“At its root, it’s fundamentally a fun action adventure,” Andrew Mark Sewell notes of his audio reboot of Dan Dare which launched last year to strong reviews from critics. With the next set out 7 April 2017, the Blake’s 7 and I, Robot producer/director chats with Paul Simpson about how Dare’s adventures are still relevant today…

You said at the launch last year that you had been attracted to Dan Dare for years; what was the initial attraction?

It does go back to my dad and introducing me to radio – The Goon Show, the classic Dick Barton adventures – which I loved that as a kid. I don’t know how I got into genre very early on, because my parents weren’t interested in it at all, but I loved that sense of wonder, that sense of adventure and derring do, and I was fascinated in life beyond our planet.

I was reading Look & Learn, with the Trigon Empire, and then Dad introduced me to the Eagle and Dan Dare. I loved all the Gerry Anderson shows, Space: 1999 in particular, but the character that to me epitomised that sense of adventure and the desire to explore beyond our own planet, beyond our solar system, was Dan Dare with that heroic, positive outlook to the future. Bear in mind when we were kids, we were living under the constant threat of nuclear Armageddon, and so forth. Dan Dare was full of optimism, even though he was battling the Mekon and various other evil aliens with plans of conquest.

It’s taken a long time to get to this point…

I feel like my professional career has been an audition to get to the point where I thought I knew how to do this. In fact my association with Dan Dare goes back to when I used to do publicity for Duncan MacAlpine who wrote the Comic Book Price Guide. I also had a little production company that Simon Moorhead and I were trying to get going called Naked Eye Productions. I met up with Glyn Dearman, a veteran radio drama producer for the BBC, who was working on the Dan Dare series: they did 4 episodes of Voyage to Venus in 1990. Duncan and I between us knew our Dan Dare so we talked to Glyn about the possibility of writing scripts for a second series had it been commissioned, which it wasn’t.

I always got so tantalisingly close to doing Dan Dare but it never happened. So having gone through the experience of doing Blake’s 7 – which was a steep learning curve, and I’m very proud of what we did with that – and then doing things like The Martian Chronicles for the BBC, we were looking at what we’d like to do next, and Dan Dare came up in the conversation. I was told, “Well, if you thought the rights for getting Blake’s 7 were difficult, try getting them for Dan Dare!”

Are they held by multiple people?

They are held by the Dan Dare Corporation which is run by veteran producer Colin Frewin. I knew that they were trying to get a feature film for Dan Dare going so I sent him along some of what we’d done with Blake’s 7 and The Martian Chronicles. He loved what we did and said, “Send me your proposal”.

We got a team of writers together but because we were doing lots of other stuff, we spent a year just chatting among ourselves and wondering how we should approach it – should we keep the retro 1950s feel or do we bring it up to date without losing that sense of derring-do?

The original version seemed trapped in a time bubble and didn’t seem relevant to an audience today and in the same way that with films and television drama the audience is so much more sussed when it comes to what they want out of a drama and what they’ll buy into. They want it to feel real.

When I started to look at the old comic strips, Dan Dare was the only one I was really engaged with and thought would work really well as an audio adventure.

What were the arguments against staying in period?

It was very much of its time and it was an antidote to the post-war austerity. It was a representation of a Britain that doesn’t exist any more.

I think why it seemed the right time to bring it back now, is the renewed interest in space exploration. It got a shot in the arm with Tim Peake and the attention he’s brought through his involvement with the International Space Station. Tim Peake is in one way a modern day Dan Dare, personifying that British spirit of adventure.

We thought, if we projected the world of now forward in the way that the original Frank Hampson scripts did in terms of predicting what the future would hold and so forth, where would we be in 30 years time? That’s why we rooted it in around 2035 to start with. We know that life could not be found on the likes of Venus and Mercury, not in the sense that it’s depicted in the script – so we decided to treat our stories as if they’re set in a parallel world, where there are civilisations on the other planets and so forth.

Yet in the scripts, within minutes of the start, there’s reference to the real NASA Pioneer mission being in the past…

The argument is that all the Apollo missions etc. actually happened, but we’re talking about alien tech, which is how we justify the Anastasia, and teleportation and so forth. We’re saying in 2025, alien tech is discovered, and that not only gives the space program a shot in the arm, it takes it to a totally different level to what we’re at now.

It also goes back to one of my main criteria in any sci-fi/fantasy stuff we do: the best science fiction is that which has its foot rooted in reality. I remember during the three years we had in development hell on Blake’s 7 with Sky, one of the interesting conversations that kept coming up with each draft of the script, was “It’s still got the girlfriend/wife handbrake. We’ve got to remove the girlfriend/wife handbrake.” The debate was always: how can we make science fiction and fantasy appealing to the girlfriend and the wife, who would typically not be interested, or begrudgingly watch it…?

Another reason for updating it was because the representation of women in the original is very one-dimensional. We wanted to do what we did with Blake’s 7, The Martian Chronicles and I, Robot. We wanted to make Peabody a modern woman who could stand shoulder to shoulder with Dare and Digby and give them a run for their money. She’s not just a sassy, strong woman, she’s also got an incredibly strong personality. In the trio we wanted our chemistry to really work, and for that to work it had to be rooted in the real world of sexual politics in a way.

We didn’t want to get deeply into the sexual politics because that’s not what the show is about, but that dynamic and how their relationship develops through the series is a very important thing. We also gave Dan Dare a really emotive emotional core and a backstory about his father and so forth, and added that Digby knew his father… There are threads and ties between the characters.

There’s a good line in Voyage to Venus about there being three people who think they’re in charge on the Anastasia…

Yes, the initial tension between Dan, Digby and Peabody and their conflicting agendas were very important to evolving their relationship. I have to say I think we were very lucky in casting. The energy and the relationship that comes across is quite natural, and fun. That was the relationship that the actors managed to establish very quickly between themselves. The regular cast all got on really well.

It was probably the most fun I have ever had in a radio studio ever – it was hard bloody work, because you spend an intense amount of time in your head. I was joking in the studio that I had been emotionally less tired after seven weeks on a film of night shoots than three weeks in the studio doing Dan Dare. It takes a different kind of toll on you.

When you’re in the studio, you’re editing it in your head, as well as directing and trying to address the various other issues that you hope aren’t going to come back and bite you in the backside when you’re in the edit suite.

Everything has to go through you…

Yes. I have a reputation in the studio of sometimes being a bit brusque, because when I’ve got a train of thought going on and someone, however helpful, is throwing a suggestion in, sometimes I can’t deal with that distraction.

What was the order of casting?

I was trying to cast while I was in Australia for two months; it was just a nightmare. When I got back we had about four weeks to do the casting for all six episodes, and we didn’t have the episodes locked. Obviously Dare was the first one: get Dare and then you’re casting against type, as it were. Ed Stoppard was suggested to me and I wasn’t that familiar with his work; I’d seen some of his stuff but he wasn’t specifically on my radar. However, when I heard his voice and chatted to him, he just got it – admittedly it’s helped by the fact that the scripts are very strong and Dare’s personality came through very clearly from the scripts, and that’s why we try to spend as much time as we possibly can on our scripts to best equip our actors when we’re recording in the studio.

The Mekon and the Treens were the other things that proved quite challenging: I didn’t know quite how to represent the Treens without descending into Doctor Who monster territory. I probably hit on not the most PC way of going about it: I looked at the systematic genocide going on in Syria, and having worked on the Syrian drama, The Boy from Aleppo Who Painted the War, I associated the way the Mekon was dealing with the Treens to the way Assad dealt with the Syrians. We decided that whilst we were going to treat the voices, we were going to go for foreign actors to give the Treens and the Mekon a different colour to their voice. Raad [Rawi] was suggested to me, and he’d been in The Tyrant TV series. I just loved the layers to the guy – he’s such a smart actor.

We’d written the Mekon as a very multi-dimensional character, not just the archetypal baddie; there’s many aspects to the Mekon. In many ways the Mekon would not have concerned himself with battling Dan Dare and the humans if they had left him alone. He had his train set on Venus and it was only because Dare came in and kicked a few of the trains over – literally – that he turned his attention to Earth and thus was born an unbridled hatred of Dare and a desire to see his demise.

With Ed being quite British – but modern British, not a toffee-nosed public school British – his counterpoint was Digby, a Northerner. I was familiar with Geoff [McGivern]: I’d met him when Dirk Maggs was doing the Hitch-Hikers’ stage show. It was his agent who told me Geoff comes from up north. We needed someone who had both good comic timing and dourness about him, as well as being a really strong dramatic actor. Geoff was a treat.

For Peabody we could have gone down the route of the English rose, but I wanted to move away from that. We live in a multinational international world now, so I thought I want something different. I’d been watching the reboot of Poldark and I was very aware of Heida [Reed]. It was only when I looked back at her work and realised she’s actually Icelandic; she has this lovely English voice with just a hint of a Scandinavian accent. It gave the character a subtle and different complexion.

For Sir Hubert, I worked with Michael Cochrane seven/eight years back on a Blake’s 7, one of The Early Years, and I constantly had his voice in my head as Sir Hubert. That was probably the easiest piece of casting.

Because we had such a big cast, we had scheduling problems. If we had been a month or so later in the studio, I wouldn’t have been able to get Ed because he would have been deep into filming a new TV series in Prague. The alchemy worked and the timing was there. We were very lucky.

What was the biggest challenge?

I made a rod for my own back: we’ve established this track record for doing what we’ve labelled ‘widescreen’ audio, so we got the writers to work in a certain way.

I’m a big fan of the four act structure so we wrote them as if they were these kind of modern but old-fashioned action adventure serials in 15 minute instalments. By doing that we got a real pace and rhythm to them and had a cliff-hanger at the end of every act. It really gave it added momentum.

But the writers took it to it with such relish that we ended up essentially with major movies which we then had to break down to make them work in terms of audio drama. That did give us some pretty big challenges in terms of how we would block out the audio recording, and how quickly we could record it, because some of the scenes had an awful lot going on which we needed to make sure we got right otherwise we created ourselves a huge headache in post.

On the whole, I think we pulled it off but we pushed the boundaries of what you can do in audio quite a bit on this. But I think it’s what gives it its sense of identity, and a real sense of fun and energy.

Of course there’s an original music score there: poor old Imran [Ahmad] essentially had to score six and a half hours of audio drama. Originally it was conceived as “do the music for Voyage to Venus, 70 minutes, and then a lot of music cues can be replicated throughout the series”. But obviously each episode has a different flavour, a different identity, which then dictated that we had to have different music, so he ended with quite a mammoth job to do.

In terms of sound design, in a nice throwback to the original Dan Dare Glyn Dearman did in 1990: the sound designer on that who also did the music was Wilfredo Acosta. Wilfredo and I have worked together for the last 10 years; in many ways he’s taught me how to do radio drama properly. We divided the post production between Alistair Lock and Alfredo; Alistair did eps 1 and 6 and Wilfredo did eps 2 to 5. They both delivered epic soundscapes which exceeded all expectations.

You’re taking a mentality from 60 years and putting it 10-20 years in our future; is there not a danger of it becoming like Adam Adamant and telling a story of a man out of time?

I don’t think so. I think what Ed brings to Dan is a sense of integrity. You trust him, he’s honourable, he’s principled. His beliefs, values, hope… what he represents as Dan Dare is as relevant today as it was back in the 1950s.

Dan Dare was born out of uncertain times and we live in uncertain times again. I don’t think he’s an anachronism.

Dan Dare volume 1 is now available from B7 Media/Big Finish; volume 2 is available from April 7 and can be pre-ordered here

Read our review of volume 1 here