The Only Entry in the Journal: Friday March 5th, 2010
Firstly, I must apologise to the people who create Doctor Who Magazine. In 1999, the editor of this serious and high-minded publication set three (press-ganged) ‘volunteers’ to the task of watching four hours’ worth of Doctor Who every month until they had seen the whole seven-hundred-and-odd-episode series, recording their honest-to-God reactions as the journey progressed. As the television series is still regularly in production, the end of that journey is still not remotely in sight eleven years later, and the ongoing quest of the “Time Team” (as they are dubbed) continue to form one of the highlights of a magazine that remains (in seriousness) generally fair-minded, jolly and lacking in cynicism. As must be obvious, I know all this because I’m a barking mad Doctor Who fan (albeit one currently braving a self-imposed fast from anything to do with it which I hope will strengthen and purify my soul in the manner of self-flagellation and cold baths at 6am). That’s a show that, in its various forms, I enjoy far more than anyone has any right to enjoy anything. But nature abhors a vaccuum and it was during one of my occasional Who embargoes that I discovered Blake’s 7, the BBC’s semi-adult space opera broadcast between 1978 and 1981, and came to love it in ways that, to be honest, I am at a loss to fully explain. But I found my love to be a somehow profound, life-enhancing thing; something worth sharing and exploring; and I couldn’t think of a better way to do that than to rip off DWM‘s Time Team format wholesale.[1]
So I gathered my own Team of four friends with sci-fi leanings who were willing to experience the unfolding majesty of Blake’s 7, some for the first time, across several evenings at my place of abode. I decided I was going to cook for them roasted vegetables with cous-cous, and (crucially) I got my Mum’s permission to arrange the premiere gathering. (I am 28 and still live at home with my wonderful Mum, and I’m bloody lucky to do so.) To get you in the mood for a succession of melodramatic sci-fi cliches, let me point out that each of my friends lives a double life. Rik is a care assistant, Dave an engineer, Allison an industrial spy (well she gathers information on liquor tariffs – that’s espionage to me) and Ross a factory worker. But in the parallel universe where everyone gets paid for doing the things they enjoy and are best at, they are a radio and stage playwright, a comedy writer, an actress and a film director respectively. Me, I’m a typist by profession, which may explain why I’m the one writing this up. I will do my best to record my friends’ experiences impartially, but may occasionally pause to deliver some ruminative prose more intelligent and coherent than anything I was able to say during the actual event because I was having too much fun.
Meet the team: (L-R) Dan, Allison, Ross, Rik, Dave and someone we just brought along for the ride. (Not really. It’s the 1978 regular cast of Blake’s 7.)
Of my four friends, Ross is the only one who counts himself as a Blake’s 7 fan (because I sired him as such three years ago). Rik has never seen it, and David and Allison have dim memories of seeing a few episodes. For their benefit, and because we are spiritually travelling back in time here – to an era when TV drama made in Britain could (but didn’t always) look shockingly different to how it does now, I had prepared a reel of clips from the media of the time. This appetizer would, hopefully, re-acclimatise our team to such bygone standards of television. Gasps of recognition and disbelief greeted a public information film about how to save someone from drowning, a TV advert reminding viewers to switch off unused home appliances, and bits of The New Avengers, The Sweeney, the 1976 Evening News Film Awards attended by HRH the Duke of Gloucester (“Couldn’t the Queen be bothered?” queried Ross), Thriller (the ATV anthology series, not Michael Jackson’s peripatetic “music movie”), Doctor Who, The Legend of Robin Hood (the BBC’s downbeat mid-seventies co-production, in which everyone gets killed), Children of the Stones, a “Protect and Survive” information film, and Survivors (1975 version). What the clips attempt to illustrate is how the concerns and technical limitations of broadcast media affected TV drama at the time, and how different the results were from today’s high-rated series. Action dramas on the commercial channels, like The Sweeney, were powered by commercial revenue and, made one careful shot at a time using a single film camera and on location, had production values comparable to feature films. Cheaper dramas, like those made by ATV or the public-funded Beeb, tended to be shot using bulky, cable-fed video cameras in small studios (the way quiz shows are still made now). In this fashion whole episodes might be recorded, scene-by-scene rather than shot-by-shot, in a single day. A minority of scenes might have only been realisable using film cameras and would have been filmed separately ahead of the studio day (scenes requiring action, model work or locations that could not be created in the studio). The Thriller clip, in which Robert Powell kisses Joanna Dunham inside his studio living room (on video) then gets inside his car outside a real house on location (on film), is a basic example of this type of programme-making, established in the 1950s and not really phased out until the mid-80s.[2] The visual style of such shows would therefore oscillate between looking like The Sweeney (grainy, dynamically shot and quickly-cut) and looking more like the awards ceremony (brightly-lit with lumbering camera moves and cuts) at which the Sweeney movie bagged a ‘Best Newcomer’ award for Dennis Waterman (“That’s the last award he ever won,” chided Ross as on screen the then-in-his-twenties-former-child-actor murmured “I won’t bore you with how long I’ve waited to become a newcomer”).
Other then-and-now insights garnered from the drama clips included how Martin Shaw has improved his acting style by finding a method of not really doing it, how Powell seems to have metamorphosed into a human being (rather than a member of the species Bowie) and Joanna Lumley, presumably less naturally, hasn’t aged at all.
What I hoped the clips would also illustrate is the miserablism present in so much media that survives from the seventies, most prominent in the “Protect and Survive” film, which garners the strongest reaction from the team (stunned, nervous laughter as we are informed, via coy arrow-based animation and a Patrick Allen voice-over, what to do with anyone who might have died in our fall-out shelter following a nuclear attack). A feeling of impending doom runs through this stuff, which one thinks must have influenced writer Terry Nation when creating Survivors (in which a virus wipes out 99.9% of humanity) and then Blake’s 7 (set in a repressive, possibly post-apocalyptic future). However, as David (who was a teen at the time) points out, real seventies life “wasn’t like that. Lots of people just got on with their lives. Some leaflets were distributed about nuclear attacks, but films like that weren’t shown. They would have been made as a precaution in case an attack became very likely.”
Although a screening of the video for Mull of Kintyre (in which Paul McCartney wanders with his guitar around a magnificent studio cliff-top) would have ideally recreated the ambience of Christmas 1977 and prepared us for the BBC lavishness to come, I forgot to put it on. But the scene-setting for our little re-enactment of 2nd January 1978 – screening date of the first episode of Blake’s 7 – wouldn’t be complete without acknowledgement of Star Wars, released nationally in Britain on the same night. David recalls the hype for George Lucas’ cinema-warping monument had been so intense for so long by the time of the film’s release “that I refused to go and watch the film on principle”, and that the shadow of such expectation would have overhung the making of Blake’s 7 in mid-1977. True enough; the series’ script editor, Chris Boucher, has recalled that its producer, David Maloney, “came back from a preview screening and announced that we were dead”[3]. Rik, the biggest Star Wars fan among us, remembers that Lucas cites as one of his principle influences Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai (Japan 1954), later Hollywoodised as The Magnificent Seven (1960). Hmm, Seven Samurai, Magnificent Seven – Blake’s 7?
Which brings us, at last, to…
7.20pm The Way Back (original transmission Monday January 2nd, 1978)
Although the plan was to kick off at 6pm and eat following the first episode, various unforeseen factors have delayed us. Therefore I am just wheeling out the couscous salad, cheese and onion pie, sausages, sprouts with pine nuts and bacon (yes, folks – I’m a culinary iconoclast, or perhaps I’ll just try anything) just as DVD-supplier Ross is cueing up the first episode. Although I knew Dave wouldn’t get on with cheese and onion pie, I didn’t realise he’s anti-onions full stop. Shame, as the salad is full of them. Being a good sport, he digs into it anyway though, and I hope that The Way Back will distract his hyper-sensitive palette from the bitter aftertaste. It does – the first glimpse of the show’s star spaceship, the Liberator, in the title sequence has him chuckling, as it shoots towards the camera rendered in 2D animation that nowadays looks somewhat South Park. The title sequence gives way to a shot of futuristic, light-blinking CCTV camera rotating watchfully side-to-side, and Ross tries to big up the production values. “Wow, look at that stop-motion!” He convinces me. “Is it?” “No.”
Ravella and Roj.
The camera watches over some silvery sci-fi corridors (“Level thirty-seven” says a tannoy) where the most curly-haired of several shambling ‘citizens’ turns out to be Roj Blake (Gareth Thomas), who slips into an adjunct to meet Ravella (Gillian Bailey). She’s a businesslike insurgent (Dave: “What’s her name? Umbrella?”) who leads Roj to a sub-basement exit which, after some sci-fi lock-picking, gives way to the “outside”, a location film sandpit. Rik’s jolted by the sudden removal of background music (making the video-film switch even more jarring), but Dave, savvy to TV grammar, recognises this means the tinny muzak we’ve been hearing is what’s played to the citizens in the city to keep them docile; outside all is clear breeze. Ravella, Roj and friend stop by a river to drink while Roj is quizzed about what’s left of his memory after his “treatments”, but he doesn’t know what she’s talking about. The group chuckles as he asks, “What about my memorrry?” in the unmistakable lilt of a Welsh actor who’s had his accent programmed out at RADA. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to laugh. But what the fuck’s he wearing?” splutters Rik as, at an underground meeting of dissidents and “outsiders”, Roj is introduced to rebel leader Bran Foster (Robert Beatty). This gravel-voiced Canadian, dressed in what looks like Timmy Mallet’s cast-offs under a snakeskin shawl, represents two of the show’s persistent joys: daring clothing and even more eccentric nomenclature. It’s a culture shock indeed when everyone seen so far has been wearing pastel tunics. “When are those tunics gonna come in?” asks Ross. “We’re ten years into ‘the future’ already and there’s no sign of them.” Dave’s picked up on the cutaways that have shown Ravella’s party being followed discreetly by a blond-mopped git who, with sinister limp, can only be a baddie. But he turns up at the meeting and is revealed to be another rebel, Dev Tarrant (Jeremy Wilkin). After a pep talk with these two, Roj wanders off to have a breather – understandably for a man who has just been told he used to be a political leader before the ruling administration had his family killed and mind wiped. As Foster begins to address his beardy followers (“That one’s out of Life of Brian“, notes Dave), sinister helmeted guards turn up on Federation stealth transports (“Golf carts!”) and slaughter everybody with firework guns. Roj escapes detection by almost hiding behind a wall (“He’s a bit fat to try that,” observes Allison) and, on emerging to survey the piles of corpses, Thomas registers severe perturbation by flexing his hairline, then stumbles into more guards who clobber him. In a filmed montage so good we’ll see it thrice this episode, we see Roj’s past: stuck in a brain-altering machine, chased, captured and hit on the shoulder nine times by a Federation guard who (as Rik spots) then walks backwards into his first position, almost as if he’s getting ready for the next take. Ross, however, rightly observes that it’s brave show which introduces a load of characters at the start of the first episode and then butchers them within fifteen minutes.
After a Nineteen Eighty-Four-esque scene in which Roj is therapised by a sinister doctor and is left in a cell to suffer at the mercy of his own voice-over, we get to look in on the office of Venn Glynd, Justice Department (Robert James). He and conspirators – shockingly including blond git Tarrant (Dave: “I was right!”) – discuss how best to deal with Blake (as he will be called from hereon). Louche, sofa-loving prosecutor Alta Morag (Susan Field) casually suggests they frame him for some unspeakable crime; she should know about that, as she is herself guilty of one – being crap. “She’s not an actress!” bitches Rik. “She’s just some who’s wandered in to chill out on the set!” Indeed, it is as if the director wanted Miriam Margolyes, but settled from someone from the staff canteen who was vaguely the same shape. Subsequently Blake is informed by his defence counsel Tel (Terry?) Varon (Michael Halsey) that several children have testified that Blake has “corrupted them”. At a sham trial, Varon and Morag present their inviolable evidence (sealed in pink perspex boxes – I work for the police and can tell you this is cutting-edge stuff) to a computer which decides Blake is guilty. The charges include “moral deviation”, “commit corrupt acts” and “kidnapping”. He reacts with horror (Dave: “He’s doing the hair thing again!”) and is tranquillised, but not before he spots Dev Tarrant, who has for some reason turned up in person at the trial of the only person who can finger him as responsible for the earlier massacre. This detail is enough to convince Varon that Blake’s story is true, and the episode splits into two concurrent plots: Varon and his wife Maja try to gather evidence on Blake’s behalf, while he gets to know his cellmates in a “transit cell” as they wait to be shipped off to a prison planet. Principally this means smuggler Jenna Stanis (Sally Knyvette, doing a fetching, very Seventies hand-on-hip thing) and thief/coward Vila Restal (Michael Keating, with a good line in untrustworthy charm). The banter between these three goes down quite well with the team (such as when Vila asks Blake to “put a word in” for him and gets the reply, “I’ll try and think of one”). The Hart to Hart stuff as Varon and Maja talk shop in bed and follow a series of heavy-handed clues to Blake’s innocence does less well, particularly when they solicit information from a security officer who loves his huge walkman and truculently answers their questions as slowly as possible. “Alpha-three-three-seven-seven, Leesal, Renor” he intones every time they ask about one of Blake’s prosecution witnesses – “Christ, is he gonna say all that again?” agonises Rik after a while. “This episode does have a lot of padding,” admits Ross. But everybody loves it when Maja brings Varon a disc of information nicked from a gullible doctor; he holds the disc up to the light for a second and avers, “Yes, we can build a case on this!” “I’ve often looked at a CD and gone, ‘Yeah, it’s all there’…” quips Ross. But Rik is perturbed by the naivety of a subplot relying on such hoary devices as incriminating conversations being overheard through doors. “Terry Nation was an intelligent guy, wasn’t he? Why did he think that would work?” Dave bets it probably looked acceptable on paper.
The last movement of the episode is unbalanced as a guard (Gary McDermott) ushers Blake and the others into the prison ship, upstaging everyone with his mid-Atlantic shouting. Blake, his thoughts elsewhere as he hopes Varon will save him at the last minute, upsets this guy and is punished by being placed in “confinement”. Meaning: his chair swivels ninety degrees and some vacuum tubes loosely cover his elbows (Ross: “Try moving in that, mate”). Intercutting shows Varon and Maja discovering the bodies of the massacred rebels (still left in the same place) and using a funky holstered camera-thing to take “picture tapes”, but the prison ship (rendered in a beautifully scaled model which is filmed as if it’s the size of a toaster) launches on time. “What the hell is that?” “It’s the spaceship London.” “Looks like it’s made of Lego.” Watching the London shoot through the stratosphere is none other than Dev Tarrant in full smarmy mode, standing over the bodies of Varon and Maja. The guard pretty much sums it up as Blake looks longingly out of a viewing port at the diminishing Earth: “That’s the last you’ll see of it.” Blake, to camera: “No. I’m coming back.” The theme music by Dudley Simpson (a man who knew as well as anyone how to make a four-piece woodwind and percussion section, plus ring modulator, sound almost like an orchestra) crashes in with its mixture of defiance and naive optimism, and everybody smiles indulgently.
Thoughts after episode one? Ross and I, being fans, love the fact that the first episode focuses mainly on a bunch of characters who don’t survive to the second, and that the creators are being leisurely in revealing their show’s format. Dave seems to have enjoyed the yarn, but points out that it was full of SF cliches, like the Logan‘s Run-esque futuristic city/wasteland divide. Allison, given a warm glow by the theme music but remembering nothing else from the show’s original run, says it was hilarious and not what she expected (too true). Rik queries the length of the episode, and everyone seems surprised it lasted an hour, which I guess is a good thing. Time for coffees, ginger beer and a fag break, I think.
What I wasn’t witty enough to say at the time, but I think is worth observing now, is that The Way Back resembles nothing so much as Nineteen Eighty-Four redone as a mini-Parallax View thriller, and stands effectively alone as a dystopian play in its own right. Indeed, the visual style and design, despite the change to colour, is very close to the BBC’s 1954 live version of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Sets may be stark and minimalist, but they’re often massive, such as the cavernous courtroom, and bustling; an effective representation of a sealed, repressed society. In many ways, despite all the cliches and implausibilities, the story is just as uncompromising as Orwell’s tale. The lead character steps out of an ordinary, placid life and finds his family are dead; makes new friends only to see them slaughtered; gets framed for child abuse and is shipped helpless off the planet. Instead of a clear villain, there is a vast corrupt system, and the operative who gets his hands dirtiest (Tarrant) gets off completely scot-free (and he’s never seen or referred to in the series again). And this is the first episode of a family space adventure, that went out at 6pm. Although of course, it isn’t really the first episode. The legend has yet to begin.
The real episode one comes next…
8.30pm Space Fall (original transmission Monday January 9th, 1978)
Ah, Space Fall. As evocative titles go, you can’t beat it for me. I don’t know what it means though.
“Nobody bothers anymore,” mutters world-weary prison ship head honcho Commander Leylan (Glyn Owen), which gets a laugh from the team (of bitter recognition, of course – as anyone who has ever had to cope with a poorly-maintained high-D shift vibration will realise).
By her own admission, our Allison is not a “girly girl”, but nevertheless her attention is drawn to the furnishings. She spots that Jenna is sitting in a different kind of chair to the rest of the prisoners: they’re in static jobs but hers is blatantly a swivel chair on castors! (Not very ‘prison ship’.) The extras playing the other prisoners have either been moved or replaced, and the shouty guard has gone. That’s because Space Fall was actually filmed before The Way Back.
Jenna, Avon, and Blake in ‘confinement’ on the prison ship.
Enter glint-eyed arch bastard Subcommander Raiker (Leslie Schofield) to lay down the law to the new intake about conduct during the long voyage ahead, including hinting not-very-subtly to Jenna that she’d find the journey easier were she to spend some of it in his cabin (we enjoy his camp hiss of “I can be very persuasive” when she rebuffs him). However, during Raiker’s lecture he is upstaged by a background prisoner who, getting a sudden medium shot, is observing the situation with boggly-eyed disdain. This, ladies and gentlemen, is Avon, Kerr Avon (Paul Darrow). Having been introduced to the team by the clip from The Legend of Robin Hood (the nearest thing to a proper precursor to Blake’s 7, in which he played a slimy, theatrical Sheriff of Nottingham), the actor here gets a laugh with his eyes alone. Soon the prisoners are allowed into the rec room, where Avon pours cold water on escape plans by explaining how everything on the ship is controlled by computer – from the ship’s log to the door locks. Computers are Avon’s thing, you see. Straight off there is an interesting tension between Blake and Avon, especially when Avon reveals that he is the only person on board who could fake the computer log should the crew decide to blow off the rest of the journey to the prison planet and simply dump the prisoners in space.
On the bridge the crew’s attention is on events outside the ship. “It’s a damn great space battle,” observes Leylan as the screen seems to display glow-worms chasing each other round a fluorescent chess board. However, as helmsman Artix (Norman Tipton) explains, we are at the limit of magnification. The London is caught in a shockwave and a minor hull breach is in evidence when small amounts of shaving foam start to pump through the rec room wall to seal the breach, whereupon it is fingered by Jenna. “It goes solid in seconds,” she intones with a gravity which only underlines that this is a plot point that will become important later.
Despite initial ructions, Blake, Jenna, Vila and Avon and a random called Nova (Tom Kelly) have hatched a plan to capture the computer core of the ship and thus hold the vessel to ransom. While beardy guard Dainer (Michael McKenzie) is distracted by Vila doing magic tricks, ten feet away prisoners are slipping unnoticed into the service ducting. “He is the stupidest guard in any science fiction film or series ever,” snorts Rik with some justification. Tragically, we soon say goodbye to the lovely mellow-eyed Kelly (brilliant as the WWI soldier in Sapphire and Steel Adventure Two, readers) as Nova gets blasted in the ducting by the shaving foam sealant. “So predictable,” says Allison witheringly.
Rik hoots as Dainer’s luckless relief guard gets throttled by Gan – genuine shock passing over his Peter Kay-clone face. The prisoners escape, but the rebellion is cut short – nice, thick Dainer turns out to be a right bastard, gunning down prisoners ten a penny. Avon, Jenna and Blake capture the computer core but Leylan gets on the intercom (“Look, he’s holding it like it’s a phone,” says David. “He’s forgotten how to use it. Earlier he was speaking into it like it was a microphone”) and tells them to give themselves up or more prisoners will be executed. Despite a blistering declaration from Avon that they should abandon the other prisoners to their fate and look after themselves (“Wealth is the only reality. And the only way to get it is to take it away from someone else. Wake up, Blake!” – the first of the series’ many insights into his treasurably caustic philosophy), Blake hands control of the ship back to the crew.
Plot B kicks in immediately, as the London draws up alongside the huge three-pronged ship that was apparently abandoned during the battle glimpsed on the scanner earlier. The London extends a docking tube much like one from a flatbed vaccuum cleaner and the team laugh again – to scale it must be the size of an M25 footbridge. Crewmembers are sent over in “survival suits” (overalls and mining helmets). Without the option of weightlessness effects, the actors lightly bounce themselves as they traverse the tube. But plaintive cries travel over the intercom as something happens to the men. When Leylan is unwilling to risk more men, Raiker suggests sending prisoners over, and Blake, Jenna and Avon are kitted up. “This is quite suspenseful stuff,” notes Rik.
Our heroes arrive on the bridge of the alien ship and are beset by a surreal montage which befuddles them and has even our viewers mildly disturbed. Jenna sees her mother being tortured, Avon has a vision of his brother, and Blake sees his own (dead) family – the trauma of which allows him to break through the illusion by, er, shooting something. Having apparently passed some sort of test, the heroes are free to attempt to work the controls of the extraordinarily glam flight deck. Big laughs as Darrow steals the scene from the back of the shot by swinging his arm round and declaring “Look at that instrumentation!” The crucial question has to be asked: what are we thinking about Avon so far? “I’m liking his occasional flourishes,” approves Rik. Well, there’s more where they came from.
There’s no let-up in the action, however, as Raiker is now armed and on his way over from the London to bring Blake and co back. “Oh, they’re going to get the ship going just as he’s coming across the tube,” predicts Allison. Sure enough, Raiker is caught short in the transfer tube as Jenna pulls the alien ship away. He’s sucked into space, and Schofield does probably the best man-trying-to-resist-a-vaccuum-without-benefit-of-visual-effects-wind-tunnel-or-stunt-harness you’ll ever see (he walks slowly forwards, holding on to the sides of the tube and going “Shhhghhhhh”).
So then, the group’s verdict on Space Fall? Ross loves the pacy plotting. Allison thinks it’s predictable stuff, but finds it much more eventful and less padded than she was expecting based on some of the old Doctor Whos she’s seen. David thinks a lot of the dialogue is clunky and cliched, but Ross defends the sarky comebacks. And Rik seems to be generally warming to the whole thing. For me it’s action-packed – the taking-over-the-prison-ship stuff followed hotly by the discovery of the alien ship – with engaging prison-break plotting and dialogue out of a classic Hollywood action film. Love it.
10.10pm Cygnus Alpha (original transmission Monday 16th January 1978)
We settle down to Cygnus Alpha after another drink/fag break.
This is the episode where we first start to feel the influence of Bergerac script editor Chris Boucher, who added juicier dialogue to Nation’s scripts. The scenes in which Blake, Jenna and Avon explore their new ship go down very well, being infused with wry dialogue and chemistry. The ship reveals its status as a sentient being when it mind-probes Jenna in a very Seventies scene. Sally Knyvette conveys fear followed swiftly by quasi-post-coital elation. “Fucking hell!” laughs a staggered Ross. “Was that good for you?” As the ship’s computer takes information from Jenna’s mind to name itself (“Zen!”) and the ship (“Liberator!”), and to accept the three rebels as its crew, Jenna explains the mind interface with the words “To be completely known… It’s like innocence.” (Best. Line. Ever.) Rik is really warming up to this stuff. “I’m getting into this now. I think you were saying earlier, Dan, if you watch any show for a few episodes you start to really love it, and I’m getting keen to know what’s going to happen next.”
The timescale of these episodes comes in for criticism when a casual line from Artix makes it clear that the London has taken eight months to reach Cygnus Alpha. The on-screen action would suggest something more like a week. At disembarkation it’s clear that the prisoner extras have changed again, and been pleasantly augmented by the vaunted RSC man David (Outnumbered) Ryall as the cowardly Selman. The London takes off again, leaving Gan, Vila and the rest to contemplate life on this gothic nightmare planet – all mists, sinister monks and a castle that Vila memorably sums up with “The architectural style is early Maniac.” The prisoners soon discover that disease is rife on Cygnus Alpha but that salvation is on hand thanks to the ministrations of Vargas (Brian Blessed at his most monumental) and his acolyte Kara (Pamela Salem), who have organised the inhabitants into a primitive religion.
Back on the Liberator, Darrow is still getting laughs – the man can’t do anything, not even something as simple as pressing a control button, without showing off, so when Zen provides each crewmember with a side-arm, he launches into pose after pose. The ship has followed the London to Cygnus Alpha and, now in orbit and with a super-duper alien teleporter at their disposal, Blake and friends are able to set about rescuing their fellow prisoners. The teleporter can transport anyone anywhere so long as they wear a fetching bracelet, and of course is in no way a rip-off of Star Trek‘s ‘transporter’ – and in fact, it represents alien technology that the human race in has not yet mastered in the Blake’s 7 universe. A nice moment has Blake and Avon realise they had both worked on a theoretical teleport development project which had never got anywhere (“Small world.” “Large project”). It’s noted that anyone teleported without accurate destination coordinates programmed in would end up with their atoms scattered across space… which could come in useful later…
A quasi-religious ceremony is in progress on the planet, during which Vargas distributes familiar-looking communion wafer-style drugs (“Triple-X mints!” exclaims Allison) which combat the indigenous contagion. When Blake beams (sorry, teleports) down he finds the prisoners once more confined – in a cell while they get over the first stages of infection – and Gan helpfully explains in his honeyed tones that said infection is incurable and they are all now dependent on daily doses of Vargas’s drug for the rest of their lives. However, soon Blake has been apprehended by Vargas, who seems less interested in caring for his flock than in finding out about the Liberator.
Brian Blessed being subtle.
The presence of Blessed seems to be triggering suspicions in Dave. “Is this the episode they always show a clip of when they want to demonstrate really bad television?” Hmm, maybe. But actually, the more we see of Vargas, the less we laugh – the characterisation has little of the actor’s traditional hammy, bonkers charm. I find the scene in which he interrogates Blake (casually crushing the invaluable teleport bracelets to put pressure on our hero) especially sinister. And it leads to a great bit of angry acting and writing as Vargas reveals that the infection is a phony and the drugs are placebos (maybe they are Triple-X mints after all) designed to ensure the prisoners obey him. Thomas spits out a fantastic rant at Vargas’ regime (and by implication that of all organised religion): “Like so many before you, you built your power on fear, and ruled them with it!” Soon, the Liberator crew are helping the prisoners effect a justified rebellion.
“Bloody hell, it’s so violent,” mutters a shocked Rik as all hell breaks loose in the temple. He’s not wrong, and the group let out a collective “Ooh!” when Gareth Thomas visibly punches an extra square in the face for real. The gorgeous (and underused) Kara, who has shown a liking for Gan, cares enough about him to shout a warning when there’s a spear thrown at him. Sadly, the daft woman then fails to get out of the way herself and the self-same implement pins her to the wall.
The rebellion is a rum business that leaves precious few alive – of the prisoners only Gan and Vila make it up to the Liberator to join the others, only to find Vargas has sneakily nabbed a teleport bracelet and is attempting a one-man takeover. However, he is swiftly tricked into the ship’s secondary teleport booth and is rudely interrupted mid-sentence by having his atoms scattered to the (metaphorical) four winds. “Lucky they discussed earlier that it could do that,” says Dave. At least it gives Blessed an agreeably shouty death.
By the end of the episode Blake, Jenna, Avon, Gan and Vila are on the Liberator and leaving Cygnus Alpha behind – with Federation ships in close pursuit. We sense a format solidifying: that’ll be Blake’s 4 then. Blake’s 5 if you count Zen. 6 if you include Blake himself. Hmm, something is clearly still missing… we’ll have to wait till next time to find out what.
The viewing team prepare for various journeys home, but cous-cous, coffee and ginger ale have gone down well and the show has proved a success, with Cygnus Alpha rounding off the evening in atmospheric, fun style. The array of differing, but generally positive, responses from the group seems to confirm that the show has continuing, if rather random and elusive, appeal. That’s very heartening to me, as the strange joy the show has brought to me is (perhaps disproportionately) bright, and I organised this evening in the hope of spreading that joy around a bit. An even greater relief is that the joy I take in cooking has not resulted in despair for my friends… unless they’ve just hidden it very cleverly (Dave?).
Until next time then, Blake. We’re coming back…
Epilogue: 5th May 2020
Sadly, this is where the journal ends, although the gang did actually meet for another couple of sessions (the group augmented by Allison’s brother, longtime B7 fan Lee), which were not recorded, before life took us all in different directions4. We got as far as the first season episode Breakdown. I take comfort in the fact that we are not the only team of adventurers to fail to complete this journey. Even the excellent podcast Down and Safe, which began documenting Blake’s 7 in entertaining style in 2015, only managed to complete two of the four series.
It’s been a sad few years for Blake’s 7 fans too – since 2016, Gareth Thomas, Jacqueline Pearce and Paul Darrow have all passed away. But, we can still remember them. These days, almost the whole of Blake’s 7 is available to view worldwide (though not exactly legally) on YouTube and most of us are stuck in our bunkers connected only by social media, so perhaps it’s time to attempt the experiment again on a large scale!
Notes
[1] To be fair, DWM did rip off the Time Team format from the very similar “Couch Potato” series from the sci-fi magazine SFX, which in issue 4 (September 1995) featured a bunch of journalists watching selected episodes of Blake’s 7. It’s a funny and intelligent article, but hopefully not as good as this one. (It’s certainly shorter.)
[2] Apologies to anyone reading this who knows all this stuff, which I think is worth explaining as, while some viewers aren’t phased at all by the film/video interface of old TV, some are absolutely thrown by it. I used the clips to remind us of and prepare us for this kind of thing, without explaining it in the detail I’ve done here, as I assumed the group, some of whom have worked in TV, would know the ins and outs – though they didn’t, necessarily!
[3] SFX issue 34, January 1998
[4] For my part, I became a professional actor for a while, and achieved a lifetime goal by appearing in a play in 2012 in which I got to briefly share the stage with Paul Darrow (before he shot me dead).
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