Orbit!

FROM: dirtydozen@hotmale.co.space

TO: pres.sleer.valan@gmail.co.smic

SUBJECT: Room on top?

Dear Servalan,

Hope you are quite well. Or, to be absolutely consistent, quite mad, bad and dangerous to know as ever you were. Sorry to have missed you on down there on the planet Malodar, a world that lived up to its name by stinking to high heaven. And yes, I got your scent, right enough, amidst the stench of deceit, regret, frustrated eroticism and Deep Heat. That evil genius Egrorian had certainly pressed against somebody who wears ‘Suspiria’ perfume, and in these circumstances at least, it wasn’t his ex-boyfriend Pinder (it was him with the Deep Heat). I wouldn’t have thought Professor E. was your type, but I can hardly talk, having taken myself and my colleagues to Malodar and the brink of destruction on nothing more than the promise of his giant weapon.

So yes, I got away, and more than that, I know it was you who tried to kill me, and more than that, I know that you know that I know, in fact: you know that I know that you knew that I know that you knew that I know that you knew, and so ad infinitum. I don’t think there’s anything we don’t know about each other. Never was the chance of a mate allowed to grow so stale.

For a long time we’ve been in the same orbit, you and I, going around and around. To an observer, it might look as if you were in pursuit; to a political theorist, it might seem that I’ve been deliberately giving you the runaround. Only an astrophysicist would know the truth: we’re both swinging in circles because that’s how the universe holds together. But whose orbit is holding us, Servalan, and if he’s not around anymore – are we free to go our own way?

To be frank, I’m writing to see if you’ve got any jobs going free at the Federation, or wherever it is you work at the moment. If you can get away with an assumed name, not even growing your hair out, I’m pretty sure I could slip into some secret niche. No, it’s not a trap. What would be the point?

Once upon a time, I’d have scorned to ask such a question. You were the enemy, pure and simple – well, not at first. Servalan, you were a target. You made yourself our opposition, pursuing and antagonising us and generally looming large. You and Travis put a face on the forces that Blake and Jenna were set against. We all came to obsess over that face, one way or another.

Nowadays, I’ve no idea what you stand for or what you want. You’re hardly in power any more, and all your schemes generally come to naught since my leather-trousered arse is still sitting safe and sound on board the Scorpio as I write this. You’re no opposition and certainly no target. If you want to get anywhere, you’re going to need better allies than Pinder and Egrorian.

More to the point, and speaking off the record, I’m not entirely sure what my place in the universe is any more. I don’t need money or glory. The woman I loved, as you know, is dead. My old friends sell me out, my new friends make me sick. Somewhere in the middle is Vila. I’ve never quite been able to make up my mind about Vila, but last Monday evening in the heat of the moment, everything to play for… to my surprise, I found my mind was made up. Oh, we laughed about it afterward, but since then, it’s given me pause. I’ve caught myself staring into space with even more gravity and melodrama than usual.

I can’t keep flying around in circles, Serv. Something has to give. You know what I’m talking about: you nearly made it out, left for dead twice, and you clambered back onto the horse and where did it get you? Pressing yourself against Egrorian, hatching another pointless scheme. I know you know what I’m talking about. You know I know, and I know that you know that I know.

Sooner or later there has to be a decisive move on someone’s part. I could send along my CV but I suspect you have all the salient details.

See you next Monday,

K.A.

Sand!

It’s the singles bar at the end of the universe, and now that Servalan has arrived: it’s ladies’ night…

I’m several stories ahead of the blog. By the time you read this, I’ll have left the dusts of Virn behind. (I’ll have passed beyond Blake’s 7 and a little way into whatever comes next. Edge of Darkness? Emu’s Pink Windmill?) I happened that, just after I watched ‘Sand’ and before I wrote this, I posted my blog about Tanith Lee’s first contribution to the show, ‘Sarcophagus’. (Click here to go back and read it if you like: you are now spiralling in time, try not to trip over that hat-stand). And rereading that was interesting.

It strikes me that I started the review talking about character. Character continuity has always beset this series. It looks like a character-driven show, and perhaps it is, but it’s driven like a go-kart round a track: however fast they go, they circle around to the beginning again. After a while, I got used to this: the same way new viewers get used to the fact that Tom never goes back for Sarah after ‘Deadly Assassin’: it’s a convention, a necessity, a loveable quirk.

In ‘Sarcophagus’, the episode pivots on an understanding of a romantic kind between Cally and Avon that might be there if you dig in the subtext of previous episodes. It’s a small fire generated by the friction of knowing glances, and the most knowing of these is shared between the viewer and the writer. Tanith Lee, like Chris Boucher before her, reveals herself to be viewer-as-writer: she doesn’t know the characters like Terry Nation, but she writes with the implicit authority and insight that all we viewers take for granted.

The Cally-Avon romance basically peters out after the end credits of ‘Sarcophagus’, but for the duration of the episode, along with some of piquant stylistic touches (cosmic folk, especially) Lee convinced me she was sharing a personal insight into the world of these characters.

I used to bemoan the huge number of regulars in the show: now I see them as multiple viewpoints on a world that needs exploring in multiple dimensions (City at the Edge of the World is a great example). And in a show like Blake’s 7, it’s not location work or special effects that create your world, not backdrops and backstory. It’s about how a character sees the world, how they inhabit it, and how they try and shape it. Lots of writers beam the characters down to the ‘planet of the week’ and have them act as disinterested participants, like gamers or tourists. It ought to be more like Chaucer: there’s a reason this story happens to this person.

This charming, brittle, beardless youth of a Federation Captain, who spends a night with the most dangerous woman in the galaxy on a planet of ghosts. This grumpy, battle-weary genius, half-seduced and half-sickened by the President’s power, hanging powerless in her orbit. This planet that engineers a story, divides and destroys and draws together its victims, and heaps up along the windows like a gestalt voyeur, as they gulp their green-ade and blue-ade and get up to who knows what. Obviously, this turns out to be a story about Servalan, and doesn’t Jacqueline Pearce shine, but Tanith Lee’s approach to Serv isn’t through a new world but a man who knows her, in every sense. Two of them, in fact, although one of them is dead as the story begins.

Green dust, black evening gown, dead man in the next room: that’s Blake’s 7.

This is the reason we have Season Four, then, to give Servalan a story in which the mask slips, if only a little. ‘Power became my lover,’ she says. And so Don Keller, the man who dumped Servalan, the warm corpse next door, becomes the reason for the events of the last three seasons. Yes, for the duration of this story, the power games of Blake, Tarrant and the rest all boil down to a lost love and a confrontation with the past in a world – a situation – where such things are briefly in focus. What else does drama do but invent the one world where one unique story can be told?

Next week, it’ll be another world, and maybe another viewpoint will open up. Somehow I doubt it - stories like ‘Sand’ don’t come along very often - but we watch on optimistically. I expect Servalan will be back, and the crew won’t mention Tarrant’s betrayal: he’ll seem to forget, and so will she. As usual, the viewer will fill in what they can remember and what they suspect, and tell their own story. One shaped forever by the particular insights of this richly beautiful, bizarre and chilly alien world…

Assassin!

One of the stories waiting to be told in Blake’s 7 is that of the cosmic couturier of Fantabulo 6. I like to imagine the planet is a bit like Logopolis, only in this world – which Christopher H. Bidmead wouldn’t have dared imagine – the dusty red rock caverns (or do they have a fresher, pinker hue?) are filled with dressmakers, hunched over their pattern cutting tables, Singer sewing machines and ancient, pedal-operated looms. What do they weave all day and all night, these mysterious machinists? What could it be but the stuff of the universe. Like the Fates of ancient time, the Fantabulosians measure, colour and cut the threads of great lives. The heroes, the villains, the Vila’s of this world too, we’re all woven in the tapestry waistcoats and coat tales of their nimble fingers. It is not through coincidence that the woman who ascended to the greatest heights in the cosmos is the one who buys her wardrobe exclusively from Fantabulo. If the frock fits, wear it. Servalan – or whatever she’s calling herself this week (and is there a blog post in the fact that there are seemingly no such things as photos in the world of Blake’s 7, or is it more of a parenthetical observation sort of a thing?) has a loyalty card for the frockmasters of Fantabulo. She has shares in the place. They’ve named a public square after her.

Servalan's Pressure Point outfit, by Demi-Goddess of Design, June Hudson

 

            It would sound mealy-mouthed to say that Servalan changes her plans as often as she changes her dress, but I would put money on the fact that she actually lets every new garment inspire her next act of galactic villainy. See her fastening the little black belt on this week’s little black, off the shoulder Bardot dress, considering the way it hugs her slender figure and complements her signature black crop, as two muscle-bound Avon lookalikes in studded leather hot pants hold up the full-length, scroll-edged mirror for her to study herself. What is this dress, this evening dress designed for the last evening in the world, trying to tell her? It’s simple, black as deep space, no froufrou or frills. Perhaps it looks like something she might wear to a funeral. But of course, it has that sexy tie around her throat, and a very daring reveal. She’d wear it to the sort of funeral where she’s in a good mood. That suggests the deaths of that pesky Scorpio crew, of course. She’s been trying to kill them for years and years, and it’s never quite come off. Time to pay a professional?

In all this time, the Federation has fallen, tried drunkenly to get up, toppled over again. Now it’s hard to tell what’s actually happening outside Servalan’s boudoir. Thankfully for the Universe, the house of Fantabulo 6 has stood proud and resolute. For a while – Season 2 – they were doing particularly good business. They even sold stuff to the Liberator crew, and they had a factory seconds outlet in Freedom City that did a roaring trade. For a while since, they’ve had to streamline their business. The Liberator crew are less fashion conscious in Season 4. Avon’s got a lot of wear out of the same studded leather outfit (it’s easily wipe-downable, and just needs a good polish with some Dubbin if he’s been out in the wet) while everybody else generally gets by on velour tracksuits with ribbed turtle-necks or (if you’re Soolin) plenty of cleavage on display. There is a chance that Blake and Jenna are hovering around, longing to join forces again, but can’t quite face being seen with them. Judging by their outfits in Season 1, however, the chances are narrow (certainly narrower than Blake’s old shoulder pouffes).

Judging by the opening of this episode, in which they gather around to listen to a suspiciously transparent message from Servalan to her hired help, Avon and his friends might well have been ordering from the Fantabulo 6 catalogue again. Tarrant’s hasn’t turned up yet (he’s still in the velour tracksuit) but Avon is in a black and silver fighting outfit, with little motifs of (I think) playing card emblems round the collar: hearts and clubs, very Avon. Soolin’s got a very restrained grey outfit with glittering beaded blue sleeve cuffs, belt and a single giant lapel: shades of Visage, reimagined for the office. Dayna is the most exciting: it’s Toyah Wilcox, doing panto but still as Toyah Wilcox.

But who is the mysterious Cancer? And why do astrological signs persist in the age of interstellar space travel?

The guest cast get the best deal from Fantabulo 6. Of course, it’s a shame that Kenneth Williams and Hugh Paddick were both unavailable, but a joy to see Betty Marsden in a late role. Joy overflows to see her in a dress made of mirrors and a headdress of costume jewellery and silver dreadlocks. If ever there were an origin story for the Movellans, their creator is surely Betty Marsden. Just a pity she’s not in it longer, but she is surrounded by space pirates and auction agents dressed in home-made versions of the Mission to the Unknown aliens. In fact, it is my personal canon that these are Malpha, Trantis and co. with a new look for the 1970s. She is also there for the best moment of Blake’s 7 so far:

I think, if you don’t mind, I would prefer my slave to address me as ‘mistress’…

            Meanwhile, there’s a fab performance from (perhaps) the ultimate Doctor Who Guest Star, Richard Hurndall. Perhaps if he had played the Doctor in The Five Doctors with a dirty face and a brown sarong, he would have been that bit more convincing as William Hartnell. It really is a lovely performance from Hurndall, and I was totally taken in by the red herring of him as Cancer.

            I didn’t think for a second it was ‘the Mighty Ajax’, with his burning eyes and – well, burning everything in fact. No, as soon as I clocked Piri the dancing girl in her spangly purple cruise chanteuse outfit, I knew what was going on, and no amount of jiggery-pokery with people being locked up and set free and locked up could throw me off the scent. At the last minute, I was proven even more right than I knew I wanted to be, as Piri emerged into the ascendant with a full Fantabulosa off-the-peg black cocktail dress with beaded black stole, mauve lippie, and a beehive like a factory chimney (I actually had to check that she wasn’t played by Mari Wilson). Having attempted to murder the helpless, over-confident, hyper-masculine (well sort of) Kerr Avon with what should have been a deadly crab, Mari Wilson is hoist on her own arachnid by super-cool Soolin (i.e. the best thing about Season 4) and dies with the wildest scream this show has ever seen. It’s a scream that comes right from the dress. It’s worth rewinding and watching again.

 Star Studded: Avon's 'Killer' Outfit, by the costume superstar June Hudson

            In summary: everyone was making more of an effort this week. Servalan had an actual plan, and for about five minutes she actually had Avon where she wanted him (and he looked quite pleased about it). The guest cast were fun, there was a twist, hair was high, there was a blood-curdling scream.

            TLDR: It was bloody awful, but my favourite episode of this season so far. Bring on next week’s offering, and may the frockmasters never die – or the Universe itself might unravel. Or worse, grow drab and uninteresting…

Alongside my shonky photos of Radio Times listings, these two June Hudson designs were found on this blog after they were auctioned by Bonhams. 

Hudson is a creative genius who helped make the golden age of BBC television look as fabulous as it did. She's still creating, teaching and modelling and you should treat yourself to a look at her web-page, here.