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Blake’s 7

Sloop John B

Sloop John B

And any old music will do…
Ruptured ankle ligament and fractures have kept me quite housebound for the past 5 weeks and I ordered Blake’s 7 from the library.

Just finished season one. Obviously nostalgia is playing a huge role but (from what I remember ) I always liked the antihero elements, never being quite sure about Avon and some of the one liners are great.

i have laughed out loud at some of the special effects so can’t imagine anyone watching it new that hadn’t splurged in the late 70s.

I’m really enjoying it and was surprised that the series has not merited one thread of its own in all the years of PFM.

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.sjb
 
Loved it.
A young teenager used to get get hot over Servalan!
best of all it was a tv series that actually had a narrative arc that reached a conclusion.
 
I seem to remember a lot of the outdoor scenes talking place in what looked like an oil refinery.

Am I misremembering?
 
I remember you were either a Dr.Who kid or a Blake's 7 kid... I was definitely the latter. Right up until Blake wasn't in Blake's 7 any more.... I rather lost interest after that.

Have these been remastered? I'd like to see it again with better than ancient VHS picture quality!
 
Bob McC said:
You don’t know which is Blake?
shame on you!
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Well. You say that as if he was some sort of icon, but frankly someone who airbrushes out two of his gang in a publicity shot is a bit stalinish. I can only presume that this Blake chap was some sort of revolutionary communist?

Mind you, no facial hair, an essential for any lefty type, so they could bat for the other side.
 
Josette Simon, who played Dayna in the final series of B7 seems to be stalking my viewing lately. She was in The Witcher. and had also appeared in the surprisingly good Halo on Paramount. And in Small Axe before that. As stalkers go, I won't complain 😊, but it was just surprising to see anyone from B7 in anything these days given the general age of the cast at the time (Simon was youngest, at 22, according to IMDB).

On the programme itself, nine-year-old me, oblivious to shoddy sets and RADA hammery, loved it. I tried to watch it again a couple of years ago (they're all on YouTube if you look), but it was clear that its ambition very quickly overran its resources. The first three episodes are actually very good: tightly written with good character development and a feeling that everyone actually lives in that world - even the production values hold up okay. It's only later that it starts to unravel. But I was surprised at how grim that first episode was: the totalitarian Federation (heh) murders an entire meeting of activists, then frames their leader on a trumped-up paedophilia charge (a wholly believable tactic given how effectively it would turn people against the accused, but surprising to see this topic even tangentally approached in a 1970s sci-fi programme), and then for good measure knocks off the prosecutor when he starts to smell a rat...

But the problem was always money. B7 was commissioned by BBC to replace a cop show (was it Z Cars? I'm too young to remember), and so the Beeb gave the production the same budget as a cop show.. out of which they had to create an entire world plus special effects and models, costumes and sets (Apparently in Series 2, the BBC relented and attached a proper costume designer to the production, which made things a little better). The other sign of the budget was a lack of time given to writers... this meant scripts had very little work done on them before shooting, with the result that the stories were riddled with plot holes and iffy characterisation. The grand arc of a fight against a corrupt oppressive regime got lost along the way.

It's a programme that would do well if rebooted and modernised, but it will never be, for two reasons: first, most people who remember it remember it as being "a bit shit"; second, most Americans would think it was a knock-off of Firefly when the debt is actually owed in the other direction.
 
ks.234 said:
Presuming one of those in the photo is the eponymous Blake, he only appears to have 5!
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I suspect Blake was included in the count, in much the same way that there were only three people in the Bill Evans Trio. The last position would be taken up by whichever computer was functioning at the time. (With Blake, I mean, not Bill Evans.)

My abiding memory of the series is Servalan, being played overtly as a science-fiction version of Margaret Thatcher - especially the lowered voice.
 
I think the seventh member was initially the ship, and Zen the ship’s computer. At least until Orac came along. The ship was, IIRC, alien tech and technologically some way beyond the Federation vessels. Hence it was an integral part of the plot.
 
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