When Star Wars came out, one of our directors was close to tears: how we made Blakes 7

Michael E Briant, director of series one I got the impression Blake’s 7 was just going to be “space opera” and wanted to move on and do other things, but the script for the first episode won me over. It was 1977, before the mass surveillance we have today, so the idea of everyone being watched by cameras, as that opening episode had it, seemed striking. It had shades of Nineteen Eighty-Four and felt very adult and relevant. The series had been pitched by Terry Nation, who created Doctor Who’s Daleks. He saw it as The Dirty Dozen in Space

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