Ian Scoones, the Visual Effects Designer for the first series of Blake’s 7, died from Liver Cancer on 20th January in Bulgaria, where he had lived since his retirement.

Born in 1940, Ian’s most formative years were spent in wartime London, experiencing the horror of the Blitz. He hated school, but eventually found peace of mind at Medway College of Art, where he studied painting, photography and set design. Graduating in 1960, he joined Les Bowie’s groundbreaking special effects team working for Hammer Films at Bray Studios.

Ian got his first job after he read that actor Peter Cushing lived in nearby Whitstable. Ian wangled a meeting with the kindly actor, who recommended Ian talk to Bernard Robinson, the art director at Hammer Films. Robinson in turn introduced him to the legendary Les Bowie, in whose company many other successful British FX men such as Derek Meddings, Brian Johnson and Nick Alder had also learned their trade. The first film for which Ian was allowed to handle an effect was Captain Clegg in 1961.

In 1965 Ian went to work for a while on Gerry Anderson’s puppet show Thunderbirds, creating miniature landscapes and models alongside future BBC Visual Effects Department colleagues like Mike Wilson, Richard Conway and Peter Wragg. Back at Bowie Films, he worked on the outstanding model FX for The Battle of Britain movie and then in 1969 came his first Doctor Who work; filming with Nick Allder (as outside contractors), all the spaceships for the Patrick Troughton story The Space Pirates.

The slump in film work saw Ian apply for a job at the BBC’s rapidly expanding Visual Effects Department, where he established the model filming unit on their old puppet theatre stage and over the next decade he worked on many TV shows, including Doomwatch, Crackerjack, Rebecca, Wuthering Heights, Arena, The Goodies, Doctor Who, Ripping Yarns and Blake’s 7.

Ian’s work on Doctor Who included such memorable classic stories as Curse of Peladon, Frontier in Space, Planet of the Spiders, Pyramids of Mars and The Invisible Enemy, although his model Jaggaroth ship for City of Death remains the most highly praised.

In 1977 he infamously took on the miniscule FX budget of £50 per episode (inherited from cop show Softly Softly, which it had replaced) for the first season of Blake’s 7. Ian took a chance and blew the entire season’s budget on the earliest episodes’ model filming - which included all the shots of The London prison ship and probably the best hero shots of The Liberator which first appears in episode 2. Incidentally, Ian had designed an alternative for the exterior of The Liberator, but was rather disgruntled to discover it had already been designed and approved by producer David Maloney and built by an outside company. Ian wrote an extensive internal memo regarding the lack of resources for the effects for Blake’s 7 which saw improvements in later seasons, but Ian had moved on by then.

As a freelance in the 1980s, Ian worked on The Hammer House of Horror series, The Wicked Lady, The Max Headroom pilot, A Prayer For The Dying, Haunted Honeymoon and Barclaycard commercials. He became an occasional guest as SF conventions where he was always witty and charming and enthusiastic about his work and was more than ready to share a bevy or two in the bar afterwards!

In 1994, I had the good fortune to hire Ian for a couple of days to do some explosions and gunshot effects on the Doctor Who spin-off film I directed, Shakedown: Return of the Sontarans, which starred Jan Chappell and Brian Croucher. Among other things Ian provided a real cannonball which doubled as a Sontaran grenade, rattling heavily down the airlock floor before ‘exploding’ in front of Brian Croucher and co.

The cannonball was, as I recall it, one of many objects Ian found whilst digging around in old peat bogs near his home in Gillingham in Kent, Southern England. I understand his collection included things like that, plus skulls, both animal and human! He certainly had a taste for the macabre, as a young fan once discovered to his cost. Following rumours, partly inspired by Ian’s ghoulish tendency, his work on the Hammer Horror films and his dark, saturnine appearance, this youngster allegedly asked Ian whether it was true that he was part of a Black Magic coven. Apparently, Ian leaned forward and in his deepest, most menacing voice, slowly said: “Never ask me about that again…!” Knowing Ian, that was probably his idea of a good joke. Or was it?

There were many terrific stories about this extraordinary man. My favourite, supposedly true, but probably embellished further every time he told it, was that a gas man once called at his family home to read the meter while Ian was out. His elderly mother let the man descend into their cellar, where Ian had his store of props, including some skeletons hanging on meat hooks. Unsurprisingly, the gasman left in great haste. Upon Ian’s return he found the place surrounded by police cars, and, as Ian told it, “Forensic officers were trying to take samples from the fake skeletons.”

I once saw Ian sitting in the audience on the James Whale Radio Show (a late night TV programme in the 1990s). They had been doing a feature on a lady who called herself “Mummy Hazel”, alongside a fat man dressed as a baby, sitting in an adult-sized child’s swing. Hazel apparently offered certain ‘relaxation services’ (“nothing sexual!”) to gentlemen who liked to be pampered as babies. She pointed out her friend Ian Scoones, who apparently built all the adult-sized baby furniture for her, including cots, high chairs and the swing.

Ian brought his friend Hazel along to the Shakedown shoot and to a Doctor Who convention in Manchester, where they drank everybody under the table and were up bright and early for breakfast the next morning, whilst we all suffered major hangovers. I think that was the last time I ever saw him, and it was a happy memory.

According to something I read, Ian was involved in some way in the running of some kind of a support group in the Medway area, where he had lived until he retired abroad. He ended his days selling his artwork in pubs and taverns, in (as befitting such a wonderful Hammer Horror figure) Viniza, Bulgaria! He leaves behind his Czech wife Anastasia, with whom he shared his latter days, plus of course, an enormous body of work, respect within his industry and a generation of grateful special effects fans.


R.I.P. Ian Scoones (1940-2010).

Kevin Jon Davies Producer, Director

Thanks to Steve Cambden for permission to quote from his book 'The Doctor's Effects'

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