At conventions and in interviews in the last decade of his life, Terry Nation often told the story of how Blake’s 7, his last major work, came into being and of his absolute confidence in the concept. ‘I said to my wife: “I’m going to pitch this show today, and I know they’re going to do it.”’ His account of the subsequent meeting evokes an era at the BBC that has long since passed. ‘I wanted to do another science fiction show, a good, rousing adventure series in space,’ he remembered. ‘I went and pitched the idea. I said, “The Dirty Dozen in Space”, and they said, “Yeah, let’s do it!” It was just like that, truly. We went on a bit further and I said: “The leader is a little more Robin Hood.” But that was it. Then I went home and I got a call from my agent. He said that the BBC had been in touch and said they would do it, but I had to write the first thirteen episodes.’
It sounds like an implausibly easy way to get a series made, but such things were not unheard of in the mid 1970s, in the days before bureaucracy took a firm grip of the corporation. Around the same time, David Croft and Jeremy Lloyd, then riding high with their sitcom Are You Being Served?, approached the head of comedy at the BBC with an idea that, said Croft, ‘was so hot that I didn’t want to tell him what it was’, for fear of word getting out and the idea being plagiarised. ‘To his eternal credit, he didn’t protest or ask for a script. He told me to go ahead and do it.’ The resulting pilot, Come Back Mrs Noah, starring Mollie Sugden as a Yorkshire housewife sent into space in the year 2050, resulted in a short series. Although it was a resounding flop, its very existence demonstrated the freedoms accorded to those with a proven track record. Over at ITV in its heyday, things could be even more straightforward. When Patrick McGoohan tried to explain his concept for a new series called The Prisoner to Lew Grade, the head of ATV interrupted him mid-flow. ‘I don’t understand one word you’re talking about,’ said Grade. ‘The money will be in your company’s account on Monday morning.’
It was true, then, that commissioning policy allowed for a much greater degree of individual decision-making on the part of executives than in later years, but even so Nation’s familiar version of the origins of Blake’s 7 did not quite tell the whole story. More accurate was his 1982 account of a meeting with the BBC which was coming to an inconclusive end when he was suddenly struck by an idea for a series. ‘It is set in the third century of the second calendar,’ he improvised. ‘A group of criminals is being transported to a prison planet. Under the leadership of a wrongly convicted patriot, they escape and get hold of a super spacecraft, then begin to wage war against the evil forces of the Federation.’ He claimed that, when asked for a name, he spontaneously came up with the title Blake’s 7. The whole thing, he added, was not so much a flash of inspiration as ‘the product of desperation’.
Again, however, his memory of events, this fully formed vision of the plotline of Blake’s 7, shouldn’t be taken at face value. A memo recording his meeting on 9 September 1975 with Ronnie Marsh, the head of drama series at the BBC, shows that he pitched two separate ideas. The first concerned Dan Fog, an American who has been a policeman and a district attorney, and is also the author of a book titled Criminal Investigation. Now in his fifties, he becomes a professor of criminology at Oxford, moving to Britain with his younger, second wife and finding himself involved in a series of adventures through his contacts with the police and the higher reaches of government. Intended to be a ‘witty, glossy thriller’, it was surely conceived with at least one eye on the American market, still the great unrealised dream. It did not, however, make any further progress, perhaps because the idea of an expert being called in when all other agencies have failed seemed too reminiscent of the special agent series of the 1960s, at a time when both American and British television were moving into more straightforward police shows with Columbo, Kojak and The Sweeney. (The idea of an Oxford don of mature years who’s also an author was strongly reminiscent of the character Robert Cullingford in the original proposal for Department S.)
The second proposal was received more warmly. Nation may well have pitched the idea as ‘the Dirty Dozen in space’, but the memo of the meeting records no such phrase, instead describing Blake’s 7 as ‘cracking Boy’s Own/kidult sci-fi, a space western-adventure, a modern swashbuckler’. The same note summarised the proposed plotline: ‘Group of villains being escorted onto a rocket ship (transported) which goes astray and lands on an alien planet where inhabitants are planning to invade and destroy Earth. Possibly live underground.’
A script for a fifty-minute pilot was immediately commissioned, but Nation’s recollection that he was expected from the outset to write all thirteen episodes of the first series was incorrect. The pilot was approved and a second episode commissioned in June 1976; this was delivered in September, more than a year after the initial meeting. By November he had been commissioned to write the first seven episodes, but still the BBC did not envisage him completing the whole series: ‘it is our intention to commission other writers for later episodes although Terry Nation has agreed to write further scripts towards the end of the strand of thirteen programmes.’ It was not until December 1976 that the BBC agreed in principle to him writing all thirteen episodes, and not until the following May – twenty months after the pilot had been commissioned – that a contract was signed for the remaining five shows. The initiative, it seems, came from Nation himself rather than from the BBC; determined not to repeat the experience of Survivors, it was he who insisted on writing the whole season, so that he didn’t lose control of his work again. Meantime Roger Hancock had been busily negotiating a better deal on the fees, so that the £975 paid for the pilot had become £1,200 for each script from episode three onwards.
The resulting series inevitably faced comparison with Star Trek, the American science fiction series which began airing in Britain in 1969 – after production had ceased – and which had steadily acquired a cult following. There were points of similarity. In both shows a small crew on a highly advanced spacecraft (the Enterprise in Star Trek, the Liberator in Blake’s 7) roam a galaxy dominated by a political structure known as the Federation, and encounter alien races and cultures in a series of weekly adventures. The differences, though, were more significant than the resemblances. Above all there were questions of tone and of the status of the protagonists. The United Federation of Planets in Star Trek is an essentially progressive force, envisaged as a kind of galactic United Nations, whereas the Earth Federation in Blake’s 7 is a repressive regime existing somewhere between the worlds depicted in George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The Enterprise is on an official mission ‘to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilisations’, but the Liberator is on the run, fighting rearguard actions and engaging in guerrilla attacks on key installations. It is the difference, perhaps, between the rampant optimism of 1960s America and the doubt-ridden, nervous state of Britain in the 1970s, where few believed that the immediate future offered much hope for improvement. Even with his love of story-telling, Nation couldn’t avoid the inherent negativity of his vision.
There was a similar discrepancy between Blake’s 7 and the movie that Nation cited as its inspiration, Robert Aldrich’s 1967 film The Dirty Dozen. Both featured groups of convicted criminals embarked on a desperate mission against a fascist state, but there was a gulf between the idea of military prisoners recruited by the American army to operate behind enemy lines in the build-up to D-Day, on the one hand, and Blake’s gang of renegades on the other. In Blake’s 7 there is no official force for good in the struggle against fascism, no higher authority on which to call.
More pertinent was Nation’s other reference point: Robin Hood, the greatest of all English myths, the noble-born hero who makes himself an outlaw in order to fight a guerrilla war in the name of justice, the rights of the oppressed and the restoration of honest governance. Just as important as Robin’s campaign is the company he keeps. The Merry Men are popularly depicted mid-feast, quaffing flagons of mead and laughing uproariously as they gather round an open fire on which a whole deer is being spit-roasted. This very English revolutionary has no time for Spartan self-denial when there’s drinking, singing and general roistering to be had. It’s a seductive image that has run through the national culture for centuries, and variations on the theme turn up throughout Nation’s work, from The Fixers through The Saint and The Persuaders! to Jimmy Garland in Survivors. Even the Doctor – however crotchety William Hartnell was, however severe Jon Pertwee could be – is essentially cut from the same cloth: the fight against the Daleks is always conducted with a twinkle in the eye. Blake’s 7 was to be Nation’s final expression of the myth, with some very deliberate echoes of Robin Hood, in terms both of character (Olag Gan is clearly derived in part from Little John) and of costume.
And yet there was the same dark twist to the tale. Robin was sustained by the knowledge that one day King Richard would return to reclaim his land from the evil Prince John and his henchmen, represented by the Sheriff of Nottingham, but for Blake and his companions there is no such king over the water, no real hope of ultimate victory, only the fact of resistance against overwhelming odds. ‘Virtually all revolutionary movements, once established, are outlawed by the establishment,’ Nation wrote in a document setting out the themes for the second season. ‘If their cause is just, they generally emerge to overthrow the authorities and themselves become the establishment. So it is with Blake. Except that Blake will never achieve that final objective.’
Trapped in perpetual opposition and lacking any official sanction, the outlaws are cast in a different light. ‘If you grew up when I did,’ Nation reflected, ‘it was simple to read stories about Robin Hood, and Robin Hood was the good guy, Prince John was the bad guy – very simple.’ In the late 1970s, however, with Irish and Arab terror attacks dominating the news, Blake’s campaign against the Federation ran the risk of looking more like terrorism than resistance. It wasn’t an angle that Nation had consciously considered but he did concede that it was a reasonable interpretation: ‘What set out to be a good, rousing adventure yarn started turning into something different.’
Other currents also fed into the show’s concept. Paul Darrow, who starred as Kerr Avon through all four seasons and became a close friend of Nation, claimed that the name of the protagonist derived from that of the British spy, George Blake, who was sentenced in 1961 to a record forty-two years in jail, but who escaped after serving just five years and fled to the Soviet Union. ‘Terry Nation, while not necessarily approving of his politics,’ noted Darrow, ‘liked Blake’s style and stole his name.’ There was also, however, a more obvious association with Sir Percy Blakeney, the hero of Baroness Orczy’s classic adventure novel The Scarlet Pimpernel (1905), an Englishman who, with a band of followers, stages operations to rescue condemned aristocrats from the guillotine during the French Revolution. Indeed Blakeney might be seen as one of the key templates for Nation’s heroes, with ‘his reckless daring, his mad bravery, his worship of his own word of honour’ and his inspired improvisations in moments of danger: cornered by his arch-enemy in an inn, he fills his snuff-box with pepper and offers it to his adversary. When asked why they risk their own lives to save strangers, one of the gang brushes aside suggestions of heroism in the same self-deprecating terms that the Baron and Lord Brett Sinclair would later evoke. ‘Sport, Madame la Comtesse, sport,’ drawls Lord Antony Dewhurst. ‘We are a nation of sportsmen, you know, and just now it is the fashion to pull the hare from between the teeth of the hound.’ Orczy’s novel was required reading for boys in Nation’s childhood and its influence was apparent in much of his writing; at one point in The Persuaders! Danny even refers to Brett as ‘the Scarlet Pumpernickel’.
Given this rich pedigree, it was unfortunate that Blake emerged as one of Nation’s less entertaining heroes. ‘He was supposed to be swashbuckling and dashing and all those things,’ regretted Nation, ‘but I never found it, I never really gave him a chance.’ He is sincere, committed to his cause and concerned for the well-being of his crew, but there is a lack of the devil-may-care hearty bravado that was surely required, and no compensating charisma. ‘To a man of my spirit, opportunities are duties,’ declares Rudolf Rassendyll, hero of Anthony Hope’s The Prisoner of Zenda (1894), and it was that defiant embrace of life that Blake should have embodied as a kind of Jimmy Garland in space. Instead, as played by Gareth Thomas, a doleful-faced actor with a vague resemblance to Tony Hancock, he was, observed Shaun Usher in the Daily Mail, ‘a thoroughly decent, rugger-playing chap, rather than a maverick anti-Establishment man-of-the-future’. Thomas himself became disillusioned with the role, and ultimately left the series that bore his character’s name. ‘One of the many reasons why I left Blake’s 7 was because I wasn’t really quite sure where else I could go with it,’ he reflected. ‘I mean, within the bounds of what could happen in the series, I felt I’d explored most avenues of Blake.’
That development, however, was for the future. When the first episode of Blake’s 7 was broadcast on the first Monday of 1978, it was clear who was intended to form the centre of the story. As in Survivors, the first three episodes form a single, sustained narrative and, as normal with Nation, the back-story is established early on. Some four years before the start of the opening episode, ‘The Way Back’, Roj Blake was the leader of a revolutionary group on Earth, seeking the overthrow of the Federation, but was captured by the authorities. Not wishing to create a martyr for the cause, they brainwashed him, blocking out existing memories through intensive therapy and implanting new ones, before bringing him to court in a show trial, where he confessed his crimes and professed his loyalty to the Federation; they then removed his memory of the trial itself. Now living a normal, unexceptional life amid a population kept in ‘a state of drug induced tranquillity’, he is taken to a meeting of a new rebel group, who are desperate to recruit him to their cause, as a powerful symbol of resistance. But the meeting has been betrayed and Federation troops arrive to break up the illegal gathering.
‘Do not attempt to resist arrest,’ urges the group’s leader, recalling the pacifism of Temmosus, leader of the Thals in the first Daleks story. ‘No matter what the provocation, we must not resort to violence.’ Like Temmosus, he’s promptly shot down along with everyone else, save Blake himself, the sole surviving witness to the massacre. Faced once again with the problem of what to do with this thorn in its side, the Federation frames Blake on a charge of sexually assaulting children and has him banished to a far distant planet, Cygnus Alpha, which – like Desperus in ‘The Daleks’ Master Plan’ – is a penal colony. The episode ends with him on board a prison ship, setting off for exile.
Since we will seldom return to Earth in the ensuing series, our understanding of the Federation is largely shaped by what we have seen in this first episode. It’s a curiously ambivalent picture. The first impression is of the borrowings from other science fiction dystopias, debts not only to the work of Orwell and Huxley, but also to the 1971 film of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange – in the flashbacks of Blake’s brainwashing – and to one of Nation’s favourite sources, Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel: the city here is another sealed dome, there are tensions between Earth and the more sparsely populated Outer Worlds, and there is a largely ineffectual dissident faction that meets in secret. But beyond the surface impression of futuristic totalitarianism, life under Federation rule remains almost entirely unexplored; we don’t see the daily life of the population, what they do for entertainment, how the media operates, what the basis of the economy is, even whether there are political parties. Ultimately Nation has little interest in exploring the nature of a future society, merely wishing to establish the existence of an evil empire against which his heroes can rebel. As with the Daleks, he is evoking a militarism that harks back to the Nazis.
Yet even this is not quite such an absolute as it seems. When Blake is charged, he is assigned a lawyer named Varon to defend him. Although the guilty verdict is pre-ordained, Varon himself is an honest and honourable man who comes to believe in Blake’s story of the massacre and in the trumped-up nature of the charges, even though to do so means challenging everything he believes. ‘If it were true, do you realise the implication of what you’re saying?’ he asks. ‘It would mean there was corruption at a high level of the administration.’ Ultimately the truth does him no good, for both he and his wife are killed, but the fact that such people can exist and thrive within the Federation is an indication that it is not quite as monolithic in its evil as first appears. There will be further suggestions that not everyone in the Federation hierarchy is corrupted by power, and that there remain checks and balances within the system. In the second episode, ‘Space Fall’, the captain of the prison ship disapproves, albeit feebly, of the murderous actions of a subordinate officer, and when we first meet the brutal Space Commander Travis, he is facing a disciplinary inquiry concerning a massacre he ordered on the planet Auros; his methods, another senior officer says, represent ‘the philosophy of an assassin, not a Federation officer’. This, it turns out, is not the stark simplistic evil of the Daleks, but a more subtly delineated society, in which the structures and legal forms are those of a democracy sinking into dictatorship with an increasingly powerful and autonomous security state. In the words of Kasabi, formerly a senior officer in the administration: ‘The Federation is degenerate.’
These nuances, however, are overshadowed by the most shocking abuse of power in ‘The Way Back’ – not the massacre of the dissidents, nor the killing of Varon, nor even the treatment of Blake, but the fact that, in order to frame Blake, false memories are implanted in children, so that they will testify to having been sexually abused by him. The ramifications aren’t developed, but presumably the psychological effect of such a process is no different to a real assault. The charge of paedophilia was a particularly resonant one at the time. In 1976 the home secretary, Roy Jenkins, had asked the Criminal Law Revision Committee to look at whether the age of consent should be reduced and there were plenty of academics and experts, including the likes of future health secretary Patricia Hewitt, who supported a reduction to fourteen years of age. Briefly it appeared as though the liberalising culture of the 1960s might find a new direction to explore, and a campaigning body called the Paedophile Information Exchange sprang up to promote the cause. Then the moment passed and a media panic ensued, focused particularly on child pornography; even as the first season of Blake’s 7 was being broadcast in 1978, the legislation that became the Protection of Children Act – heavily promoted by Mary Whitehouse – was passing through Parliament. To bring such issues on to television in an early-evening drama was an intriguing decision, even though the explicit references to Blake’s alleged crimes were toned down from the original script.
In characteristic Nation fashion, much of what has been established in the first episode disappears very rapidly. The child-sex conviction does not feature in later episodes, though this was a conscious decision by the production team, recognising that the public mood had become much more sensitive to the issue; when Blake’s trial is revisited in ‘Voice from the Past’, a second-season episode written by Roger Parkes, it is conspicuously not referred to. Less deliberately, the brainwashing, which had provided such a strong visual image in the first episode, appears to have been negated by Blake’s subsequent experiences, so that by the time he’s on the prison ship bound for Cygnus Alpha he has reverted to his revolutionary self. When someone comments that at least he’s alive, he responds vehemently: ‘No! Not until free men can think and speak. Not until power is back with the honest man.’
Meanwhile he is beginning to acquire the companions who will take us through the rest of the first season: a smuggler named Jenna Stannis (Sally Knyvette), who is also an expert pilot; a cowardly thief and locksmith named Vila Restal (Michael Keating); a convicted murderer named Olag Gan (David Jackson); and Avon, a computer expert who came close to stealing five million credits from the Federation’s own systems. It is the latter who will prove Blake’s chief rival as leader of the group, espousing a very different value system. ‘Wealth is the only reality,’ proclaims Avon. ‘And the only way to obtain wealth is to take it away from somebody else.’ He joins the others in staging an attempted mutiny on board, but only with some reluctance. ‘You’re a civilised man,’ urges Blake, trying to appeal to his self-interest. ‘On Cygnus Alpha that will not be a survival characteristic.’ Avon’s casual reply – ‘An intelligent man can adapt’ – suggests a greater degree of self-confidence than he actually displays, for despite his protestations of independence, he remains at Blake’s side, more or less loyally, for the next two seasons.
Blake’s ability to convince others, however, is less impressive. He, Jenna and Avon successfully escape from the prison ship, taking control of the sophisticated Liberator, which has been found abandoned, drifting like the Mary Celeste through space, and – at Blake’s insistence – make their way to Cygnus Alpha to rescue their fellow convicts. Using the teleportation facilities on the ship (as in ‘The Keys of Marinus’, these involve the use of bracelets), Blake ventures down on a reconnaissance mission to the surface and, discovering a blighted and benighted planet, concludes that the prospects for recruiting crew members are good: ‘From the little I did see, they won’t take too much persuading.’ But when he attempts to do so, he succeeds in convincing only four that their future lies with the Liberator rather than with the primitive religious cult presided over by Vargas (played by Brian Blessed in a typically unrestrained performance). Of those four, two are killed, leaving only Vila and Gan to join. One further crew member, the telepath Cally (Jan Chappell), turns up in a later episode and, together with the Liberator’s computer, Zen (voiced by Peter Tuddenham), these comprise the seven characters who make up the series title.
If what we see of Blake gives little indication that he is a charismatic, inspirational leader, the same is not true of his arch-enemies, representing the Federation in its most extreme manifestation. ‘Authors, unless they are careful, fall in love with their big villains,’ wrote the critic Richard Usborne, and Nation had clearly saved much of his creative energy for a splendid brace of baddies, who don’t appear until episode six, but who then become an ever greater presence as the season progresses. Even before they speak, Supreme Commander Servalan (Jacqueline Pearce) and Space Commander Travis (Stephen Greif) are a striking pair. He’s dressed entirely in black leather, with a patch over one eye and a laser gun built in to his prosthetic left hand (the injuries are from a previous encounter with Blake), while she’s clad in clinging white dresses and furs, like a cross between Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen and the White Witch of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia, or even Lady Arabella March in Bram Stoker’s feverish last novel, The Lair of the White Worm (1911). There’s also a hint in her name of Chauvelin, the principal foe of Blakeney, the Scarlet Pimpernel, and of Severin, the narrator of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs (1870), though her abrupt switches between tactile flirtation and cruel disdain rather recall Wanda, the heroine of that novel. Ambitious, scheming and utterly ruthless, the two of them swagger through their episodes in the manner of the very best – and campest – pantomime rogues.
As head of the Federation’s armed forces, Servalan turns to Travis, the man who apprehended Blake the first time around, and charges him with the mission of tracking the rebel down again. The crew of the Liberator have begun to attack outposts of the Federation – a campaign made possible by possession of a ship that can outgun and outrun any in their enemy’s fleet – and there is growing concern that Blake could wreak serious damage on the empire. Some of the governments of the outlying planets are already talking about leaving the Federation, for if it can’t provide security from a marauding gang of guerrillas, then its usefulness must be called into question. There is also the danger that Blake’s actions are acting as a beacon for the discontented. ‘Stories of his exploits are still circulating,’ frets Servalan. ‘They excite people. The fact that he is still free gives them hope, and that is dangerous, Travis. Hope is very dangerous.’ Or, in the words of another senior figure of the Federation: ‘Any damage to the Federation is attributed to Blake. The smallest incident is exaggerated out of all proportion until it becomes a major event. Blake is becoming a legend. His name is a rallying call for malcontents of all persuasions.’ It is as though he has come to occupy the supposed position of Emmanuel Goldstein in 1984, alleged to be the leader of the Brotherhood, the organisation fighting the ruling party.
Quite how these stories are circulating, however, is something of a mystery, for the rebel movement seems singularly ill-organised and misguided. The meeting in the first episode heard calls for a programme of civil disobedience in order to tie up Federation forces on Earth, thereby allowing the Outer Worlds to pursue their campaigns for independence. It was a perfectly logical strategy that only fell down when it came to proposing the sabotage of food production; starving the people into rebellion is seldom a winning tactic. In ‘Time Squad’ the resistance on the planet Saurian Major was so ineffectual that it has been entirely wiped out, with the exception of Cally. And in ‘Project Avalon’ a key rebel leader is captured and submitted to an interrogation machine that will extract information against her will, leaving Blake to stage a rescue attempt before the beans are spilt: ‘Avalon knows all the resistance movements in this star sector – places, names, everything,’ he explains. One cannot help but wonder at the incompetence of an organisation that would allow so much sensitive information to be in the possession of a single person, rather than distributed through a network of cells; by contrast, the Brotherhood in 1984 operates on the principle of no one person having contact with more than three or four others. As in ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’, Nation’s attraction to the romanticism of resistance outstripped any practical concerns.
Despite the flawed logic, the conflict between Blake and the double-act of Servalan and Travis provides a focus for the series that drives the narrative forward and provides many of the most effective sequences. In particular, the episode ‘Duel’ finds Nation at his very best. Federation pursuit ships have cornered the Liberator in the vicinity of an unknown planet and seem certain this time to kill their quarry, when both Blake and Travis find themselves transported against their will to the surface of the planet. Here they encounter two beings, Sinofar the Guardian (Isla Blair) and Giroc the Keeper (Patsy Smart), the powerful and mysterious survivors of a thousand-year war that has destroyed the planet, whose role now is to teach others about the nature of aggression. ‘You both know how to kill,’ Sinofar tells the two antagonists. ‘But here you must take a life. There will be no machines to make the act unreal. You must touch the life you take.’ Blake and Travis, with just one companion each and armed only with a knife, are sent separately into a forest to track each other down and fight to the death. The conflict ends with Blake triumphant but refusing to kill his enemy, admitting that he would enjoy it too much, and Sinofar returns him to the Liberator, apparently satisfied that he has understood the lesson: that the instinct for violence should not be indulged. Travis, of course, learns nothing at all from the experience.
Some of this is familiar ground. ‘With each generation there were fewer of us. The dead vastly outnumbered the living. And still there was no victory for either side,’ explains Sinofar, as she recounts the history of her world. And then the ultimate weapon was created and used. ‘It wasn’t a victory, it was only the end of the war. We were left with a planet made barren by radiation. Our children were monsters, or died, or were never born.’ The resemblance to Skaro is unmistakable, though the phrasing here is both more elegant and elegiac. The concept of the duel had also occurred earlier in Nation’s work; in ‘Invasion of the Earthmen’ in The Avengers, two of the cadets were sent out on a night survival exercise, with instructions that they were to hunt each other and that only one could return. There were echoes too of ‘Arena’, a 1967 episode of Star Trek. But the power of ‘Duel’ rests elsewhere, in the suggestion that violence is an integral part of human nature and evolution, touching on the theories of scientists like Robert Ardley and Konrad Lorenz, whose work was popular at the time. (Nation had cited Ardley’s 1961 book African Genesis in the novel of Survivors.)
There were other moments in the first season of Blake’s 7 that returned to favourite Nation scenarios, perhaps not surprisingly given the pressure of writing all thirteen episodes. ‘It was a hell of a workload for him,’ said Chris Boucher, the script editor of the series, ‘it was a hell of a strain.’ Boucher reworked many of the drafts, with further contributions from producer David Maloney, but there was no doubt that the process pushed Nation harder than any commitment since the days of being script editor on The Persuaders!. ‘During those thirteen weeks,’ he remembered, ‘I ran entirely out of ideas, and I’d sit around and walk for days, saying, “There are no more ideas, that’s it! I’ve shot it all, and it’s gone.” But then something comes up and you get an opening scene, and then you get the feeling that something’s there.’
Sometimes the borrowings worked rather well. The climax to ‘Project Avalon’ comes when the woman that Blake believes to be Avalon turns out to be a robot replica, armed with a phial containing a deadly virus that will kill the crew of the Liberator, a neat blend of Philip K. Dick’s ‘Imposter’ and Survivors. Earlier in the episode, as Blake tries to work out a way into the heavily guarded complex where Avalon is being held, his first thought is typical Nation: ‘What about ventilation shafts?’ Such a means of access has proved invaluable in earlier stories, particularly in Doctor Who, but it turns out that this planet has an unusual climate and is entering its Long Cold, a winter that lasts for eight and a half Earth years, with massively sub-zero temperatures, and the ventilation shafts are closed off for the duration – one Nation cliché renders another obsolete. In ‘Deliverance’ Avon, Vila and Gan are welcomed on the planet Cephlon as the fulfilment of a long-standing prophecy on a formerly advanced world that has fallen into savagery, and the references to Erich von Däniken from ‘Death to the Daleks’ return. We’re not really gods from the skies, you know,’ protests Gan. ‘We’re just men from a spacecraft.’
On other occasions the influences are less successful. In ‘Bounty’ we meet Sarkoff (T.P. McKenna), the exiled former president of the planet Lindor, who has a fondness for the past to rival that of the Medievalists in The Caves of Steel. Some of the details are nicely done – he plays a 78 rpm gramophone record of Tommy Steele’s ‘Singing the Blues’ and murmurs: ‘Echoes of a more civilised age’ – but the effect is rather that of an uninspired, budget episode of The Avengers, seeking to be quirky and offbeat and failing. (Nation later explained that some of the plotline was influenced by the Syrian intervention in Lebanon in 1976, though he admitted ‘that 99.9 per cent of people who see that show won’t see any political significance at all’.)
More explicit still are the echoes in ‘The Web’, which revisits the episode ‘The Velvet Web’ in ‘The Keys of Marinus’. Here the consciousnesses of several scientists survive in a single entity called Saymon, who is suspended in a glass tank on a life support system, and who operates by proxy through humanoid assistants. For good measure, the story also throws in elements of Wells’s The Time Machine and The Island of Dr Moreau. Saymon has been developing techniques of genetic engineering banned elsewhere in the known universe, and has created not only the beautiful assistants, but a race of ugly, stunted creatures called Decimas, a mutant strain of which has evolved, capable of thought and emotion. These mutant Decimas have turned hostile and are attacking the laboratory complex that houses Saymon. In retaliation Saymon wishes to release a lethal dose of radiation into the atmosphere to kill the creatures. But to carry out his plan he needs additional power cells from the Liberator, in exchange for which he will release the ship, currently trapped in a massive cosmic web. It’s a moral dilemma reminiscent of that faced by the Doctor in ‘Genesis of the Daleks’: can Blake condemn an entire race to death in order to save himself and his crew? And, as in ‘Genesis of the Daleks’, Nation sidesteps the issue by having the Decimas break into the lab and kill the occupants.
Then there is ‘Mission to Destiny’, a stand-alone episode that is essentially a murder mystery story of a man beaten to death on board a spaceship. There are no witnesses and the only clue is a number, 54124, written by the victim in his own blood as he lay dying. It takes the intelligence of Avon to recognise that what looks like a number is actually a series of letters: SARA, the name of one of the crew members. ‘We wanted to show that we could do an Agatha Christie story in space,’ reflected Nation. ‘It had all the mystery elements in it, and years later I thought, “What a dummy! I could have made a first-class movie out of that.” It would have been the first space murder mystery.’ He might also have mentioned that it bore a strong resemblance to a Leslie Charteris story that he had adapted as ‘The Inescapable Word’ for The Saint, which likewise features a murder victim leaving behind a cryptic message written in his own blood, in this instance the letters COP. Suspicion is directed at a former police officer, until Simon Templar learns that the dead man was of Russian origin and deduces that he had in his death throes reverted to his native alphabet. The Russian letters COP translate to the English SOR, thus pointing the finger at a character named Professor Soren. Even that was not strikingly original, being rooted in the first Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, in which a dying man scrawls the letters RACHE in blood; the police assume he was trying to implicate a woman named Rachel, until Holmes points out that ‘rache’ is the German word for ‘revenge’.
In the final episode of the season, ‘Orac’, the crew of the Liberator triumph over Servalan and Travis in the race to acquire the ultimate computer from its creator. At the age of eighteen Professor Ensor (Derek Farr) invented a component called a Tarial cell, which became an integral part of every computer in the known universe. Now in exile, he has developed a supercomputer named Orac, in a rare outbreak of futurology by Nation. ‘It is a brain, a genius,’ enthuses Ensor. ‘It has a mind that can draw information from every computer containing one of my cells. Orac has access to the sum total of all the knowledge of all the known worlds.’ But Ensor is a dying man, and possession of the computer passes to Blake, who only then discovers that it also has the personality of its creator: a crotchety, impatient old man who has little but contempt for those less intelligent than himself. ‘This wasn’t a polite computer,’ as Nation pointed out. In fact Orac (again voiced by Peter Tuddenham) is not far off being a rebirth of William Hartnell’s Doctor, always Nation’s favourite incarnation of the Time Lord.
If the first season of Blake’s 7 sometimes feels like a run-through of Terry Nation’s greatest hits, it’s none the worse for that. Since his move from comedy to drama, he had written more than 120 television programmes and his ability to tell a good story had not deserted him. The characters, as rich as those in Survivors, included some of his most memorable creations, particularly Servalan and Travis, but also Vila who has a good line in jokes about his own cowardice: ‘I plan to live forever. Or die trying.’ Most intriguing of all is Avon, whose professed lack of concern for anyone else, maintained throughout with a straight face, is steadily undermined by his interactions with the others. He banters with Vila and, although he makes no secret of his desire to take over the Liberator, he tends ultimately to defer to Blake, seemingly aware that he is not yet ready for leadership. When, in ‘Deliverance’, Blake asks him what it felt like to be treated as a god on Cephlon, he throws back the question with a tone of studied neutrality: ‘Don’t you know?’ And Blake replies, with some insight: ‘Yes. I don’t like the responsibility either.’
When the BBC conducted an audience research report after the first season, Avon emerged as the most popular character among the Liberator crew, followed in order by Blake, Jenna, Vila, Cally and Gan. The same research showed an impressive reaction index rating that averaged at 67, and a definite interest in having the show continue; asked whether they wanted to see a second season, 73 per cent of the sample replied positively. While not a spectacular ratings success, it had been solidly successful, averaging an audience of 9.2 million and reaching the weekly top thirty in the final episode; scheduled against Coronation Street on ITV, hardly the most desirable time slot, it had managed steadily to build an audience.
Less impressed were the critics, though this came as no great surprise. Doctor Who had become acceptable by virtue of its age, but still popular science fiction was seldom the recipient of critical praise, and Nation’s new show was no exception. ‘Blake’s 7 has turned out to be rather a run of the mill space adventure,’ said the Daily Express, while Peter Fiddick in the Guardian thought it was ‘a mix of olde-world space jargon, ray guns, Western-style goodies and baddies, and punch-ups straight out of The Sweeney.’ Stanley Reynolds in The Times was more enthusiastic, though his comments came after just four episodes, before the arrival of Servalan and Travis: ‘Terry Nation’s new series is straight with real villains, and it is nice to hear the youngsters holding their breath in anticipation of a little terror. Television science fiction has got too self-consciously jokey lately.’ And there was one comparison that could not be avoided, whether for good or ill. ‘I suppose the Star Wars boom sparked it off,’ reflected Clive James in the Observer. ‘Suddenly it seemed like a good idea for the Beeb to have its own space opera. Well, here it is. Activate main garbage tubes! Stand by for gunge disposal!’ Or, in the words of Shaun Usher in the Daily Mail: ‘For all those adults who pretend not to watch Doctor Who, and find it a shade too jokey and cliff-hanging, Blake’s Seven will have to do. And considering that it has the kind of budget Star Trek devoted to coffee breaks and Star Wars spent on trailers, it could be a lot worse.’
George Lucas’s film Star Wars had been released in Britain the month before Blake’s 7 debuted, having already been a runaway box-office hit in America. Its huge budget and ground-breaking special effects raised the bar for subsequent screen treatments of science fiction, far beyond a level with which the British film industry, let alone British television, could compete. ‘I enjoyed and admired the film, but came away from the screening green with envy,’ admitted Nation, after attending the press preview. He recognised that his own work had to take a very different tack. ‘When we did Blake’s 7 we realised we had to have interesting stories because our effects would win us no friends. When the space ship went through a black hole it was someone shaking a piece of black card.’ David Maloney, who went with him to the screening, concluded, ‘Well that’s us finished, we can’t possibly match that, we’re dead.’ The possibility of achieving higher production values had in fact been raised early on, when the American media company Time-Life approached the BBC, seeking to put money into the show in return for world rights, but the option was rejected by Alasdair Milne, later to be become director general of the corporation but then the director of programmes. ‘I do not accept,’ he wrote authoritatively in a memo, the same month Star Wars was released, ‘that there is going to be a great surge of interest in science fiction series in America.’
For many of its fans, part of the appeal of Blake’s 7 was precisely that low-budget production, a defiantly British response to American overkill. Some of the design and special effects were as good as anything the BBC had yet produced – particularly the Liberator itself, created by Roger Murray-Leach – but the approach to television drama had not essentially changed from the early days of Doctor Who. This was still ‘a kind of strange, bastard medium,’ in the words of David Maloney, ‘which lay between the theatre and film’. Maloney, who had earlier directed ‘Planet of the Daleks’ and ‘Genesis of the Daleks’ and who produced the first three seasons of Blake’s 7, was another who had come to Doctor Who with a background in theatre. As he suggests, there remained a certain staginess to the series.
Within its limitations, however, the first season of Blake’s 7 was a personal triumph for Nation, whose resolve to write the whole thing had been entirely vindicated. There were weak moments, but he had avoided the problems he encountered on Survivors of having his image of the show diluted by others. The volume of work this entailed meant he had even less involvement in the actual production than normal, but he did this time have a sympathetic producer and the result was exactly what he had set out to create: ‘a modern swashbuckler’. In many ways it was the ultimate Terry Nation creation, a variation on the ITC action adventure stories set on the alien planets of Doctor Who and with the more subtle characterisation of Survivors. There’s also Servalan, a monster almost to rival Davros, there are good jokes, the plot developments and action are relentless and a fight is seldom more than a few minutes away.
Equally characteristic of Nation, there is, running underneath the romping fun, a vein of pure pessimism in its depiction of the future; there’s no sense of hope or progress in this vision of things to come. ‘With its drugged, dejected masses crushed by tyrants,’ noted Shaun Usher, it ‘seemed to picture the future as being much the same as the present, Lord help us, only worse.’ And, while not straying from his wish to entertain the audience, Nation was developing a new sense of moral ambiguity. In Survivors he had begun to introduce a little shading to his villains, suggesting that there might be a need in extremis for the authoritarianism of Wormley and Knox; here he left the arch-villains pure at heart in their evil, but created a cast of ‘heroes’ that included a murderer, a thief, a smuggler and an embezzler. Blake may have been framed, but there is no suggestion that any of the others were anything but criminals.
The season ended on a note of negativity that seemed perfectly in tune with the preceding episodes. Blake and his comrades bring the all-seeing computer Orac on to the Liberator and find that it’s so powerful and has access to so much information that it can effectively predict the future, extrapolating from the present to see the ensuing chains of events and their ultimate consequences. And, in a wonderful cliff-hanger of an ending, Orac reveals to the crew images from the future of the Liberator exploding in space.