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. 

Hammer House Of Horror

Blood And Circuses

Hammer House Of Horror
UK Airdate 1980
Carlton Blu Ray Zone B
Hammer House of Horror and its sequel series, Hammer House Of Mystery and Suspense, were pretty much the last hurrah for the once popular Hammer Studios up until they returned ‘under new management’, so to speak, in the 21st Century. I would have been 12 when I first saw these and am delighted to finally be able to catch up with them again now as, even at that young age, by the time I was half way through the series I pretty much gave up on it as a kid. Even then I recognised that the show was much more miss than hit but, rewatching it all these decades later, it kind of makes up in nostalgic value what it still lacks in quality. That being said, there are a few episodes which are actually not bad, towards the last third of the series but, alas, the majority are just... well, they’re okay.

The series has some nice direction from some of the many directors here and some pretty good performances but, I’ll go through it on an episode by episode basis here to give you just a quick taste of what they are like, rather than do a big overview of the show as a whole. The series is a portmanteau format of stand alone horror tales (although some do kind of go more into thriller territory rather than actual horror, it has to be said) and I had just two strong memories from the show which I was hoping I hadn’t imagined but... I’ll make those clear as I come to them.

So the first episode is called Witching Time and, although I didn’t realise it until I was quite a way through rewatching these, it’s actually one of the stronger episodes of the show. Now, there’s a lot of camera movement in this one and, out of all of them, this is one of the more stylistically pleasing of the bunch, with some nice framing showing different layers of rooms through various doorways (which was an old Roger Corman trick to try and add depth and production values to his shots on those old Edgar Allan Poe adaptations he used to work on), with the camera picking up various characters on different planes, or sections, of the shot. The episode stars Jon Finch, who played Jerry Cornelius in the movie adaptation of The Final Programme (reviewed here). Here he is playing a film score composer (not too many films or TV shows who choose that as a career option for their characters... I can only think of a couple off hand) who is haunted both by the concern that his wife is having an affair and, also, by a witch who has come forward to his time from the point where she was almost burned at the stake. The episode includes some nudity which was probably fairly bold for its time on television and this was presumably done because, frankly, the studio probably thought they could get away with these sort of shenanigans easier in the alloted time slot and they may help increase the ratings for the show.

Next comes the episode The Thirteenth Reunion, which has a journalist going undercover at a health farm and eventually uncovering a dark secret which, frankly, becomes very obvious from a very early stage in the proceedings (like 99.9% of these episodes, it has to be said). One of the things it gives us from a nostalgia point of view is a young James Cosmo (billed as James Cosmos on the end credits, for some reason) in a role which primarily has him hurling horrendous insults at a fat woman... which is kind of interesting and I can’t imagine the same actor as he is when I last saw him in The Hole In The Ground (reviewed here) being able to get away with this kind of behaviour today, within the current climate of political correctness. Another thing I thought was nice, considering that a number Hammer films had already started being shown on television at this point, was a sort of cross-promotion in that the episode contains dialogue saying... “I’ll bring some garlic. Dracula might try to turn us into the undead.”

The third episode is called Rude Awakening and the story of this one is very vivid in my head because it contains one of two memories of the show I’ve not forgotten over the years, which is a shot of the star Denholm Elliot being approached by a naked woman and making love to him in a phone box. I remember thinking the scene was fairly raunchy at the time but, alas, the years have not been kind to the scene and it looks fairly unexciting now. The story deals with a man who can’t wake up from a series of dreams which usually end with his dying in some way. Even as a lad I could see how this one would end but it’s nice to see Mr. Elliot in the role (just before his first involvement in the Indiana Jones movies). It also has him using expressions like “Up the apples, darling.” and one has to wonder what a younger audience who are unfamiliar with cockney rhyming slang would make of this these days (I’m pretty sure they would have had no problems back at the time this show was aired).

After a strange episode called Growing Pains, in which a family adopts a weird, ‘you just want to smack him’ kid after the accidental death of their own son, who is quite happy to be influenced by the ghostly instructions of said offspring, we have what is perhaps the most famous episode of the show and the one from which my other strongest memory of Hammer House of Horror comes from... The House That Bled To Death. For some reason I remembered a scene where a children’s birthday party is interrupted by bursting pipes which cover the whole room in Hammer’s trademark Kensington gore. The episode stars Nicholas Ball, who some of my readers may best remember from his turn in the title role of the TV show Hazel and, although I didn’t remember the so-called twist ending from when I was a young ‘un... I have to say it gets quite easy to figure it out fairly quickly and the episode was a bit of a disappointment, it has to be said. As was the sixth episode Charlie Boy, about a cursed voodoo fetish doll in which, pretty much the most creative moment was when the death of an antagonist early on in the proceedings as he is knifed, is crosscut with a lady having an orgasm.

Episode seven, Silent Scream, stars Hammer stalwart Peter Cushing as an ex-Nazi Prisoner of War Camp Officer and tells of his experiments with locking up and training captive animals... an experiment which he takes up a notch when a character played by a relatively young, curly headed Brian Cox is released from prison and ends up under the unwanted care of Mr. Cushing. This episode also demonstrates the relative cheapness of the production when a stray dog follows a character on screen when she is trying to sneak into a building and said dog has nothing obvious to do with the plot and is never seen from again.

The next story, Children Of The Full Moon, stars a husband and wife who end up stranded and stay at a large house which seems to be just populated with kids and a kind of ‘caretaker’ lady who is played by Diana Dors. Unfortunately, despite not being a badly made episode, the title totally gives away where they are going with this one and... yeah... well, with a title like that there’s really no surprise, is there?

Episode nine, Carpathian Eagle is probably my favourite of the episodes of the show... despite both making the similar mistake of revealing just what is going on from very early on in the episode as regards to being the identity of the killer and, also, not actually having a horror element to the episode. This one deals with the descendant of an Elisabeth Bathory type countess who, it is said, can also change into an eagle and who cuts her victims hearts out. Her modern day biographer played by Susanne Danielle is a pretty good character though and I was not used to Danielle being able to play a role as understated as she does it in many of the scenes here. It will come as no surprise to many that the character she plays may be said to be a... well... a method writer but it really didn’t spoil my appreciation of the story. We also have Valentine Dyall (remember him in shows like Callan and Raffles) playing a policeman and there’s even a young, pre-Remington Steele Pierce Brosnan playing one of the briefly seen victims. Another fleeting cameo is made by W. Morgan Sheppard, who would later play the principle villain in Elvira, Mistress Of The Dark (reviewed here). 

The next story, Guardians Of The Abyss is also very good and it’s very much in the same vein as a typical Dennis Wheatley supernatural thriller (not that many of Wheatley’s thrillers were of a supernatural bent but the few he did write in that style became very famous and, in terms of Hammer Studios, the source novels for two of their films). The tale features Paul Darrow in the cast (Avon from Blake’s Seven) and one of the actresses who I’ve missed seeing on the screen since I had a crush on her in the 1980s from the first series of C.A.T.S Eyes... Rosalyn Landor.

Visitor From The Grave, the next in the series, also stars a Blake’s Seven actor, this time Blake himself Gareth Thomas. It also stars Manimal actor Simon MacCorkindale in what is so obviously a ‘gaslighting’ tale with an equally obvious ending. 

Next up we have The Two Faces Of Evil which is, again, obvious in what its doing but is, I have to say, an exceptionally well shot and designed episode including some very cool compositions and some nicely chilling, paranoid POV shots... it’s easily the most sinister and creepy of all the episodes, despite having yet another end game you can see coming a mile off.

The very last story, The Mark Of Satan, was interesting to me because it includes a man who is being slowly driven insane by sinister events at a hospital and with his unhealthy worry about the number nine. I had a similar revelation about certain properties of factors of the number nine on a bus some years back so, yeah, I can sympathise. It’s really not a great episode, however and it’s not the best way to end the series, in all honesty.

One of the common things about this particular series is in the endings of all the episodes, before the reprise of the distinctive title music. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, Hammer went through a stage where their moves ended in a certain, similar way. Although good was usually seen to be triumphing over evil, the endings were still quite bleak and suggested that the battle ground of the struggle between good and evil took a heavy toll on the side of the angels. Well, this series does it one better and, it has to be said, not one episode ends up well for any of the main protagonists. Either evil wins outright or both sides of the coin lose out equally... there are no bright rays of hope at the end of any of the episodes in this one. So, if you watch these all in close proximity to each other it is... I would say... a bit of a downer.

Nevertheless, if you want to see some charmingly told chillers with a whole host of easily recognisable, ‘can’t put a name to the face’ British character actors then Hammer House Of Horror is definitely one to watch and, I have to say, I was astonished by just how good this new Blu Ray transfer looks. It’s pretty obvious from this release that the episodes must have been shot on film stock as opposed to video because they look like they were just filmed yesterday. The crisp quality of the images and the deep colours are an absolute joy to look at and, I have to say, I really didn’t expect these things to have survived in such pristine shape. Network have done a really good job here (there are even a number of extras... the intentions of one of which is a little more questionable than the others) and they really deserve a lot of applause for the quality of this release. Definitely one to have for followers of Hammer Studios and lovers of British television in general. This is a very welcome addition to the TV shelf.

The Silurians

The Cave And The Bold

The Silurians
UK Airdate: 31st January to 14th March 1970
BBC Region 2

Well... today marks the 49th anniversary of the broadcast of the first ever episode of Doctor Who, so I thought I’d better watch a story and write a review of it. Here we have Jon Pertwee’s second story as the Doctor and I’ve not seen this since I maybe glimpsed bits of it from wherever I was playing or laying when it was on when I was two years old, on a black and white TV set... until I revisited it now. I honestly don’t know if I saw any of this as a kid or not, but little flashes of imagery did keep coming back to me as I was watching it.

I wasn’t expecting much more than a clunky piece of whimsy out of this but, once again, the serial surprised me by being fairly well written, pretty well shot and really well acted. The key UNIT (United Nations Intelligence Taskforce) team of The Doctor, Liz Shaw and Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart actually does have a lot of chemistry... even though it was not long, after only four stories, that Caroline John (who played Liz) left the show because of pregnancy, although I understand the shows producer wasn’t looking at renewing her contract anyway. Which is a shame actually. I mean, I like Katy Manning as Jo Grant as much as the next feller, but I thought Liz was a pretty good companion too. Although she continued with the character in later decades in Who related video and audio productions, she was only seen once again in the show itself in a tiny guest spot in The Five Doctors... which is a pity. The last I heard of her was when she was reading the audio version of Elizabeth Sladen’s autobiography, as Sladen was no longer around to do that herself. Ironically, it wasn’t long before Caroline sadly passed away herself, earlier this year.

Anyway... back to The Silurians. The writing in this story, about a race of cave dwellers who are awoken and want to reclaim their planet, touches on some really interesting themes and moral questions and, in seven episodes, covers slightly different but ultimately the same ground as the Matt Smith two part Silurian story, The Hungry Earth/Cold Blood... which I realise now was more or less a rewrite of this original story but with some short cuts taken for brevity. Although, when you compare the two stories, I’d have to say I prefer the Pertwee original a lot more than the 2010 version.

There’s a whole group of familiar actors who turn up if you like playing “spot the future famous person”, including a young Geoffrey Palmer and a slightly younger than I remember him Fulton Mackay, who took me all of the first episode to place without that white hair I used to remember him for in Porridge. Also on hand, as UNIT-Captain-who-slinks-around-in-the-background-firing-off-shots and, amazingly, surviving all the way through the whole serial without being killed, is a young Paul Darrow, who many UK TV watchers will mostly remember from his turn as Avon in the much loved British sci-fi TV show Blake’s 7. It was nice to see all these kinds of people on hand to give quality performances to a show which really made use of them.

Also, Who fans take note, this story marks the first appearance of Jon Pertwee’s (and later Tom Baker’s) old faithful yellow roadster Bessie. I remember everyone used to like seeing pictures and doing jigsaw puzzles of Bessie back in the day.

The special effects are, as you would expect, a bit iffy (although not as iffy as they got a decade or more later) but the silurian costumes themselves are really top notch designs and so much better than the almost fake “pass-for-silurians” costumes which we have in the show nowadays. The design features of these suits really do look “non-human” as opposed to the “people wearing make up and a touch of prosthetics” which producers of all modern TV shows seem to think is the way to go, and which gives the aliens on most TV shows produced today a homogenous, similar look. The lack of flexibility in these old costumes still triumphs, I think, over the advantages of a lighter application of make-up, although there is a very bad performance issue with one of the Silurians on this. The more militant silurian (pretty much the same kind of character as one in the Matt Smith two parter) is faced with the problem, which his fellow silurians also have, of needing to add some movement to himself when he is speaking to show that it is, indeed, he who is speaking. Unfortunately, the actor playing this part seems to go over the top and his silurian seems to have a permanent, jittery movement whenever he’s on screen, like he’s got Parkinson’s disease or something. This really isn’t a good look for the character and it’s such a shame that the story in general is cursed with, effectively, a “mad silurian on acid” performance when the rest of the race are portrayed much more sensibly by his colleagues. Of course, he might have been told to act this way because of the nature of that particular silurian’s character, I don’t know, but I was surprised the entire performance on this one is like it is.

That issue aside, though, it’s a great little story and doesn’t shy away from showing things happening on a much larger scale than I‘m used to seeing in the modern incarnation of the series. When the silurians release a plague on mankind, for example, they actually show it happening all over London in various location shots such as a busy station. I’m guessing a lot of the “extras” in some of these shots weren’t aware that they were being extras in a TV show at all, and I’m not sure you could get away with that approach today, but it certainly pays off in here, especially in a crudely edited but brave attempt at a montage sequence showing The Doctor attempting to discover an antidote and UNIT working “crowd control”, superimposed over scenes of people collapsing in various UK locations. Great stuff.

Not one of my favourite classic Doctor Who stories by a long shot but definitely an enjoyable romp with a very serious edge to it (even if Jon Pertwee keeps doing his “funny face” look from Worzel Gummidge whenever he’s zapped by the third eye of a silurian). Definitely recommended and a nice reminder of the origins of the creatures who are still with us in the show today (and I am looking forward to seeing the return of my favourite of the “modern silurians” in this year’s upcoming Christmas special). Next stop for this Doctor Who fan will be me revisiting a story that definitely had something of a terrifying effect on me as a nipper, although I can’t remember any of it except the iconic look of the monsters. Join me again with my Doctor Who head on soon as I delve into the classic story of... The Sea Devils... string vests n’ all!