Blake’s 7: The Complete Series One
So, my favorite show is finally on DVD. I’d say I can die happy, but I think I’ll wait until the release of the fourth season, and then I’ll die happy after rewatching the whole thing. The series in question is the much-missed and often unfairly maligned Blake’s 7 (1978-1981), a show which I didn’t catch until it began airing in the States circa 1985. I still, in fact, remember the first time I saw it - it replaced Oklahoma PBS’ Saturday night airings of Doctor Who, and I was pissed. Somehow, though, that first episode gripped me enough to break through that and I stuck with it for the remainder of the series.
The first thing that one sees after the obligatory BBC copyright notice is a beautifully rendered CGI scene of the Liberator flying by. In glancing through some recent photos of the Blake’s 7 cast reunion in March 2004 to celebrate this DVD set’s release, I was almost moved to tears to see what’s left of the real Liberator model - dilapidated, damaged, and all but falling apart. It’s been kept, but not kept up. To see the ship in this form mere days later reminded me why the sight of a forlorn old BBC model got me that choked up - I’ve got a lot of fond adolescent memories attached to that cathedralesque piece of SF legend.
The first four discs of the five-DVD set each contain three episodes. This is a rather unusual distribution of content, since dual layering means that one disc could easily contain four episodes, with room left over for animated menus and an easter egg or two. That, however, would’ve made this a four-disc set - and therefore possibly something that wouldn’t fetch a price nearing fifty pounds in stores in the UK. The way the discs are 
authored also drops the dual layer switch right in the middle of an episode, but while some viewers have reported less than smooth transitions, my Apex multi-region player didn’t even blink. The fifth disc contains only one episode and the bulk of the bonus features (some of the other discs are sprinkled with Easter eggs). The whole set’s packaged in something that’s a cross between the DVD packaging of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Babylon 5 - like the Trek discs, it’s a fold-out package (though at first I thought it was a booklet) and the interior package borrows some of B5’s best tricks, including an almost comic-strip-like, season-spanning photomontage that stretches from one end of the foldout to the other, and on the reverse side, an outstanding montage of the crew and the Liberator under the transparent disc trays.
Three episodes carry commentaries: Space Fall gets the treatment from producer David Maloney and actors Sally Knyvette (Jenna) and Michael Keating (Vila). Seek-Locate-Destroy sees Keating sticking around to spar with the villainous duo of Jacqueline Pearce (Servalan) and Stephen Grief (Travis), both of whom return for Project Avalon with Knyvette. Space Fall is the liveliest, with Keating and Knyvette singing the theme song over the opening credits (when Sally repeats this gag with Stephen Grief on the Project Avalon commentary, Jackie Pearce ruefully says “Don’t give up your day job, guys”). Maloney provides the richest source of real information, mainly focusing on the legendary amount of money that Blake’s 7 simply didn’t have in its budget (it filled the timeslot of, and inherited the exact same budget as, a modern-day police series). The actors spend most of their time talking about fellow 
performers, directors, locations, anecdotes, and that nagging sense of never quite knowing what it was all about. Even the subject of accents and their attendant implications of social class structure is brought up, so I guess the authors of Liberation really are on to something. It’s a lot of fun, though it seems that Jacqueline Pearce hasn’t held on to the details as well as her co-stars have - but she makes up for this with a constant sense of surprise and a naughty wit to boot.
The other bonuses are so-so, with the Blue Peter feature on making your own teleport bracelet out of handy household items being particularly amusing. There are vignettes of scenes defining each character as well, as well as an outtake or two. But - to my amazement - the best bonus feature is the Series Two trailer, which packs the second season’s main threads into a tightly edited and quite honestly damned suspenseful movie-style preview, set to the epic strains of some Mark Ayres Shakedown: Return Of The Sontarans soundtrack music (a great fit, since Ayres was emulating the style of Blake/Doctor Who composer Dudley Simpson on that project). Damned if I didn’t sit and watch this trailer five times in a row, it’s that good, and if I am to be totally honest, I have to admit that it makes the second season look better than it really was. I want them to throw together a Series One trailer, just for the hell of it, because after years of seeing Blake’s 7 glossed over as “camp sci-fi” (and those words are straight out of the BBC’s own mouth), I love watching someone go through the effort of making the show look so good.
What’s missing from this picture? Kevin Davies’ eagerly anticipated four-part documentary was nixed late in the game by B7 Enterprises, the company formed to acquire and exploit the rights to Blake’s 7. As the official story from B7E goes, they didn’t feel Davies’ Making Of Blake’s 7 was “a fitting tribute” to series creator Terry Nation. That could mean a number of things; I’ve loved previous Davies documentaries (More Than 30 Years In The TARDIS, The Making of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Dalekmania and so on), but in the back of my mind I can’t help but wonder if the bone of contention wasn’t a continued focus on the campiness fator again. Whatever your opinion is of either party, the documentary isn’t part of this set, and I’m not going to take points off of this set on account of a feature removed prior to publication. We may never know who was in the right here.
So, with all the talk of Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Stracyznski having been inspired by Blake’s 7, among other celebrity endorsements, how does it all hold up? That’s a toughie. Antecedent of Babylon 5 that it may be, Blake’s 7 is hopelessly dated, what with the flared trousers and disco-era makeup and many other elements of production and production value that scream 1970s at the viewer. And yet it’s so far ahead of its time with the morally ambiguous storytelling move of making - and let’s not kid ourselves or sugarcoat it here - a terrorist cell out to be the good guys. This isn’t a show that could or would be made today, especially now (which makes one wonder why someone would try to do so, especially after its biggest-name star has pulled out, but I digress). I recommend it to you, but of course my recommendation is colored by an undying fondness not only for the show, but for the time of life during which I first became a fan. For my fellow fans, though, you’d be hard-pressed to do better than this set, so four stars it is. Roll on Series Two!