all domineering. She’s great fun, but it can be a little tiring because she’s got such a fund of jokes and stories! But what’s odd is that when you actually put the camera on her, she comes right down, she’s very underplayed, absolutely still and quite icy cold. I can remember a scene out on the windy moors. We were running out of light, it was about to rain, and her line to her henchman was simply ‘Kill them’. She so underplayed lines like that – not at all over the top. I think she’s a wonderful actress. It’s funny, I think even in America she was mobbed and asked for autographs because of Blake’s 7.

“When you direct something, you always have certain subtexts within the cultural framework, so I had this nice idea that maybe we could bring a bit of Mrs Thatcher out of the character of Servalan. I don’t know whether it comes out or not, but there are obviously some parallels with current society. That’s what science fiction is about really. It enables us to project, into the future, situations which might result if we allow the current world to develop as it is doing. That, I think, is the point Ridley Scott was making in Blade Runner. That’s why science fiction is an interesting format. It’s not just for children. It also enables you to go over the top and do things which you couldn’t possibly do in a ‘realistic’ drama.”

Volcano was followed by James Follett’s episode Dawn of the Gods, a script which presented fresh challenges. “As a director, your task is to take a script which isn’t really a piece of literature, it’s rather like a score of music which is an annotation, an indication of what could be on the screen. It may be dialogue, it may be description, but sometimes a writer can write something which is quite complicated. I read through the script for Dawn of the Gods, and I came to this point and it says, ‘They enter a black hole’ – which is fine as one line on the page, but it’s quite a difficult thing to do visually! In fact it’s impossible, because there isn’t any reference, so all one can do is extrapolate. One looked at certain scientific theories about what might happen. Gravity becomes infinite, so I thought physically one would become ‘stretched’ in some way on entering the black hole, so we used a convex mirror to elongate the characters, as you do in a hall of mirrors. With the limited special effects which were at our disposal, we tried to create something which would suggest it to an audience.

“But again, if one is relying on the scientific veracity of any of the effects, I think the point is lost, because the piece is not about that. The effects, and this is probably true of the robot character in Volcano as well, now look rather ludicrous, because we’ve seen so much from Steven Spielberg’s massive budget movies. But I don’t think Blake’s 7 necessarily stands or falls by its effects. It’s much more with the story and the characters and the acting. So, you know, I think you’ve lost your audience if they’re going to ask those sorts of questions.

“Dawn of the Gods was an interesting challenge really: how to evoke this rather poetic world in what is expected to be a dramatic, action-packed series, and not let the tension drop. So I went to a lot of trouble to cast the Thaarn character, and to explore ways of creating the images in the dream room through Chromakey. There was also a sort of factory room, with a lot of characters all working in there. Since these were all characters who’d got sucked in and entrapped in this black hole, it seemed to me that they would have come from planets all over the universe, so I wondered how to do this. The obvious example was the famous Star Wars bar scene, and I thought it would be nice to have this mixture of physically different species. With the effects people, we dreamed up a number of different characters who would be just walking through, so for instance there was a kind of Magritte inspiration of a woman with a fish-tail, and they went to great trouble in creating these. When we eventually got into the studio, and the producer saw these characters, his view – and probably in retrospect he was quite correct – was that this belonged more to Doctor Who’s format than to Blake’s 7. He felt that this would be rather too surreal and perhaps jokey. I didn’t feel it was, but obviously in a situation like that the producer has the last word. So unfortunately the special effects people had done a lot of work which we never saw on the screen.

“The Thaarn was a difficult thing to envisage, but after casting Marcus Powell, it was then over to make-up really, and they created the character. I believe the director should give all creative artists latitude to contribute. I think the voice helped enormously. It was quite powerful, and of course you rely on the other actors to create the fear. So I thought within our limits, we created rather a good character. Maybe we could have been more imaginative. It could have been a brain in a glass case or something.”

The Thaarn is one of the few Blake’s 7 villains to escape at the end of the episode, as the Liberator crew reflect that they have made a new enemy. “There’s always openness in any series,” Des reflected. “In soap operas people often go abroad instead of being killed off, because they just might be brought back!” And of course, something similar happened not long afterwards with Blake’s 7 itself. “As you know, there was a fourth series after ours. At the end of the whole studio cycle, we had a small party with all the cast in the green room, and while we were having our drinks, and talking about how marvellous it was to work on, they were hacking the set to pieces because this was the end of it all. The Liberator was blown up, and that was it, goodbye. And I remember when seeing the last episode of the series go out, it suddenly said, ‘And there will be another series next year!’ You see, sometimes these decisions can be made after they see the audience figures, so they actually had to build a new ship for the following year.”

At the time we spoke, the wonders of DVD and other digital formats lay in the future, but Blake’s 7 had already been released in its entirety on videotape, and Des was very much aware that the series had an enduring appeal. “Of all the things I’ve done, this is the one programme from which I’ve occasionally received a small sum of money from sales of cassettes, or showings in other countries around the world, so evidently it’s got a wider appeal. It obviously taps into a bit of the Boy’s Own, heroic, forties Battle of Britain sort of thing, which is very much current nostalgia now amongst young people. One could also say that science fiction is very popular because of the pessimism of our current end-of-millennium atmosphere, and realism is becoming much less common. The sort of social drama programmes of the sixties are not being made now. Even soap operas have elements of fantasy. If we look at the cinema, we either see nostalgia for the forties and fifties, or otherwise you go into fantasy worlds.

“Whether there will be another Blake’s 7 series, who knows?  It would be nice to think there would, although there is a nostalgic element which maybe you couldn’t recapture now because filming technology has advanced so much. But Blake’s 7 always seemed to me to give good stories, well acted and well put together.

“I was pleased with my episodes, I think. When I see my work played back, I always think of things I could have done better, or differently – but I think that’s how it should be.”

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I spoke to Des McCarthy on 9th February 1995. My thanks again to Des, and to Jonathan Helm for kindly giving me the run of his unrivalled collection of photographs.

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