CALLY'S WAR

AS SERIES TWO HITS BLU-RAY, BLAKE'S 7 STAR JAN CHAPPELL TELEPORTS BACK TO HER DAYS ABOARD THE LIBERATOR

- WORDS: NICK SETCHFIELD

WHEN PEOPLE SAY they don't believe telepathy exists I find myself sincerely confounded.

How could you believe that it doesn't?"

Jan Chappell isn't just defending a key aspect of Cally, the psychically gifted interstellar rebel she played in Blake's 7. She's speaking from personal experience.

"It's just an everyday part of my life and always has been," she shares, revealing how she found her way into a character unlike any she had played before. "Cally was telepathic, which I identified with. I studied it when I was at school, along with handwriting and hypnotism, because I loved going to the library and pulling out books on all sorts of things.

"I suppose I was 13 or 14. We'd go to the little hockey shed at lunchtime and do one of the experiments. One of the girls would kneel in the middle of a circle and the rest of us would go away and secretly decide on an image. We'd touch the girl's shoulder and try and communicate that symbol - a square with a star in the middle or an oblong or whatever it was - and the girl would draw what she thought she had picked up from us. Nine times out of 10 it was absolutely accurate. What more can you say?

"My family used to call me the Witch!"

Chappell is engaging, unguarded company when SFX meets her over Americanos in an Art Deco-styled London brasserie so elegant you expect to find Poirot truffling for clues among the potted palms. She's as happy to chat about paranormal phenomena as the inner workings of the Royal Shakespeare Company, but with the imminent arrival of Blake's 7 series two on Blu-ray, the conversation inevitably turns to the time she fought the Federation on primetime BBC One.