BLAKE’S SEVEN: SEEK-LOCATE-DESTROY & ORAC.

BFI Southbank, Saturday 5 October 2024.

I was a Doctor Who fan first and foremost in the 1970s, so in 1978 I pretended that I wasn’t as enamoured of Blake’s 7 as I really was. In those days, pop culture was very tribal – you weren’t allowed, it seemed, to listen to 2-Tone if your preference was for Punk or Led Zeppelin.

Looking back, I can now see that Blake’s 7 was a stepping stone on my path to adulthood. I was moving away from the innocence, fun and simple morality of Doctor Who into the ethical ambiguity, cynicism and real politick of the grown-up world, filtered through Blake’s 7’s jaundiced, though engaging, worldview. It wasn’t until much later in life, that I realised being an adult didn’t necessarily mean you had to put away children’s (or teenage) things.

Which is what brought me back to the BFI Southbank on Saturday, 5 October 2024.

Courtesy of most of the restoration team behind the seminal Doctor Who: The Collection Blu-rays, Blake’s 7 is finally getting the VAM-heavy box set treatment. It’s about time. The perception of Terry Nation’s “Dirty Dozen in space” – or, for me, ‘The Wild Bunch [1969] in space’ – over the passage of time has, thankfully and finally, moved on from journalistic cliches about cardboard sets and tinfoil costumes.

What’s apparent over forty years later is the series’ remarkable maturity. Terry Nation’s obsession with the Second World War – fuelled by Luftwaffe bombs dropping on Wales, where he lived as a boy – gave British television the ironically named Federation, a fascist interplanetary empire, the flipside to the utopian, United Federation of Planets in Star Trek (1966-69). More George Orwell than Gene Roddenberry, Blake’s 7 was a science fiction TV drama that, in its first episode The Way Back (1978), framed the title character, Roj Blake (Gareth Thomas), as a paedophile.

At a time when the Irish Republican Army was bombing mainland Britain, Blake’s 7 – with increasing creative input from its script editor, Chris Boucher – developed the compelling theme that one side’s freedom fighter was the other side’s terrorist. This dichotomy was played out in microcosm in the tensions between Blake and his ‘Iago’, the morally neutral Kerr Avon (Paul Darrow). Their relationship ended in a finale to the series that alludes to the grand tragedies of Hamlet and King Lear. Paranoid and believing he’d been betrayed, Avon shot and killed Blake, while the rest of Avon’s crew, all replacements for the original 7 – except the faithful Vila Restal (Michael Keating) – were systematically gunned down by Federation troops.

Nothing so relentlessly nihilistic masquerading as a science fiction adventure had been transmitted on British television before. That partly explains why, on an autumnal Saturday afternoon in early October 2024, the auditorium of NFT 1 was almost full.

At the start of the event, regular BFI TV SF hosts Dick Fiddy and Justin Johnson relayed messages of goodwill from Ann Jackson, the widow of David Jackson, who portrayed Gan – one of the original 7 – as well as Rose and Julian, the wife and son of Zen/Orac/Slave voice artist Peter Tuddenham. Then we were off – “Standard by Seven…”

SEEK-LOCATE-DESTROY

The program began with a screening of Blake 7’s fifth episode, written by Terry Nation and directed by Vere Lorrimer.

At this early stage in the series, Nation’s World War II fixation was as apparent as it had been in his definitive Doctor Who story, Genesis of the Daleks (1975). The Federation decoder Blake and his crew steal is the allies’ Enigma machine in all but name, and the dedication Space Commander Travis (Stephen Grief) shows to “total war” – in one grisly example, massacring enemy troops who’d surrendered – was the identically-named policy of Nazi Death’s Head SS units in the German army. Not all Wehrmacht soldiers in the Second World War approved of the SS, a fact reflected in Seek-Locate-Destroy when officer Ral (Ian Oliver), confided in Supreme Commander Servalan (Jacqueline Pearce) that some of his fellow officers wouldn’t acknowledge, or serve, with Travis. 

Unexpectedly, there’s some inappropriate behaviour in the workplace, evident in Servalan’s dalliance with Ral. Having said that, Jacqueline Pearce’s performance is a long way from the camp of Series D, when she matched Paul Darrow’s Avon beat for mannered beat. In Series A, Pearce subtly drew an intriguing picture of a young woman in high office who, despite her youth, was clearly ambitious, ruthless and had an agenda of her own. Watching Seek-Locate-Destroy again at the BFI, I’d forgotten that the story was Servalan’s debut.

When the episode – which looked brilliantly clean and clear on the big screen – finished, Justin asked Dick what he thought. Astutely, he observed, “It had good roles for women.” Blake’s 7 was first transmitted in 1978, when leading roles in action series – Battlestar Galactica, The Sweeney and Starsky and Hutch, to name a few – were dominated by men. Terry Nation was always strong on proactive female characters, from Sara Kingdom (Jean Marsh) in Doctor Who: The Daleks’ Master Plan (1965-66), through to Abby Grant in Survivors (1975-77). Notably, sexism in the Blake’s 7 future is non-existent. No-one questioned the ability of Jenna, Cally or, in particular, Servalan to do their duty.

One scene specifically highlighted Blake 7’s attention to character detail. Reviewing the forensic reports about Blake’s attack on a communications centre, Travis seated himself behind Servalan’s desk. She entered her office, said nothing, then sat on the other side of her desk from Travis, proceeding to ask him about his investigation. Physically, the balance of power between them had shifted, but Servalan’s poise and control confirmed that it would shift again – in her favour.

Coincidentally, the BBC’s World War II drama Secret Army (1977-79), based around an escape line for crashed allied pilots, was the only other series of the time that offered roles for women as dynamic as those in Blake’s 7.

VISUAL EFFECTS 2024

Blake’s 7 was always designed to be more visual effects heavy than Doctor Who. The BBC acknowledged this at the start of production, assigning two visual effects designers, Ian Scoones and Mat Irvine. Between the screenings of Seek-Locate-Destroy and Orac, Justin and Dick invited Irvine himself – remarkably, not looking a day older than his 1970s -1980s BBC heyday – and Christopher Thompson, the Blu-rays’ effects designer, to the stage for the most informative chat of the day.

To the murmured delight of the audience, the enthusiastic Mat revealed that three spaceship models survived from the original filming: Blake’s ship The Liberator, which hadn’t been refurbished since the last episode it featured in, 1980’s Terminal, now residing in the National Film and Science Fiction Museum in Milton Keynes; one of Travis’s three pursuit ships also still exists, as does The London, the prison transporter in the episodes Space Fall and Cygnus Alpha. In a delightful touch, The London has been restored and used in the filming of the new visual effects sequences.

Thompson offered the quite amazing statistic that he’d worked on “800 [effects] shots in five months.” In a heart-warming example of the old and new coming together, he revealed that Mat had been technical advisor on the visual effects shoot for the restored Series A. Highlighting the pair’s attention to detail, the space and star backgrounds seen throughout the first season  – some atmospherically filmed on 35mm film by Ian Scoones, some not – have all been made visually consistent.

Speaking at the start of the event, the restoration team’s Paul Vanezis informed the audience that on the new box set, consumers would have the option to watch the episodes with the original special effects sequences, “which is how everyone should watch them”, or with the new visual sequences, “which is how everyone will watch them.”

ORAC

Disappointingly, the thirteenth and last episode of Series A, again directed by Vere Lorrimer, is a lightweight runaround. The budget had obviously run out: the only new set was the computer scientist Ensor’s retreat – a cluttered room with one empty corridor. The script for Orac was also written close to production; compared with the plot and counter plot of Seek-Locate-Destroy, the storyline is completely linear: Blake and Cally, and Servalan and Travis – furnished with convenient maps – keep missing each other in Ensor’s (atmospherically filmed) tunnel system.

You can tell script editor Chris Boucher hadn’t had time to embellish the dialogue. Teleporting down to an alien beach, Blake walks up to an alien obelisk and says, “it’s an obelisk”. When Terry Nation was writing scripts under pressure, his dialogue was basic and mechanical (viz-a-viz the Doctor Who story ‘The Keys of Marinus’ (1964), quickly written after the overnight success of the Daleks. Materialising on an alien beach, the Doctor and his fellow time travellers walk up to a pyramid, where Ian Chesterton (William Russell) stiffly comments, “it must have been built with tremendous accuracy.”) Nation’s imaginative fatigue is most notable in Blake’s instruction to Avon to “beam us back up again” (a command that, notably, is never issued again). At a stroke, Nation gave away his inspiration for the Liberator’s Teleport system although, to be fair, it was obvious to anyone watching that, from the get go, Nation had ripped off the Transporter in Star Trek (1966-69).

Making up for this are some good character moments, the primary strength of Blake’s 7. Derek Farr’s Ensor is entertainingly cantankerous, while Jacqueline Pearce seized the opportunity to give Servalan’s character some light and shade. On the back foot away from the security of Space Command headquarters, the Supreme Commander showed fear and vulnerability on an alien planet, with Travis barely able to conceal his contempt. The balance of power later swung back to Servalan, when she made it clear the Space Commander was going to take the blame for losing the master computer Orac – “You’re in a lot of trouble, Travis.”

Quelle surprise. Senior management never changes.

Fittingly, Avon had the best line of Orac (and possibly Series A). Congratulated by Blake for shooting and disabling Travis’s Laseron gun hand, Avon sardonically replied, “I was aiming for his head.”

I always enjoy listening to today’s headliners, Sally Knyvette (Jenna Stannis) and Jan Chappell (Cally), joined today by production designer Roger Murray-Leach (who worked wonders on four Doctor Who stories directed by Blake’s 7 producer, David Maloney, in the mid-1970s). They were as witty, insightful and forthright as ever, but today had really been about Blake’s 7’s model makers and effects designers. It’s often said that the series didn’t rely on special effects, but they were an important selling point of Blake’s 7, evidenced by Mat Irvine’s guest appearances on Blue Peter and Multi-Coloured Swap Shop (above) in the late 1970s.

It was good to see the technical wizards of low budget television finally getting their day in the sun. BBC visual effects were as much a part of my early life as discovering pubs, The Stranglers and horror film double bills on BBC2.

Well now. Blake’s 7: The Collection – Series A is released in November, an essential purchase for lovers of quality storytelling, quality performances and quality spacecraft. In short – BBC television SF drama at its finest.