City on the Edge of the World!

Chris Boucher is back at the helm, and quality control has been restored. I refuse to believe that Boucher even knew they were making Harvest of Kairos. I think the cast and crew made it when they were drunk during somebody’s wedding. If they turned the camera around during that scene with Dayna’s feet stuck in the web and the flea-monster waddling towards her, you’d see Jacqueline Pearce dancing to ‘Come On Eileen’ with somebody’s Uncle whilst nibbling on a big bit of wedding cake.

But now the party’s over, the hangovers have cleared (Jacqueline’s was bad, because she switched to a bluer shade of space drink last week) and we have an actual television programme once more. And it felt like proper Blake’s 7.

I mean, for one thing it starts off with everybody in a dreadful mood. Del Tarrant is a particularly nasty sort to Vila, and Vila gets a proper retort of a kind that practically made me cheer.

Vila: All my life, for as long as I can remember, there's been people like you

Tarrant: I thought I was unique.

Vila: You’re not even unusual, Tarrant.

They teleport down on a space mission, something goes wrong, and Vila can’t teleport back up. Then we have some baddies, a peaceful alien race with a terrible secret, and a surprising subplot. It’s witty, it’s nicely shot, the effects aren’t entirely disproportionate to the budget but (when we see Vilaworld) they do just go slightly beyond what they can afford, which is how I like it. Also, the Doctor Who guest stars this week outclass even Michael Gough.

I say this felt like familiar territory, but in a significant way it didn’t. This was a story about Vila for a change. It actually gave us a story told from his perspective, and was full of people trying to see things his way. The result was lovely and human. I don’t want to sound too predictable, but having a human, trickster hero did remind me of the mothership: i.e. Doctor Who.

It was so niftily written. From Vila’s point of view, Villains like Baban the Barbarian aren’t rivals or existential threats or mirrors or anything like the villains in other stories: they are, simply, stupid bullies. And Baban was great fun in that role. The city puzzle box transmat space ship – well, it didn’t make perfect sense, but it was different: a riddle, a battle of brain rather than brawn.

Vila really talked and acted like a clever guy this week, talking about the architect of the riddle as if he was still around. He didn’t just point a sonic suitcase at a lock.

And this was a story that benefits so much from happening in this time of upheaval, Tarrant jostling for captaincy, Avon quietly asserting his authority. I don’t know what happened with Jan Chappell’s performance, but she was suddenly more assured and steely – and I put this down to the more interesting group dynamic amongst the crew. Where might this lead?

It’s a credit to Boucher, and a reminder that the show hasn’t yet exhausted all its potential, despite the last few stinkers.

Speaking of stinkers, there was Carol: though she did, admittedly, take a shower halfway through the adventure. Of course, this being his story, Vila had to finally get a romantic storyline. Maybe I’ve just had too much blue space cocktail, but I found it very touching, even though it happened on fast forward. It would have been nice for Carol to stay as tough and smelly as she was when they first met, but it was also nice that Vila got to play the matinee idol hero. Nothing approaching this is going to happen again to Vila again.

One of my most persistent gripes with this show is that it’s overloaded with lead characters. In this story, Chris Boucher demonstrated how a story could emphasise one particular lead above the others – while still giving everyone something to do – and subtly colour the narrative a different hue to others in the series. Since they can hardly vary the settings and locations very much, this seems to be a skill the other writers should get the hang of quickly.

Most ridiculous of all, I actually welled up a bit when Vila said he couldn’t come to ‘Homeworld’ because there was nothing to steal there. I couldn’t help feeling that Chris Boucher was talking about being a writer. Most other professions are transferable to other situations – or perhaps people don’t feel defined by them. But could a writer survive in a world without a past, without riddles and challenges and stuff to do. Who would he be?

Of course, Vila is more a trickster than a thief. So maybe there is a kind of dignity in the analogy. All I know is, however little he might fit into other people’s stories, I’m glad that there is someone like Vila in the world of Blake’s 7, and that now and again he scores a victory over someone like Tarrant.

Dawn of the Gods!

I’m not really sure what happened here.

The title has a fantastic ring to it – definitely reminiscent of the golden age pulp action that makes up so many rungs of Blake’s 7’s DNA. It suggests colour, drama, people swinging on chandeliers, booming disembodied voices.

It turns out that the god in question is something out of the myths of Cally’s planet. So you would think it would be, for the most part, Cally’s story. She certainly deserves one, having been absent for episode one, on a couch for episode two, and standing at the back throughout episode three.

The big drama of the story comes when the Liberator flies unerringly into the heart of a black hole and everything goes marvellously mirrorlon. I mean, that never fails. And then, in a masterstroke, we find out that Orac has taken them through the black hole on purpose. He’s gone slightly nuts! But nobody really gets very angry at him. They just stare at one another in bemusement.

Soon afterwards, Vila goes on a great big spacewalk into the unknown blackness. Exciting! But then he falls onto the floor. He is attacked by a giant unknown something... but survives because there’s a breathable atmosphere.

It’s as if James Follett is trying to undercut every expectation we have about where the story is going. He’s successful for the most part – although we do get a big booming disembodied voice, who is, as expected, much more earthly than a god. But it does sometimes feel as if everyone’s making things up as they go along.

There is, at least, an acknowledgement that great telly depends on great visuals. What more could you want than a spaceship plunging into a black hole, or a world of darkness with a monster coming out of the shadows, or a sinister Willy Wonka type with a sonic cane, or nefarious types sawing the Liberator decks into lumps before being zapped by a psychic computer?

Except that after that, it’s

Doctor Who Guest Star

Terry Scully

with a sun visor and a pack of HB pencils in a random engine room set. Meanwhile, Cally is lying on a sheepskin rug surrounded by curtains being menaced by the voice of Thaarn.

Which is nothing to what happens when she does peek behind the curtain.

Like I say, it’s really not easy to say what happened when this story was made. Nobody comes out of it well: not Cally, not Avon, not Orac, definitely not Thaarn, and not the man with the sonic stick and the top hat. Poor old Terry Scully blows himself up (the second time in a row that we’ve had that story) but it’s not really very clear that he has to.

All I can say with some confidence is that in early 1973, James Follett happened to tune into the tenth anniversary story of another TV show, where the regulars are transported through a black hole into a world of strange imagery, where the will of a godlike being was absolute, a being who belonged to the myth of the show’s only alien character, who had a booming voice but turned out to be strangely impotent when it came down to it.

And he thought, “What this needs is a bloke with a big head behind a velvet curtain…”

I photographed the Radio Times listings from copies held by the British Library. Other screencaps are thanks to this amazing website: www.framecaplib.com/b7lib