Blake’s 7 and the rare occasion of the internet being lovely

The other day a very rare thing happened, which is I posted something on social media, had a little moan, and then somebody replied politely and changed my mind. I think the last time anybody had a nice interaction like this on the interwebs was 1867. So I thought I would share it …

The occasion was the arrival of my lovely new Blake’s 7 The Collection Series 1 Blu-ray box-set. Phwoar! Look at that!! Maximum power!!!

Posting a picture of it on Facebook I said:

“This series has been properly long-overdue a definitive remaster, but genuinely a shame it has taken so long for it to get done that a lot of the key stars are no longer around to take part in the new making of/special features”

Which seemed fair enough to me. I can’t place the quote but I remember reading something once along the lines of “Every single person who was a tea lady once for the BBC in the 1960s has been extensively interviewed in case they have any memories of Doctor Who, but imagine putting that much effort into other things that are lost/loved” with Blake’s 7, Play for Today and – away from the BBC – Sapphire and Steel and the Tomorrow People often getting mentioned.

But then Phil Newman, who is one of the internet’s loveliest people, someone who designs gorgeous theatre sets, and who is canonically Kiv thanks to Dimensions in Time basically said in reply:

1. All the people we have lost are still featured on the Blu-ray because of the box-set including loads of unreleased “making of” material including the Kevin Jon Davies doco

2. The budget and technology to update the VFX across all the episodes would not have been available a few years ago

And convincingly, with a bit of a time’s unkind arrow ouch to it that …

3. Interviewing elderly participants now about television shows made decades ago doesn’t guarantee their memories are going to be clearer than when they were interviewed nearer the time

THESE WERE ALL PERFECTLY CROMULENT POINTS!

“Everything has its time” Phil said. Including me changing my mind in public on the intertubes, it seems. Bless him. Here is a picture of him as Kiv in Dimensions in Time. He’s on the bin …

[Phil Newman as Kiv outside the Queen Vic in EastEnders because reasons]

The arrival of the Blake’s 7 Blu-ray box-set also presented me with another timing challenge. I have been on a long, and sometimes frankly arduous, rewatch of it on the ITVX streaming service since early in 2023 when I first subscribed to it.

I say “arduous”, not because I’m not enjoying it – although there are some terribly clunking episodes in there along the way – but because usually I watch this kind of telly like a type of comfort food. Come in from a gig, bit drunk, whack on some Doctor Who, Blake’s 7 or Sapphire and Steel etc.

But the thing is, with probably any Doctor Who episode from 1963-1989, I can put it on in the background, know it all backwards, it just keeps trundling along. But with Blake’s 7, some of these episode I maybe only saw on original transmission when I was a kid, and then maybe again on weekend mornings in the 1990s on UK Gold when I was a hungover student.

So I sometimes get into the doom loop of thinking “Oh I missed that bit because I was dicking about with my phone/laptop, what happened?” then rewind five minutes by mistake, because I am a clumsy old fat-fingered oaf on the remote control, but then get distracted by my phone/laptop again, so have to rewind another clumsy five minutes and so forth. Eventually I’m back at the beginning of the episode and none the wiser as to what was going on. We’ve all been there. It is the modern equivalent of nodding off and reading the same page in the same novel over and over again.

I’ve just got up to episode seven of what I always understood was called “SERIES D”, although will now presumably be Blake’s 7 The Collection Series 4 Blu-ray box-set when it comes out in … what … 2029/2030?

The episode is called Assassin and unwittingly features Richard Hurndall in 1981 putting in a performance as Nebrox that turned out to be the catalyst for him appearing as a recast First Doctor in the late William Hartnell’s role in 1983 Doctor Who anniversary special The Five Doctors, pineapple and all.

[Paul Darrow and William Hartnell Richard Hurndall in Blake’s 7 S04E07 Assassin]

And then I’ve gone on to episode eight, Games, where I am dull enough to have immediately gone, unprompted, “Oh! That’s Skaro from Destiny of the Daleks” as soon as Servalan and her Federation goons made landfall.

[Blake’s 7 on location at Winspit quarry in 1981]

[Doctor Who on location at Winspit quarry in 1979]

But basically, my position is I can’t actually unwrap the lovely new Blu-ray set and enjoy the lovingly updated first series of Blake’s 7 until I’ve ground my way through the fourth series and its jaw-dropping finale.

By Christmas I will have got there, I’ve promised myself.

Mind you, then this arrived …

Also, finally, may I just say, Jacqueline Pearce, blimey. *fans self*