Blakes 7

1 9 7 8 - 1 9 8 1 (UK)
52 x 50 minute episodes

Yes the sets wobbled with tedious regularity (but they did on Dr Who as well and that's one of the most popular shows in the world!). The consoles also wobbled. So did the shelves, the scenery and the spaceships. And sometimes bits fell off as well.

The cast often fluffed their lines or came in too early or couldn't get the props to work (and in one episode - Trial - a BBC workers toolbox was visible on the set during a scene!) and in the exterior location scenes you could often see camera dolly tracks in the dirt! So what made Blakes 7 so special then? Well, Soolin for a start !!! (corr!) And Servalan nurtured me through puberty. Making its television debut on BBC 1 on 2nd January 1978, the night that Star Wars blazed across the cinema screens of London for the first time, Blake's 7 was the BBC's attempt to present to the viewing public a serious home grown science fiction adventure series.

Set in the 'third century of the second calendar', the series presented the grimly depressing central premise of an Earth under the yoke of a near omnipotent, brutally totalitarian government, known as The Federation.

Ruthlessly crushing all attempts at individual freedom and creative endeavour, The Federation controlled its populace by means of air and water administered tranquillising drugs, and the immediate elimination of any and all dissidents by means of murder or sentencing them to exile to an off world penal colony for crimes of which they are innocent. Utilising just such a fabricated charge (in this instance child molestation - a daring move at the time) The Federation dispose of Roj Blake, (Gareth Thomas), former hero and leader of the underground resistance movement.

Blake manages to start a revolt whilst on the prison ship carrying him and a fresh group of criminals to their life of servitude, ultimately escaping along with a small group of fellow prisoners aboard a technologically advanced, abandoned alien spaceship, which they dub The Liberator. From this point, writer Terry Nation (co-creator of Dr Who's most notorious monsters, the Daleks and the sombre, serious post apocalyptic drama series Survivors), began the slow development of the character and his band of mismatched fellow escapee's into a reworked, futuristic version of Robin Hood and his band of Merry Men, with the Federation cast in the role of King John's tyrannical forces.

The series' original seven were Blake, the coldly deadly and self-serving computer genius Kerr Avon, full time thief and accomplished coward Vila Restal, the gentle giant 'Little John' character Olag Gan, beautiful smuggler and space pilot Jenna Stannis, Auron telepath Cally, and Zen - the ship's near sentient computer.

Over the course of its run, the core cast underwent a number of changes. The character of Blake himself departed when Gareth Thomas opted to pursue other career avenues, to be replaced by the far less charismatic standard hero character of Mercenary Del Tarrent. The Giant Gan and telepath Cally were both killed off and Jenna left the Liberator, their places were taken by two new female characters, weapons expert Dayna Mellanby and blonde gunslinger Soolin. Rounding out the new team were the non human forms of the smugly superior mini supercomputer, Orac, and (following the destruction of the Liberator at the climax of season three) the introduction of the far less imaginatively designed replacement ship Scorpio's obsequious onboard computer, Slave.

With Blake no longer at the head of the outlawed band, Darrow's Avon character emerged as the natural successor to Blake's vacated leadership. Now, with a cynical anti-hero in control, the war against The Federation took on a much darker, less noble aspect. This change of direction and character dynamics led to a much more intimate small-scale style of warfare between the two opposing forces, the chief highlight of which were the complex and ambiguous love/hate relationship between Avon and the physical embodiment of the Federation, Servalan (an almost high camp performance from Jacqueline Pearce, which nevertheless demonstrated the character's cold-bloodied insanity to sometimes chilling effect).

Although Terry Nation also departed the series, a number of later episodes were still well written, with the final story of the series, entitled simply Blake, arguably one of its strongest, finest and certainly most controversial. In that final episode, more than ten million viewers watched in disbelief as the heroes they had followed faithfully over the course of four years were cut down in a hail of Federation gunfire, whilst the returning Blake was himself killed by Avon. It was an audacious end to a series, which ultimately failed to live up to its early potential.