Rave 1. Blake's 7: In space, no-one can hear you gripe.

I love Blake’s 7 (BBC TV, 1978-81) because it presents a unique vision of the future.
Space was always supposed to be shiny, thrilling and inspirational; a setting in which humanity could display its fully-realised heroic and scientific potential. Typical TV sci-fi portrays wholesome, good-looking and well-adjusted people exploring space and the future, and finding endless opportunities to display their ingenuity, ability to resolve problems, defeat enemies and make exciting discoveries.
The universe of Blake’s 7, however, is populated by grumpy, malcontent, sarcastic and unhappy people. These are people who don’t like each other very much, and aren’t shy about saying so. This is a future in which people feel free to wear their hatred of, and disappointment in, humankind on their leather, bat-wing sleeves. Even the computers are ill-tempered and snappy.
Humanity has reached its full potential here, but for corruption, and evil. The universe cowers under the lash of a brutal and murderous Federation. Aliens aren’t the problem in this universe, humans are.
Of course, because it’s a late seventies/early eighties BBC sci-fi its budget was never going to be huge. Yes, the special effects don’t stand up too well alongside today’s CGI. But for all these perceived deficiencies, Blake’s 7 has something that most other TV sci-fi lacks completely.
The uncompromising bleakness of its dystopian vision of the future remains daring, even by today’s standards, and, in my opinion, has yet to be equalled in terms of a creative imagining of the future so completely at odds with the conventions of the TV sci-fi genre.
There is artistic integrity and intent behind Blake’s 7. It was never intended as a franchise geared towards selling action figures, and it is certainly not mindless action fodder aimed at children. Likewise the BDSM aesthetic of its costuming (particularly evident in the Federation characters) offers few soft edges to mitigate the darkness at the series’ heart. This is perhaps less the case with the female Liberator crew members – but once again, their treatment and costuming play with viewers’ preconceptions, and the expectations generated by the genre.
The women of the Liberator (and later, The Scorpio) crew are hard, despite their glamour. None of them are what could be described as “nice” in the usual way. Viewers expecting a bubbly Farrah Fawcett-type personality to match Jenna’s looks will have those expectations thwarted. These women are unsmiling, non people-pleasing, fiercely independent, and comfortable with inflicting violence. They are not in the show for the sake of romantic interests for the male characters: Jenna is a hard-bitten pilot and smuggler, Cally is a guerrilla fighter, Dayna exults in designing and using weapons and explosives, Soolin is a mercenary. Their combination of stereotype-challenging attributes and femininity in appearance is one which I find fascinating.
In keeping with the series’ inversion of convention, its most glamorous female character is its most brutal and powerful player. Servalan, Supreme Commander (and later President) of the sadistic Terran Federation, still reigns as TV sci-fi’s most fascinating villain, and surely one of the most unique characters that television has ever seen.
Supremely beautiful, polite, well-spoken and smiling, dressed in an endless variety of exotic and very feminine outfits, characteristically (and surely, ironically) clad in white, Jacqueline Pearce as Servalan toys masterfully with all our prevailing cultural preconceptions about women, morality and power. Pitiless and ruthless, Servalan’s hunger for power is as insatiable as Gan’s is for space rations.
Has there ever been such a seductive tyrant? Has there ever been a femme fatale quite so fatale, or so gloriously femme? Servalan’s lure as a sex-symbol is as potent today as it was when the program first aired. Yet, by conventional standards of behaviour and personality, she breaks all the rules of what is supposed to be attractive to men.
Personally, I find Servalan thrilling to watch because of her power and indomitability. What Jacqueline Pearce brings to role only adds dynamite to this already incendiary character. Here is a mature woman, with a magnificent womanly figure. Here is a woman who takes as much pleasure from power as she does from pretty dresses and jewels. Pearce’s genius lies in the psychological dimensions with which she imbues Servalan, the emotional layers which prevent her despot from veering too much into caricature. She doesn’t crave power because she is evil, but because she has intelligence, ambition, plans, and savage determination to prevail. There is a confidence and assuredness in Pearce’s performance which makes the viewer accept a woman who is hyper-ambitious for power as not only natural, but damn sexy.
But for me, the real star of the show has to be Avon: Avon in black leather, Avon in silver leather, Avon in red leather….is it getting hot in here?
Paul Darrow’s highly developed ability to fill out a pair of leather pants aside, the psychological nuances of his performance are what draws the reader through the series as a whole. That and his smoldering intensity…hang on, let me open a window…
While other cast members came and went, Avon’s role as anti-hero developed into the core of the show – and it was natural that it should. Blake’s Robin Hood-style heroism and altruistic ideals were never going to sit comfortably with a fictional universe so steeped in cynicism and misanthropy. Avon personified both of these attributes, and the psychological tensions which they generate.
The genius of Darrow’s performance, and the quality that makes him so irresistible to the viewer, is in the constant tension he creates between Avon’s wise-cracking, hyper-cynical façade, and the desperate, almost pathological sadness that we sometimes glimpse behind it.
To recognize that one is alone in a universe in which no-one can be trusted, in which those that we love betray us, in which our lives are dominated and diminished by the constant threat of violence, and by the machinations of ruthless regimes that reduce us to numbers: how can that be anything other than psychologically shattering? Avon’s deadpan monotone and his brittle persona, like the leather outfits he wears (so fetchingly), are the armour he wears to shield the broken Romantic within. His mask-like expression, a classic symptom of severe depression, is broken only by the occasional bitter laugh or sardonic smile.
Avon is the inevitable anti-hero of Blake’s 7 because his pain, and his defence mechanisms, make him more relatable to us than Blake, with his selfless heroics and his irrational optimism about people and the future.
Darrow’s performance embodies both vulnerable child and terminally damaged man; pain concealed by survivor humour. He seems, so often, just a sneer away from crying.
Those who dismiss Blake’s 7 purely on the basis of the standard of its special effects and budget are missing the point on so many levels.
I actually like the fact that in the face of inadequate funds, the special effects team used their ingenuity and creativity to do the best what they had, or could scrounge. They actually made an effort because they cared, even though their resources were insufficient. There’s love in those (sometimes improvised) sets and model aircraft.
OK, there’s love and aluminium-foil pie tins.
But I can forgive pie tins. I can forgive the miscasting of Brian Croucher as Travis (mark two). I can even forgive the omitted apostrophe in the show’s opening titles.
In a medium where sameness and safe blandness rule as tyrannically as the Terran Federation, Blake’s 7 stands proud, warts and all, as a renegade; a lone champion of nihilism and pessimism about humanity’s future.
A future populated by sour, grumpy people sounds about my speed.
I find that oddly comforting.