Posted on by Guy Walker

Seen and unseen – horrors of the Holodomor

The Last Road, by Nina Marchenko

Mr Jones, 2019, directed by Agnieszka Holland

GUY WALKER admires an overdue film about a usually ignored atrocity

This film deals with a real event – the ‘discovery’ and reporting by a Welsh journalist, Gareth Jones, of the Holodomor (man-made starvation) which took place in Soviet Ukraine in 1932-3. There is scholarly dispute about the degree of intent, but, essentially, Stalin’s policies caused a famine in one of the world’s most productive breadbaskets which resulted in the deaths of between three and ten million Ukrainians and the conviction of 2,500 for cannibalism. Stalin’s policies caused the famine by vindictively suppressing 6 million kulaks – enterprising peasants who bettered themselves and thus became considered as bourgeoisie – through the forced collectivisation of farms and by the requisitioning of grain – ‘Stalin’s gold’ – which he used for export to pay for the industrialisation of the USSR. One of the first journalists to draw attention to the event was Malcolm Muggeridge. He managed this in spite of working under a regime where the Press Department of the Commissariat of Foreign Affairs once told him “You can’t say that because it’s true”. Later, to convince the West that the Holodomor was not true, the USSR was aided by George Bernard Shaw who visited and helpfully reported back that he “saw no evidence of starvation”.

We live in a world where television fascist dystopias are ten a penny and every time Donald Trump uncaps his vulgar gold pen or Boris Johnson steps up to a lectern the media class hallucinate goose-stepping Nazis. The same people contrive, simultaneously, to blink at the wall-to-wall post-Gramscian Marxism with which our culture is sodden. This might mean that the rarity of a film about real events casting a 70-year Communist experiment which led to the Holodomor in a bad light is to be considered a welcome corrective. Of course one can argue that the function of art is not to redress political balances but it’s hard to argue that this fine piece of art does not intend to make a political contribution. Holland was born behind and was a refugee from the Iron Curtain and, therefore, perhaps tacitly, assumes the wickedness of the USSR as a given we all know about. This being the case the only question is, considering the need of a dumb and somnolent, Hollywood-blunted Western audience (who may be resistant to it) to have everything spelt out in ten-foot letters, does Holland pull her punches too much? The film feels on the cusp of being Polish and addressing an American audience.

She and the screenwriter, Andrea Chalupa, go quite a long way to make the politics clear. The whole is framed by George Orwell (Joseph Mawle), disillusioned by Gareth Jones’ Ukrainian revelations, tapping out drafts of Animal Farm. Jones loudly and helpfully proclaims “the Soviet union is not the workers’ paradise” and the odious American apologist for Stalin, Walter Duranty, actually mouths the classic heartless platitude about omelettes and broken eggs. In addition, there is a character, Duranty’s secretary Ada, played by Vanessa Kirby, who personifies the way in which the panic about the Nazis pushed out the ability to recognise the Communist menace. Jones, who had already interviewed and even flown with Hitler before coming to Russia, also contains the history of the period in his personal experience. Ada walks a fine line and, having promoted the USSR under Duranty’s influence, gets it in the end.

The film reeks of Holland’s directorial class. She brilliantly sharpens the contrast between the freezing monochrome of the Ukrainian famine where people live on tree-bark and human flesh, and the warm polychrome of an England where food is almost literally waved under your nose. Another contrast is heightened; this time, that between Walter Duranty and Gareth Jones. Duranty, the New York Times (famous in our time for its uncritical embrace of authoritarian, woke culture), Pulitzer prize-winning journalist in the pocket of the Soviets is a true press lizard. In exchange for a life of extravagant decadence in Moscow he detoxifies and renders the USSR palatable to his readers sufficiently to ease the delicate consciences of US businessmen so that they can feel comfortable about exploiting attractive Russian markets. The US recognised the revolutionary USSR in 1933 because of Duranty’s account of it. On the other hand there is the inconvenient truth–telling of Jones who is what a journalist should be.

Techniques are honed and the cinematographer, Tomasz Naumiuk, deserves great credit. Lovingly detailed, dark-walled Moscow interiors lit by candles oppress claustrophobically. The 1930s modernist gleam of the Hotel Metropole where journalists stay only as long as it suits the NKVD, enchants, deceives and chills. The smoke and mirrors of the Russian state is evoked by shifting, kaleidoscopic reflections of people in mirrors and spectacle lenses, and long, soulless corridors. Frantic internal emotion is suggested by speeding up film. And, in the portrayal of the Holodomor we have trademark Holland realism. Typically, she doesn’t flinch at the horror created because the horror was real and the reality was both horrific and banal. Circled Ukrainian children sing to him a ghastly song about starvation in angelic voices before swiping Jones’ food. Then, after he has unwittingly participated with some children in an act of cannibalism, he sees children as carrion creatures encircling him in the snow. Both, admittedly poetic sequences could be seamlessly grafted straight onto a horror film. This shuffling nightmare is horrific and chills most because it was real. Holland ensures that it sinks slowly into and lingers in the consciousness.

Vanessa Kirby portrays a consciousness overwhelmed and haunted by twin nightmares very effectively. James Norton, reprising his Russian associations in McMafia, is excellent as the earnest and driven seeker after truth. Peter Sarsgaard is the suitably loathsome and Mephistophelean Soviet puppet, Duranty. He conveys menace, corruption and moral abandonment with finesse. 

Some people will still need it all spelt out. Perhaps only those who deserve to understand the film will do so.

Posted on by Alex Woodcock-Clarke

“No, Mr. Bond, I expect you to die!”

ALEX WOODCOCK-CLARKE says No Time To Die may have become too woke to live

Thrown off buildings, cliffs and dams, out of planes in their death spiral, into pools full of sharks, and once into bed with Grace Jones dressed as Satan. Assaulted by giants with steel teeth and midgets in bowler hats. James Bond has survived all this for 58 years. Yet soon, perhaps as soon as April 2021, No Time To Die, the latest Bond film, may achieve the dream of international maniacs everywhere: killing off the multi-billion dollar franchise he’s led since 1964.

The culprit will not be Netflix-age franchise fatigue nor even the larger ‘wokeness’ now infecting Hollywood, but a surprise villain in the heart of Bondage itself. You know her name. It’s charged with the phonemes of any femme fatale who’s ever shot, stabbed or drugged OO7. Rosa Klebb. Elektra King. Vesper Lynd. Faintly European, oddly evocatory, marked by stressed syllables. She is Barbara Broccoli, and she may be about to blow Bond 25, No Time To Die, sky-high.

Broccoli has been in charge of the billion-dollar Bond franchise since 1995 when her father, the famed Albert “Cubby” Broccoli, handed her control of EON (“Everything Or Nothing”) Productions which owns the entire Bond Intellectual Franchise. Broccoli’s control of IP is very nearly total (she shares ownership with her adopted half-brother Michael G. Wilson), and gives her a billion-dollar net worth that makes Auric Goldfinger look amateur. Such leverage makes her perhaps the most powerful female producer the film industry has ever seen, comments  the Guardian.

She and Wilson have been credited with saving the IP twice. Firstly, by relaunching it as a glamorous, slick Nineties actioner fronted by Pierce Brosnan with 1995’s GoldenEye and then again, when the Brosnan-era Bond staled into CGI invisible cars and diamond faces, by rebooting the franchise as a gritty, grim, shaky cam thriller fronted by her personal pick for the role, knobbly-faced, jug-eared Daniel Craig. “We got too fantastical,” commented Wilson ruefully. “We had to come back to Earth.”

As far as the accountants are concerned, the two co-producers went La Grande each time. While The World Is Not Enough (1999), Brosnan’s last 007, film made $431.9 million, the rebooted, re-Bonded Casino Royale came in at $669,789,482. Craig’s Bond film, 2012’s Skyfall scored the highest gross ($1,218,849,723) of all of them, and a profit of $910,526,981. Forbes magazine calculates that, adjusted for inflation, the Bond franchise has grossed $16,315,134,284. That makes it the fourth richest movie franchise of all time (behind the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Star Wars and Harry Potter). Together Broccoli and Wilson have pulled off a golden grand slam.

But now it’s 2020 and, make no mistake, of the two co-producers, Broccoli calls the shots. How the ownership of EON is divided is not known but Broccoli was Cubby’s blood child while Wilson is his adopted stepson. Even if ownership is equally divided, Wilson is now 77, and press articles suggest his energy is waning while his half-sister, a remarkably well-preserved 60, is just getting into her stride. “Barbara scares the hell out of people,” Wilson told the New York Times in one joint interview only to receive what the reporter calls “an O.K.-that’s-enough look”. In another interview, Variety noted her casting “a reproachful eye at Wilson when his attempts at humour strike her as ill-considered”.

It’s just as well Broccoli now holds a firm grip on EON’s production decisions because No Time To Die is a production already estimated to cost around $250,000,000 and juggles competing distribution, marketing and merchandising responsibilities between Sony, MGM, Omega and Heineken to name a few interested parties.

No one was surprised then when, EON announced on 4 March 2020 that after “thorough evaluation of the global theatrical marketplace”, No Time To Die’s release would be postponed until 12 November 2020. This was the first major production to be delayed as Hollywood responded to the pandemic. Media commentators approved the announcement. “Sensible” said Deadline Hollywood. “Necessary” commented the Radio Times. Launching the film into a dead market might have been catastrophic. The Hollywood Reporter estimates $5 billion has been wiped off the value of cinema receipts by COVID.

Except a closer read of the EON announcement reveals some real red wine-with-fish clues that all is not well with No Time To Die.  The press release was issued before most governments, particularly in the US or UK, had issued advisories, let alone sanctions, relating to the COVID crisis. A careful second reading also reveals it doesn’t mention the pandemic at all.

Delaying a film is expensive. Shifting the release date and sacrificing the time-fixed launch events, advertising and material (all of which are pre-bought sometimes years in advance) is calculated by The Hollywood Reporter to cost EON around $50 million; the whole marketing campaign had to be scrapped just after a $4.5 million Super Bowl ad had been screened. Yet this isn’t the first time No Time To Die’s launch has been delayed. Not even the second, or the third. On 2nd October, a fourth release date was announced, of 2nd April 2021.

The first delay occurred when EON producers fell out with the first choice to direct the film, veteran Danny Boyle. Citing “creative differences”, Boyle departed, and the launch was moved from October 2019 to 2020. A February launch was on schedule until without warning the film’s composer, Dan Romer, was suddenly dropped and replaced by Hans Zimmer. Again, “creative differences”.  The launch date was then moved to July. Then November. Now April. That means a film whose principal shooting was completed in October 2019 could be delayed almost two years before it ever hits the movie theatres.

And now there is another rumour. Emanating from Midnight’s Edge, an internet movie site, and picked up by a number of national newspapers, it reveals that EON ran a number of super-secret test screenings and that

Sources have informed Midnight’s Edge that a recent test screening of No Time To Die did not go well

While skating around specifics, the site concludes bluntly:

…they are using the outbreak as cover to avoid bad publicity

So, what’s gone wrong? And who’s to blame? The answer to both questions is Broccoli.

Broccoli has been positioning No Time To Die as the culmination of a five-film arc that began with Commander Bond’s career from recruitment into the service (Casino Royale) and now ends with his retirement in No Time To Die. This coincides very nicely with Daniel Craig’s own tenancy of the role (“That’s what he’s saying. Yes, he’s saying this is his last movie as Bond. Sadly”, commented Broccoli). More significantly, it’s also the climax of Broccoli’s most radical rebooting of the brand, to make Bond ‘woke’.

In 1962, Sean Connery was interviewed on about his forthcoming appearance in Dr No. He presciently analysed the character that he was to make into an icon:

I see Bond as a sensualist – his senses are highly tuned and he’s awake to everything. He likes his wine, his food and his women. He’s quite amoral. I particularly like him because he thrives on conflict – a quality lacking in present-day society

In just a few words, this galumphing Glaswegian bodybuilder-turned-milkman summarised the essence of what made Bond a hero to men for the next fifty-eight years. His selfish, stylish, combative pursuit of his own appetites that the rest of us must reel in and subsume in our responsibilities to our families, to our jobs, to our assigned roles in society. This archetype is unique amongst modern fictional heroes, and it’s uniquely British. It couldn’t be American which requires an element of self-sacrifice from its modern legends. Bruce Wayne’s crusade against crime derives from his tragic bereavement. Walter White builds his drug empire to support his family after his death. Even Homer Simpson, for all his oral-compulsive slobbishness, is all about family.

For all their differences in tone and style, Connery, Moore, Lazenby, Dalton and Brosnan were always true to that unique archetype. The lone warrior who does not apologise for being good at what he does and doing it for no other reason than he’s good at doing it.

Onscreen, castration is a motif introduced in Casino Royale (1953), the very first of the original books, and recurs through the films (once, in Goldfinger (1956), while strapped to a gold slab in danger of being bisected by an industrial laser, crotch-first). But since 2006, Barbara Broccoli had made some sharp and deep cuts beneath the waistband of the old fellow, and audiences have noticed.

It’s not just that Bond now prefers not vodka-martinis but Heineken beer (thanks to a product placement deal that reportedly netted the film nearly $45 million). It’s not that he now drives an Aston Martin Rapide E, an electric car (since when did the man who blew up a volcano care about his carbon footprint?). It’s not that he has less sex than any other Bond (six across five films compared to Roger Moore’s nineteen). It’s not even the bizarre plot jumps and anti-twists, Broccoli has forced into the story structure. (The villain’s big plan in Quantum of Solace? To steal all the water in Bolivia! Blofeld’s motivation for revenge in Spectre? His dad was Bond’s ski-instructor!)

No, the real reason fans are souring on Broccoli’s vision of Bond is that she has made him weepy, humourless and regretful. He shares tearful showers with his girlfriend at the awfulness of it all and he weeps buckets over the death of M in Skyfall (That said, the vision of Craig’s rubber walnut face melting with misery over Judy Dench’s upturned face is one of the funniest scenes in all Bondom). He doesn’t like his job. Bond doesn’t even want to be Bond anymore. In the new film, according to deliberately leaked information, No Time To Die Bond is retired and his OO7 status taken over by a – gasp! – black woman, Lashana Lynch. The Daily Mail reports this development like this:

A movie insider said: ‘There is a pivotal scene at the start of the film where M says ‘Come in 007’, and in walks Lashana who is black, beautiful and a woman. ‘It’s a popcorn-dropping moment. Bond is still Bond but he’s been replaced as 007 by this stunning woman’

Anthony Horowitz, the novelist and screenwriter hired by the Fleming Estate to write new James Bond books Triggor Mortis (2015) and Forever and a Day (2018), best sums up many people’s objections:

Bond is weak…He has doubts. That’s not Bond… It’s that sort of thing that made me angry

Madeline Grant of the Telegraph puts it another way:

If James Bond has gone woke, he might as well be cancelled

Why has Broccoli turned Bond into this lachrymose capon? The answer is simple. Sometime in the mid-2000s, she saw The Bourne Identity and its follow-ups. This thriller by Doug Liman starred an amnesiac American secret agent who fights shadowy governmental enemies while struggling all the time with severe emotional problems. These films intercut hyper-violent, visually incomprehensible shaky cam action sequences with scenes of Matt Damon, the star, in front of rain-streaked windows, looking out soulfully with brimming eyes into the darkness, like a basset hound finally realising he will never learn to use a doorknob. On a relatively small budget, the Bourne films turned a huge profit and wowed audiences with their ‘realistic’ take on the spy game.  One can imagine Broccoli sitting in a darkened viewing room, rising dramatically from her seat and declaiming to the world: “I’ve found my Bond!”.

The trouble is, Bourne isn’t Bond, and the world is beginning to see through the switch. It already registered its objections when the last Bond film before this one, Spectre, received ‘mixed reviews’ and grossed $879.6 million, an impressive figure until you realise it’s $200 million less than its predecessor, Skyfall (which grossed $1.111 billion).

If No Time To Dies does not match or exceed these figures, considering the vastly excessive additional costs imposed by the COVID crisis added to those of the director and crew changes, then the whole billion dollar franchise could go up like a volcano base. All across Hollywood once great and permanent franchises, from Star Wars to the DCVerse to Universal’s Dark Universe, are learning that one or more bad films can wreck previously rock-solid brands and sink the careers of once untouchable producers, like Barbara Broccoli.

Yahoo Movies recently reviewed the progress of production on the movie. It noted the delays, the sackings, the creative differences, the endless rewriting of the plot by five different writers. It quoted one

…straight-talking source [who] revealed that ‘the crew reckon they’re working on a well-polished shit show’

If true, then Bond may be looking down a gun barrel for the last time – and the finger on the trigger will be Broccoli’s.

Posted on by Paul Garner · 2 Comments

Blake’s 7: moral darkness in outer space

Gareth Thomas as Roj Blake

PAUL GARNER pays tribute to an innovative sci-fi series which gave grim glamour to late Seventies and early Eighties evenings

In the dark winter months at the beginning of 1978 I began to regret signing up as a cub scout. We met on Monday evenings in the school hall, and, thanks to the vagaries of BBC scheduling, that was also when episodes of the brand-new science fiction series, Blake’s 7, were being broadcast. I remember hurrying home from all the ‘dyb-dyb-dybbing’, anxious that I was going to miss the beginning of the latest instalment.

For Doctor Who fans like me, the new series would help to fill the gaps between Saturdays when the TARDIS would whisk us off on another adventure. But if we expected Blake’s 7 to emulate the fantastical whimsy that characterized late-1970s Doctor Who, we were in for a shock. The BBC’s new ‘space opera’ was tonally very different and about to subvert all our cosy assumptions.

Creator Terry Nation claims to have pitched the series to BBC executives as “The Dirty Dozen in space”. Blake’s 7 is set in a dystopian, post-atomic future in which the Terran Federation controls the human population with a combination of drugs, mind control techniques and old-fashioned thuggery. The earth and its colonies are police states, with Stasi-like informers everywhere. Citizens can trust no one and betrayal is the order of the day. In the opening episode, we are introduced to Roj Blake (Gareth Thomas), a man who has been brainwashed and can remember nothing of his previous life as a resistance leader. When his former compatriots help him to break his conditioning they are mercilessly eliminated, and Blake is subjected to a show trial with trumped-up accusations of child molestation. It is hard-edged stuff.

Blake is convicted and sent on a transporter to a prison planet, Cygnus Alpha, but en route organises a rebellion and manages to escape with two of his fellow convicts. Kerr Avon (Paul Darrow) is a computer genius and embezzler and Jenna Stannis (Sally Knyvette) is a space pilot and smuggler. Commandeering an abandoned alien ship, the Liberator, with its master computer Zen (Peter Tuddenham), they mount a rescue bid, and on Cygnus Alpha recruit Olag Gan (David Jackson) and Vila Restal (Michael Keating). Vila is a thief and expert lock-breaker, Gan guilty of killing the Federation guard who had raped his girlfriend. Soon they are joined by Cally (Jan Chappell), a telepath from the planet Auron and lone survivor of an anti-Federation guerilla force. Pledging to destroy the Federation, the seven head off into space, hotly pursued by the leader of Space Command, Servalan (Jacqueline Pearce), and her psychopathic henchman, Travis (Stephen Greif in series one, Brian Croucher in series two).

Given this set-up, Blake’s 7 could easily have lapsed into two-dimensionality, but one of the most notable things about it is that nothing is cast in black and white. We are never entirely sure that the ‘good guys’ really are good guys. The Federation is ruthless and brutal, but the rebels are not averse to some ruthlessness and brutality of their own. The body count is unquestionably high whenever Blake’s crew are around, and not just on the Federation side. Blake himself seems fully prepared to risk the lives of others in pursuit of his political ideals, and his quarrelling followers often seem ready to abandon one another to save their own skins. They are at best anti-heroes. The most morally ambiguous of them all is Avon, whose obvious self-interest leads to some tense confrontations with Blake early in the series. Avon is not the kind of man on whom it would be wise to turn your back. Even Vila, for whom Avon shows some grudging affection, is not safe. In the episode Orbit, Avon is ready to throw Vila overboard so their shuttle can overcome the gravitational pull of the planet from which they are making their escape, and his stalking of Vila through the darkened corridors, while his companion cowers terrified in the shadows, is genuinely chilling. Avon’s callousness is also spotlighted in other episodes, such as Stardrive, in which he coldly sacrifices Dr Plaxton, and Rumours of Death, in which he seeks revenge against Shrinker, the man he suspects of murdering Anna Grant, the only woman he ever loved. Shrinker is soon reduced from sadistic torturer to quivering wreck, begging Avon for mercy, in a fantastic performance by guest actor John Bryans. But viewers are left wondering, with the crew of the Liberator, whether Avon is any less monstrous than the man he is punishing.

Jacqueline Pearce as Servalan, and Paul Darrow as Kerr Avon

Later episodes introduce changes to the regular line-up. At the end of series one, Orac, a flashing box of tricks with an irascible personality, is acquired by Blake and his companions from the computer genius Ensor. Midway through the second series Gan dies under falling masonry during a raid on Federation Central Control and at the end of the season Blake and Jenna go missing after bailing from the Liberator during an intergalactic conflict. With Blake’s departure, Avon appoints himself leader, and in the third series the crew is joined by Dayna Mellanby (Josette Simon), the daughter of a fugitive and revolutionary, and Del Tarrant (Steven Pacey), a defector from the Federation’s Space Academy.

At the end of the third series, Avon’s recklessness in the teeth of opposition from his fellow crewmembers leads to the destruction of the Liberator, along with Zen, and the unhappy survivors are trapped by Servalan on the planet Terminal. This was originally intended to be the climactic episode, but late in the day the decision was made to commission a fourth series. By this time the production office had already closed down and there was a scramble to reenlist cast and crew, and get a production line of scripts going, which accounts for much of the unevenness of the first half of series four.

The fourth and final series opens with Cally’s death in a booby trap left by Servalan. Then we are introduced to Soolin (Glynis Barber), an expert gunslinger whose parents had been murdered by hired mercenaries. The rebels acquire a new ship, Scorpio, along with its computer, Slave, and they establish a base from which to launch an offensive against the Federation. Meanwhile, Servalan, who by this time has been deposed as Federation president, takes on a new identity as Commissioner Sleer and resumes her vendetta against Avon and his crew.

Forty years on, Blake’s 7 remains loved by many, though it is difficult to regard it as high art. It has a reputation, not wholly undeserved, for looking cheap, though it must be remembered that it was made in the unionized days of the late 1970s, when budgets were stretched by rampant inflation and there was an ever-present threat of strike action bringing a halt to production. The clichés about dodgy special effects, wonky sets and quarries masquerading as alien worlds are clichés for a reason, and the constraints that faced the production team are often all too evident in what appeared on screen. Despite this, the series has a loyal fan following and conventions continue to be held annually, sadly with a dwindling number of original cast and crew as the years pass.

Inevitably, comparisons are made between Blake’s 7 and Doctor Who, though in reality the two programmes are very different. Blake’s 7 is darker, grittier and more clearly written for an older audience. There are references to sex, drugs and alcohol in Blake’s 7 that would never have been allowed in classic Who. Blake’s 7 is also much less reliant on aliens and monsters, preferring to concentrate on human drama and action. On the few occasions when Blake’s 7 does venture into monster territory the results are less than satisfying, object lessons in how ambition cannot always triumph over practicalities. Director Vere Lorrimer wisely keeps the Phibians lurking in the shadows in Orac, teasing the viewer with occasional glimpses of claw or tail, but on other occasions the programme makers are less circumspect, and, unfortunately, the giant insect in The Harvest of Kairos possesses all the menace of a pantomime horse and the climax of Moloch is rather spoiled by a laughable monocular glove puppet.

However, the play’s the thing, and the great strengths of Blake’s 7 are in characterization and story. The regulars turn in some magnificent performances, even if, at times, a certain amount of scenery-chewing is indulged. Paul Darrow’s Avon is beautifully crafted, dark, self-centred and cynical, with a nice line in sardonic asides, such as when he says of Tarrant that he “is brave, young and handsome; three reasons not to like him”. Michael Keating brings great humanity to his portrayal of Vila, whose cowardice and complaining could have been irritating in the hands of a lesser actor. Yes, Vila is often employed as comic relief (there are lighter moments, even in Blake’s 7), but he is not stupid, on one occasion feigning drunkenness so that he could pass on to his crewmates the solution to an intractable problem while making sure he didn’t have to endanger himself by dealing with it. From the outset, Jacqueline Pearce’s Servalan is deliciously sadistic and scheming, and one can’t help relishing her performance even when it goes over the top. Finally, special mention should be given to Peter Tuddenham, who manages to invest all the series’ computers with distinct personalities, from the detached logicality of Zen to the fussy obtuseness of Orac and the Uriah Heep-like obsequiousness of Slave.

There were some notable guest appearances too, including Roy Kinnear as the bumbling, avaricious security officer of a passenger liner in Gold, Aubrey Woods as a corrupt and flamboyant casino owner in Gambit, and Julian Glover as an unpleasant neurosurgeon and Federation informer in Breakdown. As in any long-running series, the scriptwriting hits highs and lows, but Blake’s 7 delivers many stand-out episodes and even the most mediocre often contain memorable lines.

Among my favourites are City at the Edge of the World, in which Vila almost gets the girl and we meet Bayban the Butcher (Colin Baker in pre-Doctor Who days), Terminal, a well-crafted and pacey episode, with a heartbeat soundtrack that sets a funereal tone, and Sand, in which Tarrant and Servalan are thrown together in unlikely fashion on a planet with a very strange and threatening lifeform. Nor are the scriptwriters above the shameless plundering of plotlines from classic fantasy literature, especially in the fourth series which gives us episodes based on Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (Rescue) and H. G. Wells’ The Island of Dr Moreau (Animals). Even Headhunter trespasses into the domain of Frankenstein, with its lumbering android grotesquely wearing the decapitated head of its creator.

Blake’s 7 ran from 1978 to 1981. Looking back now, one is struck by how unremittingly bleak it all was. Every series ended in some kind of catastrophe, and there was never any guarantee our heroes would even survive. In the final series, we witness Avon’s slow descent into paranoia and madness, culminating in the shocking denouement on the frontier planet of Gauda Prime. For more than two years, viewers had eagerly anticipated Blake’s return, but when he does finally reappear it is not the glad reunion for which we had hoped. Blake, battered and world-weary, stands once again face-to-face with Avon, only for his old comrade to shoot him in the stomach at point-blank range, under the tragic misapprehension that Blake has betrayed him. What follows is one of the most shocking endings to any television series, with all the Scorpio crew except Avon being gunned down in slow motion by jack-booted Federation soldiers. As Avon stands over the bloody corpse of Blake, with the guards closing in around him, he raises his gun and smiles. And that’s where the curtain falls, the closing credits breaking in with another volley of shots. There is no happy ending. The ‘good guys’ don’t always win.

Of course, fans of the programme have been endlessly inventive in coming up with scenarios in which their favourite characters survived or the story continued. Sequels have been written, new episodes recorded for radio, and there have been rumours for years about a television revival, although a reboot seems as far away as ever. But I can’t help feeling that the ending we got was the right one. The rebellion is ultimately a failure. The Federation is still in control, even expanding after the setback of the Andromedan war. And Servalan, who mysteriously makes no appearance in the finale, is presumably still out there and plotting her route back to power. It’s bleak, but anything more hopeful would rob Blake’s 7 of its soul.