Episode 38: Steven Pacey and the Rules of War (Death-Watch)

Rule 1. We only allow clones of Steven Pacey in our army.

This week we time travel back to Ancient Rome, or we would, if this was Doctor Who. Instead we bring Ancient Rome into the future, because this is Blake’s 7 where everything is in the FUTUREEE. It’s Death-Watch, written by Chris Boucher and aired on March 24, 1980.


Show-notes:


9:55 Well the New York Times seems to think its a problem.
19:34 Why is the Princess Bride such a cult hit? It’s not even that good.
28:04 The Purge is a pretty recent movie franchise that asks the question “What if crime was legal for 24 hours?” It’s really not as interesting as it sounds. We discussed it a couple months ago for our movie trilogy podcast, Triple Play.
50:16 Flight Through Entirety is a Doctor Who podcast that does the same thing our Doctor Who podcast does (watch all of Doctor Who in order), only much better.


Blake’s 7 © The BBC
Any other references belong to their respective owners, no copyright infringement is intended by this podcast.
The Blake’s 7 title music was originally composed by Dudley Simpson.

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2 comments

Detta’s coach as you called him was named Max. The actor was in the Doctor Who serial The Green Death as doctor Jones who becomes the love interest to Jo Grant.

This episode has borrowed from a Star Trek episode. I forgot the episode name but it is the one where they are fighting a simulated war using computers and the people ‘killed’ have to surrender themselves for death and the Enterprise is ‘destroyed’ and they try to trick Scotty into lowering the shields so they can destroy them for real.

Death Watch I believe was a last minute replacement for a script that didn’t work out.

Also forgot to say that Blake’s 7 did holodecks first. Take that Star Trek.

And the reason Del and Detta didn’t meet each other is due to time and money. It is an expensive and time consuming exercise to do split screen shots. Everything filmed that day had to be in the can by 10pm. The sets would be built in the studio over night and the actors would come in in the morning and rehearse through out the day and film in the evening usually between 8.30 and 10pm and then those sets would be taken down and put into storage and sets for the next day’s filming would be erected. Filming of a show like Blake’s 7 would take 3 days to shot in the studio with location filming having been done several weeks before hand. There is an excellent documentary about this on YouTube where the viewer is taken through what happens at the BBC over 24 hours. I think it is also an extra on one of the classic Doctor Who DVD releases.

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