blakes 7

As if I needed to spell it out after four consecutive instalments of Ward’s 7, here I made it absolutely clear that I was really into Blake’s 7. At the time, we were five episodes into the third series and it had obviously inspired me a hell of a lot. I don’t know if I was asked to write about something I really enjoyed or whether I just couldn’t contain my enthusiasm, but it looks like I decided to write the entire history of the programme from memory. And then got carried away with irrelevance until I ran out of time. As you can probably imagine (or spot straight away, if you know anything about Blake’s 7), I got most of the details wrong. It was Avon, not Gan, who first boarded the Liberator with Blake and Jenna. They were able to pilot the ship a full week before Zen revealed himself. Servalan’s ‘battle cruiser’ definitely didn’t attack them near Cygnus Alpha because she wasn’t introduced until three episodes later, and she definitely didn’t crash there. And all that stuff about patrol troops and blasting them out of the sky - I completely made all that up. The rest is more or less right, give or take a few things, but by that time I was clearly rushing to get it done before the bell went. To be fair, this is an eight year old trying to remember TV programmes from when he was six. I assumed, when I read this, that I’d recently seen a repeat of the episode where they all end up on Cygnus Alpha, explaining why I spent so much of this page mentioning it. But no - scouring through BBC Genome, it’s clear that didn’t happen. Series 1 of Blake’s 7 wasn’t repeated until the year 2000. Series 2 and 3 were never repeated on the BBC. Fortunately, the episodes were available on VHS and DVD long ago (and are now available to stream to your heart’s content on Britbox), which is how I know now what I didn’t know then. It’s so weird, this idea that back then, we couldn’t instantly access all the information we needed about whatever we wanted to know about. The internet is so much a part of our lives now, I don’t give it a second thought. The ability to find out anything and everything about Blake’s 7 is enshrined in international law as a basic human right. But in 1980, if I didn’t tune into the right channel at the right time, that was it. Home video recorders - still over a year away for me - would give us a bit more freedom. But there was no way to find out what happened if you forgot to press record, no one to explain it to you if you didn’t know anyone who’d seen it. And the idea that you’d ever see it again was distant and remote. I longed to see this stuff again, but never really thought I would. Did that make it more exciting? I don’t know. But it definitely meant I never imagined anyone would scrutinise my misrememberings to this extent. Much less that it would be me who did it. Whatever happens, if you haven’t actually watched the whole of Blake’s 7 and don’t know how it all pans out in the end, DO NOT READ SPOILERS AND DON’T SKIP AHEAD. It’s worth sticking with it on the slow path - the ending will be so much sweeter if you’ve earned it.