Why Big Finish does not feature Blake's 7 Series D

Doctor Who fans have it easy. Every character, every planet, every serial is ripe for a revisit in the audio drama world. For Blake's 7 fans... not so much. Since the franchise made its comeback over at Big Finish Productions way back in 2012, the fans have been curious why there's been almost no stories set in its polarizing fourth series. Where are the adventures of the ramshackle Scorpio? Where is the cold-hearted gunslinger Soolin? 

Today, I'm going to discuss what's going on. However, please: do not take this article as gospel. This is not an official documentation. It's simply my theory, based on what I've put together over the years from interviews and other sites of dubious repute. It's the only explanation that seems reasonable to me, given that I'm completely unaware of the actual legal situation. 

The BBC personally licence Doctor Who in its entirety to Big Finish, for a fee. What that means is that they take care of paying the estates of various writers whose ideas are used in the audios (so, for example, if the Ood are featured, then RTD gets a paycheck because he came up with them).

However, the BBC do not do this for Blake's 7.

Here's why:

In the 1990s, Paul Darrow approached Terry Nation's widow and purchased the rights to the Blake's 7 brand with the intention of creating a sequel miniseries. To that end, he co-founded B7 Productions.

In the early 2000s, Darrow exited B7 Productions due to "creative differences". The rights were left with them and they produced a reboot audio drama series. Soolin was intended to appear in those, so it's likely that B7 Productions had or thought they had the full rights. However, she never did turn up.

Eventually, B7 Productions merged with Big Finish, who now control the rights. And since then, they have produced stories that almost exclusively use material created by Nation personally. Big Finish cannot use the Scorpio, the computer Slave or the character of Soolin, because those belong to Chris Boucher's estate.

Paul Darrow and mrs Nation were presumably unaware of all these details, and simply assumed that Terry held the full rights to every aspect of the programme. And to Darrow's credit, he was unlikely to need anything more than Avon and the brand itself to create his miniseries.

What this all amounts to is that making Blake's 7 audios is incredibly easy for Big Finish, because they don't have to bother with the BBC to be able to use the Liberator, its crew, Servalan, Travis etc. They probably could work out a deal to pay Boucher's estate for series 4 property, but it'd be un-lucrative when they can just make more series 1-3 stuff for free.

NOTE that there have been exceptions! The recent Worlds of Blake's 7 range (2021-2022) did make heavy use of several Boucher characters and locations. Bayban the Butcher, the mysterious Dorian, the Terra Nostra, the Clone Masters. It's likely that a temporary deal was worked out with the Boucher estate for these.