Blake’s 7

Apostrophe Now!

Blake’s 7

Series 1 
January - March 1978
13 episodes

Series 2 
January - April 1979 
13 episodes

BBC Blu Ray Region B

Warning: Some general spoilers.

An unexpected disclaimer: This review was always meant to go up on the blog today and I've had it loaded in for a week or two now, ready to publish. So it's a sad coincidence that I learned two days ago, along with everyone else, of the passing of Michael Keating who delighted so many viewers of this show as the comical and cowardly thief Vila, one of the best characters in the show and one of the few actors who actually saw through all four series. So I guess, inadvertently but no less empathetically, this particular post is also a tribute to the quiet genius of Keating's personification of Vila. He will be much missed and certainly much remembered. 

I hadn’t seen Blake’s 7 since I was a kid, when I used to like the show a fair bit but, in the intervening decades, I’d forgotten why. Now, however, the BBC are... very, very slowly... releasing the four series in Blu Ray sets and, it has to be said, they’re looking pretty good. Now, one of the options (and this is presumably why the releases are taking so long to bring out) is to watch the shows with newly added and augmented special effects... which to me kinda defeats the object entirely of watching the show again. If I want to recapture the show of my youth, which was known to us kids in the playground for having the absolutely cheapest, shoddiest looking effects work, even worse than Doctor Who, then I want to be watching it with the original model work (some of which is actually quite good) and the damned 2D cardboard cutouts of the ships moved about on visible sticks which the BBC tried to pretend were somehow serviceable. 

So that’s what I did.

And I have to say, I didn’t just have an okay time with these first two series... I had an absolute blast. Ten year old me perhaps hadn’t acknowledged just how well written and performed these shows were. Created by Terry Nation (creator of the Daleks), he wrote the majority of the first series episodes and brought in others to help out on the second. And it’s absolutely brilliant science fiction writing. Blake doesn’t assemble his band of rebels against the evil Imperial Federation straight away... it took a few episodes to set up. The world building on this show is incredible and constantly, judging from the first two years, evolving.

Yeah, although this was a family show the BBC didn’t steer away from complex adult issues like faked paedophilia accusations and occasional shots of bloody violence in the show. For instance, when Brian Blessed as a villain is making a nuisance of himself, the crew just teleport him into space and we watch him explode. 

At the end of the first episode, while he is being transported with other prisoners, Blake (played by Gareth Thomas), meets cowardly comic relief thief Vila (played by Michael Keating) and the glamorous but capable Jenna (played by Sally Knivette).  By the end of the second episode he also has the company of the brawny Gan (played by David Jackson) and the brilliantly cold and ruthless Avon (definitely my favourite character after all these years, played crisply by Paul Darrow). Blake and his new crew also steal an advanced alien ship, The Liberator, with a somewhat sophisticated computer called Zen, which they take as another crew member. 

The final team member (until another turns up in the last episode of series one) is Callly, played by Jan Chappell, who joins after a few episodes in. And the numbers and, indeed the title of the show, never made sense  The ship-board computer of their sophisticated and extremely beautiful alien spaceship is named as the seventh crew member but, the other computer crew member at the end of the first series, Orac, means there are technically eight of them by the end of that first year. 

The title logo was a good one too but, for some reason as a kid, I never noticed it was missing the apostrophe it so greatly needs to make any grammatical sense. I shall always call it by its grammatically correct name, though. 

Also during the first season, we gradually have the main villains set up. Jacqueline Pearce as the stunning (and sexually awakening, to a lot of teenagers in the UK at the time, by all accounts) and utterly ruthless Supreme Commander Servalan. Then there was her right arm, Space Commander Travis, played by Stephen Greif. His left arm was artificial with a laser which shot out of the finger and he had a nasty eye patch where Blake had destroyed half his face in years gone by... he was obsessed with hunting and killing Blake. In the second series, Brian Croucher replaces Greif as Travis and, I dunno, he is playing it in a completely different way to the former actor in the part. It’s a bit jarring to tell the truth... we noticed it then and, now we can watch episodes back to back, it’s very noticeable now. 

The thing about Blake’s 7 is... Blake didn’t always win or come out on top. Sometimes he got a little victory, sometimes it was a stalemate and, yeah, sometimes he lost in quite spectacular and damning fashion. And the regular characters were never safe from harm either. The death of Gan a little way into the second series, where he dies trying to hold up a ‘cave in’ to let Blake through... was shocking at the time. Blake’s ‘heavy’, with the limiter chip planted in his head by the Federation so he couldn’t intentionally kill someone, died in much the same way as Athos the musketeer does in the Alexandre Dumas book The Vicomte de Bragelonne (sometimes published as The Man In The Iron Mask) which was one of the sequels to The Three Musketeers. So I always wondered if Terry Nation had Athos in mind when he created the character. 

The teleport effects in the series are crude but quite cute... I always loved the outline of the figures who are being teleported being graphically shown as they ‘beamed down’ to a planet, as much as a distraction to the crude effect as anything else. 

One of the strengths of the new Blu Ray sets put out by the BBC is the wealth of extras. One I remembered very well and I was delighted to see, again, for the first time in so many years, is the segment of Blue Peter where the presenter showed the kiddies how to make a Blake’s 7 teleport bracelet out of a Lucozade bottle and some easily found or reconstructed household objects. The final result looked so good that it seemed obvious that this was indeed the same way the special effects department must have made them at the time. 

And, honestly, I was so surprised at just how good this was. Series One ended up with a vision of the graceful looking starship The Liberator being blown up with Blake and all aboard perishing... until we are reminded at the start of series two that it’s just a vision and also, we see how the vision really comes to play out. The Liberator itself would not be destroyed until, if memory serves, the end of the third series. The second series ends with the crew on their own in their small starship facing off an overwhelming fleet of alien invaders... rolling credits just as they are about to engage. Now, I don’t remember just how this is picked up in series three but I know that Blake and Jenna do not return. Well, Blake does for one episode and for the very last episode at the end of series four, when one of the most traumatic endings the children of the UK were ever subjected to played out... but I’m getting ahead of myself. 

I was absolutely delighted to rediscover Blake’s 7 again on Blu Ray and really wasn’t expecting the writing and performances to be so good after all these years. Keeping my fingers crossed that Series 3 will be released very soon. 

Shed Of The Dead

Dawn Of The Shed

Shed Of The Dead
UK 2019 Directed by Drew Cullingham
7DM Studios

Warning: Some spoilers.

Zombie movies seem to come and go with an alarming and ever increasing frequency over the decades since George A. Romero (whose image makes a posthumous cameo as a cartoon figure in the opening titles here) reinvented and popularised the genre back in 1968 with Night Of The Living Dead. I think the reason why zombie films and the majority of horror films made these days are so predominant in the modern cinematic landscape is because they're relatively cheap to shoot and, quite often, have more of a shot at turning a profit on their budget. So, yeah, Shed Of The Dead is another relatively low budget zombie movie which tries to sink or swim with all the rest of them.

Now, I will go on record straight away and say... this is not a terrible movie. It’s well made and it’s got a lot going for it. I think, from my personal point of view, the worst I can really say about it is that it’s just not to my taste. And you have to factor in that I’ve only seen, maybe 50 - 90 zombie movies in my life, so I’m hardly an expert on these things. I think this one may split people though, not because of the way in which it lives and dies by the necessary genre clichés of all the other zombie films made these days... but because of the tone of the writing.

Okay... so the plot is that Trevor (played by Spencer Brown) practically lives in the shed on his dishevelled and untended allotment. His prime activity, since he’s unemployed, is to distil homemade vodka and paint up his role playing game figures. Indeed, the pre-credits sequence of the film is the conclusion of a campaign rendered mostly as static drawings with slightly animated sections and a wonderfully enthusiastic voice-over commentary by Brian Blessed. He plays a Dungeon & Dragons flavoured military table top style game with his best friend Graham (played by Ewen MacIntosh) and suffers the constant nagging of his wife Bobbi (played by Lauren Socha), who has a beauty parlour under the ‘office’ of her sex worker friend Harriet (played by the always watchable Emily Booth). Then he gets into an argument with a guy in the allotment who accidentally falls back onto his own pitchfork which goes through his face and kills him. Trevor, quite stupidly, saws his legs off so he can bury him but, luckily for him... before he can be accused of a murder, the zombie apocalypse happens... although he does have a bit of trouble disposing of the very animate, legless corpse for a bit. Of course, as in the majority of the movies in this genre, there is no explanation given for the sudden zombie infestation and, frankly, none needed.

So there’s the set up. It’s got potential I think and at least some of the writing isn’t too bad. The performances are all excellent and, in addition to those four main cast, there are a wealth of good and known actors from the genre joining them, including Michael Berryman (as Harriet’s favourite client), Kane Hodder and Bill Moseley. And they and, pretty much everyone in this, are firing on all cylinders giving some nice performances.

The film is... well... it’s very English and the humour (it’s a zombie comedy, for sure) is probably not going to be everyone’s cup of tea. Personally, I found the dialogue and characterisations to be a little bit caustic and grittier than I would have liked. While the fact that some of the characters felt like they’d just stepped out of a Mike Leigh movie would normally be a huge compliment, I just found the language and crudity of certain characters a bit much and, for this kind of film, a little unnecessary (yeah, you probably won’t hear me leveling that complaint at a film very often, for sure).

That being said, there were some nice moments of humour and the goriness which, post-1968, have become a staple ingredient of the genre, certainly didn’t feel too cheap. And, of course, certain of the very UK oriented bits of humour did bring a smile. Like the fact that everybody knows that one of the allotment plot keepers is a serial killer who routinely buries the bodies there but, you know, nobody really cares enough to tell the police or anything and are just happier minding their own business. Very British.

There are some nice one liners in Shed Of The Dead too and, frankly, seeing Emmy Booth dressed as a dominatrix in one scene is certainly worth the price of admission to this kind of an affair. I do feel like I’m in the middle of the road on this one, much to my regret. I didn’t love it but, at the same time, I certainly can’t condemn it because it’s too well made and some of the characters made me smile on occasion. Although they were a bit dumb in a lot of cases, especially when the main weakness of the zombies is made known to one of the characters and used as a joke early on in the film... and then totally ignored, never to be revisited again in the course of the running time. It’s not exactly frightening or suspenseful but, then again, this kind of comedic zombie carnage movie rarely is intended to be, to be fair. And that’s about as much as I can say about it. Not a hit or a miss for me. I wouldn’t recommend it but then, I wouldn’t tell anyone who is into zombie films not to watch it either. Just not something which pushes my buttons in any major way. This might have done better if it had premiered at FrightFest, I suspect.

Flash Gordon (1980)

Flash In The Can

Flash Gordon (1980)
UK/Italy/Netherlands/USA 1980
Directed by Mike Hodges
Studio Canal Blu Ray Zone B

When I was a kid, from the first omnibus TV screening of the original 1936 Flash Gordon serial by the BBC in 1975... which was shown as two long ‘compiled’ episodes with a Hoppalong Cassidy movie playing between the two, I was absolutely hooked on Flash Gordon and that theatrical serial and its two sequels, Flash Gordon’s Trip To Mars and Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe, were... and still are... three of my favourite things within the world of film.

Now I’m not going to talk about the serials much here because... well, I intend to watch them again sometime over the course of the next year and write about them for this blog... but I will say that many decades later, when I read some of Alex Raymond’s original Flash Gordon newspaper strips, I was shocked to find that, as far as the first serial goes at any rate, the 1936 Hollywood version with Buster Crabbe, with all its episodic twists and turns and globe-trotting travels on the planet Mongo, was remarkably close to the original source material.

Now, around about the same time as I first saw that original serial, a young director called George Lucas was trying to buy the rights to make a modern, Flash Gordon movie (the rights were optioned with Fellini at the time, I believe, who gets name checked as a character in the 1980 version). He couldn’t afford the asking price so, in the end, he put all his ideas into making his own space opera which borrowed quite a lot from the feel of the original... that film turned out to be Star Wars and, as you undoubtedly know, the rest was movie history, as far as that story goes.

However, the Flash Gordon film then being made by Dino DeLaurentis was floundering and creative differences forced one of the original directors for this movie to part company... so, yeah, we missed out on the great Nicholas Roeg’s vision for Flash (which, given the direction he was going, I’m not sure wasn’t a blessing in disguise) and eventually Mike Hodges went on to direct the new movie.

Ironically, of course, it was the success of the first Star Wars film itself that paved the way for the atmosphere in which a film like Flash Gordon could be taken seriously by studio executives. The bandwagon machine for post Star Wars clones was an immediate rush for anything science fiction to be given a green light and the next ten years saw a lot of films, some bad and others good, coming out to greet the viewing public. Stuff like Star Crash, Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek The Motion Picture, The Black Hole, Battle Beyond The Stars, The Humanoid... things that might not have made it to the cinema in exactly the same way they might have, if at all, without Lucas’ film hugely changing the cinema going map. Even the popular James Bond franchise was retooled and the next intended film for the series was replaced with a ‘name only but not the original story’ version of Moonraker, to keep up with the general public’s voracious demand for science fiction.

I remember seeing Flash Gordon back in 1980 at my local cinema in Enfield and thinking to myself that, although it was obviously nowhere near as good as those original theatrical serials (nothing to do with Flash Gordon since has ever touched those... but I’m sure there’s a great film series to be realised from these stories yet), this film was still a huge amount of fun and, if it wasn’t anywhere near as close to the original story, it did have some anchor points and some of the spirit of the template was certainly there. So I liked it a lot, in other words... and ended up seeing it three times at the cinema, if memory serves.

The wonderful Arrow films has released a nice new Blu Ray restoration of the movie overseas but, alas, due to rights issues, the new UK version has been released by Studio Canal. I was going to go for the big £50 boxed edition but I thought that was a bit of an expensive option and I had most of the stuff in it anyway... so I saved some money by buying the new, slimmed down 2 disc 40th Anniversary Edition and then augmenting it with the third of the discs in the deluxe edition set, the documentary film Life After Flash, as a separate Blu Ray purchase (I got a nice little handwritten note from the director thanking me when that film came through in the post and I am looking forward to watching and reviewing Life After Flash for this blog at some point in the very near future).

The film is, mostly, nicely presented and the production values are, for the most part, excellent. I hate the first couple of spaceship designs used in this but the final one, War Rocket Ajax, is a nice, spectacular design worthy of the original strip and the whole film is like a bizarre fusion of 1930s eye candy reimagined for the 1980s. It’s so colourful too... like somebody had hired Mario Bava and Dario Argento to do the lighting and then just let them run riot with the thing.

The cast is wonderful... Sam J. Jones as Flash is a lot more of a presence than I believe people gave him credit for. Melody Anderson’s Dale Arden is, perhaps, a little stronger as a character than she was in the 1930s but that’s no bad thing either. Now I always loved the original 1930s cast and especially Frank Shannon as Dr. Zarkov. Here, Zarkov is played by Chaim Topol and he’s absolutely amazing in the role, if a little over the top. That being said, most of the cast are a little over the top because the movie does almost demand a larger than life delivery of the lines. I mean, Brian Blessed as Vultan, King of the Hawkmen, is a completely brilliant bit of casting and Timothy Dalton as Prince Baron is... as written, a little more intimidating and complicated than the original... but still great. And Ornella Muti as Princess Aura, daughter of Ming The Merciless, is who every teenage boy was thinking of at the time. And of course, there’s the great Max Von Sydow as Emperor Ming, playing it to the hilt just as Charles Middleton had done in the 1930s. Plus a load of great character actors in the piece too, of course, such as Richard O’Brien and the late, great William Hootkins. Nothing much can go wrong there.

The films is exciting, fairly pacey, very humorous and has some exciting laser battles towards the end of the picture. There’s maybe too many “that characters dead, they’ve had it now, oh no they’re not... “Gordon’s Alive!” moments in the film but this just, generally, reflects the cliffhanger nature of both the original serials and the newspaper strips so... I’ve got no complaints. It’s also a very sexy film and as far as the costumes and certain comments go, it certainly reflects the first of the three 1930s serials in this respect (the costumes... or lack of them... had to be completely toned down for the second and third serials, is my remembrance).

And then there’s the music. Queen’s hit song is fantastic and some of the other action sequences are exciting too. Alas, they didn’t really do their job is my understanding and, though they got a hit record album out of it, a fair amount of extra music had to be hastily written by Howard Blake using their themes, from what I've read over the years and there’s some nice stuff from him here too (I have a ‘promo’ CD of his parts of the score and it’s a real eye... err... ear opener). Still, the main Queen song, Flash, is great and the pulse which starts it and goes through some of the action scenes certainly makes the hairs on your arms stand up at times. The opening credit sequence accompanying this song, utilising fast montages of the original Alex Raymond newspaper strip, is probably one of the best title sequences in cinema history, as far as I’m concerned.

I have two slight problems with this new Blu Ray restoration. Once is that the highly visible strings on the Hawkmen have been digitally removed and I think I noticed  few other little special effects ‘enhancements’ as I watched this new version. Nobody needs this kind of Lucas-like tinkering. We want to see the strings and the wobbly sets please... they’re part of the history of the film. The other thing I wasn’t too sure about was the scene where the Ming punches through the windscreen of the plane near the start. The saturation seems hugely overblown here and you really can’t see that it’s a facsimile of Ming punching through anymore... just a big red blur. I think that was a bit overdone and another unwelcome bit of ‘restoration’. However, the majority of the film is still beautifully lurid in its design (contradictory as that may sound to some) and hugely entertaining.

And there you have it. Flash Gordon (1980) is a fun film which lovers of cinema should definitely take a look at if they like a good night in with a good movie. A feel good film which doesn’t, alas, live up to the 1930s serials but certainly makes a much more successful go of it than any other versions since then (don’t talk to me about the 1950s German/US TV show starring Bantam paperback Doc Savage cover model Steve Holland as Flash... it was a bad attempt at best). This film is easily one I’ll watch again and again and it’s loaded with extras including a half hour look at the unfilmed Nicholas Roeg version and... and this is a real good one... a commentary track by Brian Blessed. I haven’t listened to that yet but I already know that’s going to be worth the price of purchase alone and it will be going on sometime soon.