The Way Back

This appreciation – and I am not using that word lightly here – of the re-release of series one of Blake’s 7 on Bluray was originally written as part of an attempt at establishing a mailing list of weekly recommendations, which never quite caught on for some reason and I ultimately decided that it was probably a better idea to concentrate on putting more material directly on here; however if you are interested in receiving regular additional bits and pieces, including long-lost highlights from the archives, deep dives on fifties and sixties newspaper adverts, occasional audio exclusives and more, then you can find out more about my Patreon here. Considering my longstanding ambivalence towards the authorities-averting escapades of Kerr Avon and company, I was pleasantly surprised at how much I genuinely enjoyed revisiting the series almost as if seeing it for the very first time, and impressed at the lengths that the box set’s producers had gone to in an apparent attempt to present it in something at least resembling its original context as far as was possible, which went a very long way towards comprehensively dismissing all of the usual jokes and, well, dismissals routinely directed at poor old Blake’s 7. I really do feel that this enthusiasm found its way into what was ostensibly a throwaway on-the-spot review that nonetheless I genuinely enjoyed writing, and as such I really am delighted to be reusing it here. Incidentally, if you want to know more about that Blake’s 7 theme single, you can find out all about its recording and release in Top Of The Box, the story behind every single released by BBC Records And Tapes, which is available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

Ironically for a series so frequently dominated by model shots of a ‘neutron speed’ starship remaining resolutely motionless against a starfield background, poor old Blake’s 7 has hardly ever exactly enjoyed a stellar reputation. Often disregarded as a more worthy, less dynamic and overall corridor-heavy contemporary of Doctor Who at a time when Doctor Who itself was visibly overrun with corridors, Blake’s 7 may well have been popular enough to run for four series – one of which was commissioned by a BBC ‘suit’ down the phone as the credits rolled on what the cast and crew had anticipated would be the final episode – but almost from its first appearance on screen it became a target of derision for the Michael Parkinsons of this world who were seldom short of a guffawing ‘quip’ about it all being filmed on the same cardboard rubber gravel pit or something. Fashions and locations with a tendency to look unnervingly close to the video for The Safety Dance, futuristic designs that rapidly revealed themselves to be about as authentic a glimpse of things to come as Gary Numan and Deeleyboppers and a small army of over-earnest letter writers desperately pleading to Points Of View for its return long after it had been cancelled as decisively and irrevocably as only an early eighties BBC drama series can be all conspired to render it very much a vision of the future of the past. Even Captain Zep would have told them to get with the times. Unloved and overlooked, Blake’s 7 was essentially just there, even to those who knew they should have loved it but just… didn’t.

This is why it was something of a surprise to say the least to see Blake’s 7 being given the Doctor Who-style heavyweight high-end Bluray ‘collection’ treatment, especially after so many years of inactivity and unavailability on the part of the crew of the Liberator and/or Scorpio, but somehow this prolonged absence had actually made it the ideal moment for the series to resurface. Even to the specific generation who had known and loved it at the time of transmission, Blake’s 7 had slipped so far off the radar that revisiting it now is as near to watching it for the first time again as it is possible to get. To everyone else, it was sufficiently ‘forgotten’ for there to be enough distance between the jokes about Blake’s 7 and actual Blake’s 7 itself for them to appear not just unfunny but unfair; a surprising number of the surprising number of positive reviews opened with a plea to forget everything you thought you knew about dated effects and cheap sets. Which is well worth doing as, the odd misfiring episode like the spectacularly uneventful Bounty aside, Blake’s 7 not only looks and sounds much better than you might remember but also turns out to be underpinned by properly heavyweight drama with a capital ‘D’ from the days when there was an actual entire BBC department devoted to it. Not only is there an ongoing storyline, long before certain creative visionaries decided that they had invented the ‘story arc’ by mentioning something a couple of times early in a season and then revealing what it was in the finale, it is also easy to forget just how bleak and dark a premise the entire series had, right from the moment you discover what Blake had been framed and brainwashed into believing he was guilty of – which I don’t even feel like recounting here – rather than the evidently more wicked and unpardonable crime of answering back to authority a bit.

Initially a skilfully extended escape plot, the series really moves up a gear when primary antagonists Servalan and Travis enter proceedings and episodes like Seek – Locate – Destroy and Duel in particular suggest that a large proportion of Blake’s 7’s detractors might not actually have seen it. Although the large ensemble cast could possibly have been a bit better handled – the device of them splitting into three teams, two on a planet and one on the Liberator and one falling out of contact is deployed more than a little too often – they are all constructively used and although certain characters do dominate it is still slightly exciting to spot when an episode is going to be a Gan or Cally-heavy one. The series is also sometimes criticised for Terry Nation’s notorious inability to write female characters effectively, but this actually works to Blake’s 7’s advantage in that it allows Jenna and Cally to act like the hardened and embittered no-nonsense outsiders and freedom fighters that they realistically would be – over twelve months ahead of Alien, it’s worth noting – and in all honesty this aspect of the series has, albeit accidentally, aged better than you might otherwise expect. There is still the problem of the Liberator being the slowest ‘fastest’ starship ever seen on screen, but this does at least afford an opportunity to marvel at just how spectacular a design and a prop it was, even in its usually risky miniature modelwork form. We never really do see it in a ‘gravel pit’, though.

Restored to its sharp videotape look with the often murky and battered filmed sequences cleaned up nicely – there is also an option for updated visual effects, although personally that’s not quite my cup of BBC VT Tea – it’s easy to see why such a downbeat and wordy sci-fi drama proved such a massive hit back in 1978. There’s also a tremendous documentary about the making of series one, in which the cast and crew recall their reactions to their debut coinciding with the UK release of Star Wars – which, it is always worth reiterating, also features a staggering amount of corridors – and Matthew Sweet hosts typically revealing extended chats with Jenna actress Sally Knyvette and director Michael E. Briant. Enjoyable features from Blue Peter and Swap Shop give a sense of just how popular the series was with a younger audience at the time, and there are outtakes sourced from the notorious BBC ‘Christmas Tapes’ and even a handful of deleted scenes; it’s frankly astonishing that there is still ‘new’ Blake’s 7 even after all this time. Presumably on account of there being fewer extant off-air recordings, the broadcast continuity isn’t quite as interesting as that of its Doctor Who counterparts from around the same time, but it is still nice to see it and there is also a remarkable recording of a transmission breakdown during Mission To Destiny, degenerating into blocky rectangles before falling off screen for a full forty seconds while BBC1 was plugged by a Blake’s 7 continuity slide that looked like it was itself collapsing live on air and some frankly unhinged jazzy library music that doesn’t seem to know what it wants to do from one bar to the next. Most excitingly, at least as far as I’m concerned, there’s a splendid high definition transfer by Mark Ayres of both sides of the previously trebly and very slightly muddy BBC Records And Tapes Blake’s 7 theme single; which you can find out more about here, incidentally. Some of the features carried forward from the long-deleted DVD releases do feel a bit lightweight in this context while a documentary that was dropped from them for rights reasons suffers from being ‘new’ content made in a style that feels entirely alien now, with too much reiteration of the irritating and long-discredited myth that Terry Nation delivered scripts that essentially amounted to a quarter of a page of A5 made into a paper aeroplane and left everyone else to do the work. There’s an argument that maybe some of the recycled extras should have been dropped to make room for the BBC Video compilation of reordered extracts from several first series episodes – which of course for a long time was the only way anyone had of seeing any of it again – but extras are literally just that and what really matters is Blake’s 7 itself, which will leave you looking forward to series two just as keenly as any viewer left gobsmacked by Orac’s somewhat inconvenient cliffhanging prediction back in March 1978.

Buy A Book!

You can find much more about the Blake’s 7 theme single – and hundreds of other BBC theme singles, including all of the various iterations of the Doctor Who theme – in Top Of The Box, the story behind every album released by BBC Records And Tapes. Top Of The Box is available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

Alternately, if you’re just feeling generous, you can buy me a coffee here. Don’t send it via The Liberator, though. It’ll have long since gone cold by the time it gets here.

Further Listening

If the TARDIS is more your chosen mode of transport, you can find out what Doctor Who was up to whilst Blake’s 7 was making its debut appearance on BBC1 in It’s Still A Police Box, Why Hasn’t It Changed? here.