BLAKE'S 7 to get Blu-Ray release with new model vfx

Blake's 7, the seminal dystopian British space opera series, is getting a re-release on Blu-Ray. The first season will launch on the format on 11 November this year.

Blake's 7, created by Terry Nation, ran for four seasons from 1978 to 1981, chalking up 52 episodes. The show, set roughly a thousand years in the future, saw an ideological revolutionary, engineer Roj Blake, framed for crimes he didn't commit by the despotic Terran Federation and sent to a remote penal colony. Blake escaped with the help of a group of hardened criminals, salvaging an advanced alien starship along the way. Blake wanted to use the ship, dubbed the Liberator, to strike back at the Federation and eventually help destroy it; his criminal comrades had other, more lucrative ideas for what to do with the vessel. The series became infamous for its bleakness, its high cast turnover and remarkable body count amongst the regular cast. The show was also noteworthy for its endlessly quotable dialogue, its dark sense of humour, and sometimes mind-bogglingly bad special effects.

This new release uses the impressive technology used previously on Doctor Who and Red Dwarf to dramatically improve the quality of the video-shot interior scenes, whilst exterior film footage has been rescanned in HD. There is also the option to replace all of the vfx with new material, including newly-recreated model shots, occasional CG sequences and new teleport effects. The release includes a documentary that was shot over a decade ago for the DVD re-release but had to be held back for copyright issues, as well as newly-shot interview footage with surviving crew and castmembers.

Blake's 7 was tremendously influential on J. Michael Straczynski's Babylon 5 (JMS is an avowed Blake's 7 fan), due to its serialised storytelling. Echoes of the show can also be seen in the likes of Firefly (Joss Whedon was studying in the UK when Blake's 7 was airing), with its band of dysfunctional characters forced to work together by circumstance.

There has been several attempts over the years to reboot Blake's 7, with the UK's Sky One getting close over a decade ago, although their take was altogether more cliched (with Blake as a disgruntled ex-soldier driven to revenge by the murder of his wife) and less interesting, but the idea seems on the backburner for now.

RIP Chris Boucher

News has sadly broken that the British SF scriptwriter Chris Boucher has passed away at the age of 79. Boucher is best-known for his work on the British TV series Doctor Who and Blake's 7, on which he was the principle creative force for most of its run.

Boucher was born in 1943 and graduated from the University of Essex. He worked in the gas industry in the 1960s before switching to writing television scripts. His early work was in comedy, news and current affairs before he switched to drama in the mid-1970s.

Boucher achieved his big breakthrough when he wrote 12 episodes of Doctor Who across Seasons 14 and 15, contributing the serials The Face of Evil and The Robots of Death for the former and Image of the Fendahl for the latter (all broadcast in 1977). The Robots of Death is frequently cited as one of the greatest-ever Doctor Who stories and the other two are also held in reasonable esteem. For The Face of Evil, Boucher created the character of Leela, played by Louise Jameson, who became the Fourth Doctor's new companion and one of the most popular companions in the original run of the series.

Boucher's well-received work on Doctor Who led to him being asked to work as a script editor on the in-development space opera series Blake's 7 (1978-81), created by former Doctor Who writer and Dalek creator Terry Nation. Nation wrote all 13 episodes of Season 1, but time constraints meant he only had time for one draft of each episode apiece. Boucher, thus performed an uncredited rewrite on every script of the first season, with his changes sometimes being minor and in same cases extensive. In particular, Boucher punched up the dialogue, drawing on both dystopian science fiction and Westerns for ideas.

Starting in Season 2, Boucher began writing scripts from scratch. His increasing importance to the series led to him becoming the effective head writer of the series after Nation moved on after the first season. Boucher ended up writing nine episodes of the series in total, but he performed rewrites of almost every other script for the four-season run of the show. Boucher's solo episodes Trial, Star One, City at the Edge of the World, Rumours of Death and the series finale, Blake, are often cited among the best episodes of the series.

Boucher is credited for the idea of making Blake and his crew more like real rebels/freedom fighters, where the line between a noble rebel against oppression and a terrorist whose actions may cause innocent deaths becomes blurred. Boucher also resisted the idea of making Avon into a simple replacement for Blake when star Gareth Thomas left at the end of Season 2, instead having Avon embrace more of an antihero role and even becoming psychologically damaged as he tried to reconcile his crew's reputation for heroic rebellion and his own, more amoral and selfish desires. The resulting internal conflict was welcomed by actor Paul Darrow and was popular with fans.

Boucher also embraced the idea of serialisation, refusing to return to the status quo at the end of each episode, frequently referring to previous events, extending character arcs and storylines over entire seasons and pushing the idea of "dark, gritty" science fiction television years before anyone else caught on. Blake's 7 later become a key influence and inspiration for shows like Farscape, Firefly and Babylon 5.

Boucher was particularly praised for the shocking series finale, which is often cited as one of the darkest ways to end a TV show. However, the episode was never meant to be the finale and he had written it to set up a fifth season. The BBC's decision to cancel the show on a whim came as a surprise to the production team, since the fourth season had garnered very strong ratings (even defeating soap opera Coronation Street in a head-to-head showdown, something that Doctor Who never managed).

Boucher never quite achieved the same level of success again. He wrote some procedural crime dramas, but his only other genre contribution was Star Cops, a 1987 series which attempted to be a "realistic" near-future science fiction drama. The show was notable for its use of real physics and attempts to deal with issues like corporate crime and colonisation in an SF context. Despite some good reviews, the show only lasted one season before being cancelled.

In 1998, Boucher resumed working on Doctor Who by writing four novels for the spin-off range: Last Man Running, Corpse Maker, Psi-ence Fiction and Match of the Day, one of the last books published before the TV show's return in 2005.

Between 2001 and 2004 Boucher also produced and co-wrote the Kaldor City series of audio plays, which combined some elements of his work on both Doctor Who and Blake's 7.

Chris Boucher wrote some of the best British TV science fiction of the 1970s and 1980s, and his work on Blake's 7 had an impact that reverberated far beyond to later generations of SF TV writers. He will be very much missed.

Happy 40th Anniversary to BLAKE'S 7

Cult classic Blake's 7 celebrates its 40th anniversary today.

The original crew of Blake's 7: from left-to-right, thief Vila Restal (Michael Keating), telepathic guerrilla Cally (Jan Chappell), freedom fighter Roj Blake (Gareth Thomas), pilot Jenna Stannis (Sally Knyvette), computer genius Kerr Avon (Paul Darrow) and idealistic fighter Olag Gan (David Jackson). The seventh character is the Liberator's powerful AI, Zen (Peter Tuddenham).

Blake's 7 was the creation of Terry Nation, a British television writer who had previously created the Daleks for Doctor Who in 1963 and penned a post-apocalyptic series called Survivors in the early 1970s. Blake's 7 was George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four rewritten as a space opera, the story of a horrific totalitarian empire - the Terran Federation - which used propaganda, mind controlling drugs and overwhelming military power to keep the people compliant and enslaved.

Engineer Roj Blake had previously led a failed rebellion against the government. He'd been captured, brainwashed and turned into a model citizen to show the futility of rebelling against the state. However, his former allies "rescued" him, restored his sense of justice and heroism and started planning a second rebellion. This was crushed in its infancy and Blake was exiled to the prison planet Cygnus Alpha. Along the way he escaped with the help of his criminal shipmates and an derelicted alien starship they discovered along the way. Using this ship, the Liberator, Blake planned to wage war against the Federation to destroy it. His more selfishly-inclined criminal shipmates, however, often had other ideas on how to use their good fortune.

The result was an incredibly bleak and unceasingly cynical TV show, very much at odds with the boo-yar optimism of most contemporary space opera. Blake's crew were often defeated or forced into morally complex situation where Blake's simplistic view of good and evil was hopelessly compromised. The show was rooted in the conflict between idealism and pragmatism and writers like Nation and Chris Boucher mined this conflict to great effect.

The show had rich, endlessly-quotable dialogue, fine performances (particularly from Gareth Thomas as Blake and Paul Darrow as his amoral, aloof foil, Kerr Avon) and quite astonishingly bad production values, even for 1978. The producers organised a trip to see the first Star Wars movie - which wasn't released in the UK until January 1978 - and were horrified at its effects, feeling that their show couldn't help but look dated in comparison. Fortunately British audiences responded to the show and it eventually ran for a respectable four seasons and 52 episodes, ending in 1981 with a famously dark ending where almost the entire regular and recurring cast is brutally gunned down by Federation troopers.

There have been attempts to remake the show from time to time, often by writers whom it sounds like had very little understanding of the show and its rich, complex ideas. More successful were writers inspired by Blake's 7: J. Michael Straczynski was a big fan of the show and used some of its structural ideas in Babylon 5. A young Joss Whedon watched the show whilst at boarding school in England, and it's DNA and fingerprints can clearly be found in his later space opera Firefly.

Blake's 7 also pioneered the use of the big season-ending cliffhanger, with each season ending with a huge, shocking event which ensured audiences would return next season. It would be another twelve years before American SF cottoned on with Star Trek: The Next Generation's Best of Both Worlds season-ending event.

Happy anniversary to this classic show, and here's hoping that if it is remade, it's done by someone who has a good handle on the source material.