Boucher, Backbone and Blake - The Legacy of Blake's 7

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Title:	Boucher, Backbone and Blake - The Legacy of Blake's 7
Creator:	Erin Horáková
Date(s):	August 22, 2016
Medium:	online
Fandom:	Blake's 7
Topic:
External Links:	Boucher, Backbone and Blake – the legacy of Blakes 7, Archived version
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Boucher, Backbone and Blake - The Legacy of Blake's 7 is a 2016 Blake's 7 essay by Erin Horáková.

See the original essay for the author's hyperlinks, notes and references.

Some Topics Discussed

• Blake's 7 as a building block for other shows
• Chris Boucher's brilliant writing
• much about characters and their development in the show
• comparison of scripts and the writing process
• there will never be a remake of Blake's 7 because the show is about terrorism
• how fans developed their theories about the characters, often due to their ability to view the show properly due to technical issues
• so, so, so much more

From the Essay

Blakes 7 has obvious and sometimes self-confessed inheritors (Farscape, Firefly). You could make "some-influence" cases for other big-name SF programs: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine; possibly Doctor Who’s proposed, aborted Shalka reboot (Who and Star Trek’s reverse-borrowings are only fair, given that Blakes 7 always had a close relationship with both canons, and a positively incestuous connection to Classic Who); and elements of Buffy. Some would also add Babylon 5, and the new Battlestar. And then there are the legion of less-broadly-successful offerings. Sometimes you can hear the pitch meeting dimly in the background of shows that haven’t fully established their own voices: "It’s like Blakes 7 meets—".

The misguided attempt to replicate Blakes 7’s supposed grimness stands as a synecdoche for a lot of the pitfalls of attempts to use the show as a building block. I can feel, when I’m watching a program with roots in Blakes 7 or its inheritors, familiar strings being pulled with varying degrees of success. But as with "grimness," often what subsequent creators have borrowed isn’t what actually works best about Blakes 7. They shake the silver out onto the carpet and make off with the nice-but-less-valuable cabinet it was kept in. Curiously, people almost universally fail to steal what makes Blakes 7 vital, special and (still) relevant. There are things I wish people would gank. These can be summed up as Writing, Backbone and Blake.

Writing: I understand why (it’s because it’s difficult), but almost no other show, genre or otherwise, is as well-written as Blakes 7. Oh I know there are some clunkers in these scripts (I can’t pull anything that’s gone regrettable out of the fridge without sadly telling it “Yes. That is how I reasoned you would look.” ("Moloch")), but by and large, the show’s consistent script editor and sometime-writer Chris Boucher takes Blakes 7 creator Terry Nation’s basic conceptual skeleton and does to it what Pound did to Eliot’s first draft of “The Waste Land” (except this time no one’s fascist) (except the Federation). And that’s putting it mildly. If you look at Nation’s draft of series two (or series B, if you will — generally, I won’t) episode "Pressure Point" and then at the script as-aired (difficult to do, given that the BBC despises its own institutional legacy and money, and would rather hoist itself on whoever’s leading the Tories this week’s petard than release a good, edited collection of scripts — but not wholly impossible), you can see how richly Boucher has complicated the characters.

In general, Boucher’s dialogue sings. A lot of what people love about this show, a lot of what makes it a goddamn landmark, is down to Boucher, who has often claimed (without rebuttal) to have rewritten every line Paul Darrow ever spoke (only in the program, alas — one can’t script-edit life). And the writing is more than just a showcase for banter — Blakes 7 isn’t Gilmore Girls in space. I dig the plot’s concerns, the structures of many of the episodes and, to an extent, even the structures of the seasons. Before the proper development of the SFF television series season plot (as distinct from Who’s insular multi-part stories—all seven episodes of "Doctor Who and the Silurians"/Pertwee Strips Down to a White T-Shirt For No Real Reason, and Darrow Is Also There, for example), before television writing staff even had the power to demand that any episodes beyond the first and last installments of a series be aired in a given order, Blakes 7 offered its multi-episode escape-the-prison-ship/acquire-the-cast and locate-and-destroy-Star-One plots (these ran roughly contemporaneously with another early attempt to deliver an arc: Doctor Who’s "Key to Time") that, due to clever writing, largely hung together despite these limitations. This (and the retrospective framing the conclusions of series three and four provide) makes Blakes 7 and Boucher’s work thereon rather important in terms of the development of media SF storytelling technology.

Boucher’s interviews regarding his BBC work are salty, hilariously-and-inappropriately-bitter gold. No one told him about the advance of the nouveau-Studio-System PR machine and its associated reconstructed industrial platitudes — or if they did, he could not find a tenth of a shit to give them in recompense for this knowledge. Boucher’s interviews and author’s notes contain fascinating (very honest) discussions of his work and production contexts — I would highly recommend them even to people who don’t know the shows in question and are just interested in television writing, or in writing characters full stop. If Boucher never publishes an “On Writing” sort of affair, it will be a loss to the field. Moreover, I have never been plunged into deeper shade, “One of the particular things I liked about [him] was that he learned the lines and delivered them.” (I don’t even think this is meant to be an insult per se? It’s just incidentally devastating both for the recipient and everyone else around him (who, we must presume, did not learn the lines). Like friendly fire? The man who brought you Avon, ladies and gentlemen.) I feel like Orpheus trying to get Eurydice back, that is how surrounded by shades I am while reading these interviews.

... a remake can’t happen (or it really shouldn’t) because this is a show about terrorism — not like, incidentally. It’s a huge structuring element of the plot, because the central characters (whether or not they signed up to be) are political terrorists. They attack military facilities, sometimes threaten civilians, hijack a ship, and do other things that would be read by an anxious modern US audience as terrorism. If I say "terrorism" three times, an American network executive will appear in the mirror and pull funding (try it at home!). Get "Netflix?" out of your mouth — even your beloved "edgy", "independent" networks would balk. They produce content with fucking and gore that pretends at sedition while reinforcing conservative thinking about the normalcy of sexual assault, the acceptability of military violence, etc. I’m not prudish about this, I’m just bored. Because it’s not fucking seditious, is it? All that is less risky than producing content with a fairly simple, coherent political through-line.

[...]

It’s not just terrorism that makes a Blakes 7 remake network poison on both sides of the Atlantic. The first episode features the then-brainwashed protagonist, Roj Blake, being framed by (essentially) Dolores Umbridge for homosexual child molestation. Death, Umbridge and homies conclude, would just make Blake a martyr. They need something else—and what tars a political opponent more effectively than this? It’s an awful, brilliant move.

Even the fairly distinct camps of what can broadly be termed Blakes 7 affirmational and transformative media fandom have at times been wildly wrong about Blake, and in interestingly contradictory ways, although one has to assume that both camps must have paid more attention to this show than your average bear. It’s been argued that Blake is a prig and a bore, an idiot and a one-note goody-goody who isn’t as fun as Avon. There again, he’s a vicious manipulator; he’d readily commit sexual assault if the whim took him. Or perhaps he’s a dangerous mass-murdering ideologue—a sort of Welsh Stalin.

[...]

The fact that people can dislike Blake for such disparate reasons is itself fascinating in terms of how readings and consensuses develop, and how far from straightforward the relationship between a text and its reception can be, even when the object under discussion is readily available. To be fair, fandom (and transformative fandom in particular) had the excuse, for some time, of a highly irregular transmission process which involved very limited access to the actual episodes. This is extensively explained in Enterprising Women, a deeply uneven but useful early study of fandom. (That, incidentally, was my introduction model: erratic episodes on snowy third-hand VHS circa fifteen, at the hands of a friend who was a second-generation Avon/Vila true believer. Ah well, I don’t agree with my mother about anything, either.) As I mentioned earlier, three bizarre compilation tapes, which I would argue actually give you quite misleading ideas about characterization, had been available in the UK since 1985, and a fourth came out in Australia in 1986. Again, these tapes mashed three or four episodes into 90 minute "films," skipping over major plot points to do so. Blakes 7 was finally released properly on VHS in 1991 (whether you could get ahold of it and afford the run was another matter). By the time the availability of the material began to improve, the transformative fandom for Blakes 7 (and similarly positioned canons) had already inherited the mixed patrimony (matrimony, honestly, given who was doing the writing) of a critical and artistic tradition developed during an era of limited access. Figuring out exactly how fandom arrived at this degree of extreme communal cognitive dissonance regarding stupid/evil Blake (like Kate Beaton’s Watsons) would involve tracking this development of ideas and delving into the similar case of Terrible Zine-Era Kirk and Blessed Saint Spock, and we haven’t the time.

Thomas didn’t really seem to get Blake — at least not in interviews he gave long after the fact (he seems to have fallen into the "Blake was a goody-goody" camp rather than the Machiavelli camp, if you want to know). But actors are never reliable on this point, and frankly we should stop asking them about their characters as though they wrote or were them. An actor’s reception of their own work is bound up in popular and critical reception and biography, distorted by time and distance. Shatner probably thinks he was wretched as Kirk, now, because people have said it enough — though any attentive viewing of the program that looks to like, if looking liking move, would give you quite a good impression of his work there. This is especially true considering the somewhat different performative moment. Recall that Olivier’s Richard III was recorded in 1955, and that Star Trek: TOS came out eleven years later. We always talk about Kirk as if we wanted exactly the same things out of performance in 1966 as we do right now, and as if the grimdark "naturalism" of The Wire isn’t itself a style, and one that’s going to look like ass to some short-memoried punks in 2040. Actors certainly aren’t unfiltered final arbiters on characters they’ve played, any more than any given Romeo owns the role absolutely. It isn’t their job to be: critical interpretation’s a distinct and only somewhat overlapping skillset.

I didn’t know Thomas, not even in the casual convention-going sense. I don’t like meeting actors. I mean, my sister’s one and I can hardly escape the acquaintance, and I’ve directed and acted in minor productions, but that feels quite a different thing from meeting An Actor in the context of a convention or what have you. Seeing actors in their unnatural habitat gives me the uncanny feeling of meeting someone I know well, but who doesn’t know me at all. Worse, that person’s insides have been scraped out. "Kirk" or what have you’s been replaced with another person, who doesn’t look like you’re used to seeing them—even as the individual in front of you may well retain a lot of the intonations and gestures you’re familiar with. It’s like your local getting gutted so a Wetherspoons can be put in.

... Blakes 7 became one of the small clutch of early media megafandoms, serving as a sort of test case for the development of the phenomenon. If you like Western SF television produced after circa-1982, or are in media fandom, then for good and for ill, you’ve inherrited structures from programs and fannish materials you may never have seen. If you’re off reading some Finn/Poe ABO, then to some extent the fandoms for Blakes 7, The Professionals and say five other things (again, not with the full lists and the inevitable arguments, oy) are, inescapably, your great grandmothers. You do not need to have met them to have inherited their weird laughs or propensity to psoriasis. These zine-era megafandoms (small in production volume and number of participants by modern standards, but with now unparalleled relative market saturation) established a ton of practices and sit at the bottom of several traditions. (Though there are also a lot of competing influences and trajectories knocking about. I also by no means want to discount the observations of fan studies scholars such as Rukmini Pande, who points out that overly-streamlined, self-congratulatory and singular narratives of the history of media fandom that would, under the guise of “fandom history,” frame fandom as an untroubled progressive safe space (while naturalizing and validating its undue focus on the white male subject) can further marginalize already excluded non-white and especially non-"developed world" fans. Again we come back to Macharia’s point about the dangers of thinking in terms of hetero-genealogies.

The nature of this "early-megafandom" status meant that the territory was fairly unexplored. No one had the experience to navigate the PR questions involved. This was an era in which the BBC gave official management of the Doctor Who fanclub (and given Dalekmania, this was no minor property to them even then) to a literal keen child who wrote in asking whether there was such a thing. Compared to the well-oiled machine that is a Comicon appearance today, the situation of early-megafandoms involved less money, less distance, and less insulation between the players: factors that magnified the opportunities for things to Get Weird (and weird they accordingly got). This was a lot of uncertain, shifting terrain to navigate, and Thomas managed, with consistent credit to himself. (If he had a bout of awfulness, I do not know about it. And that is all I can ask.))