The Man Who Invented the Daleks (44 page)

Given this rich pedigree, it was unfortunate that Blake emerged as one of Nation’s less entertaining heroes. ‘He was supposed to be swashbuckling and dashing and all those things,’ regretted Nation, ‘but I never found it, I never really gave him a chance.’ He is sincere, committed to his cause and concerned for the well-being of his crew, but there is a lack of the devil-may-care hearty bravado that was surely required, and no compensating charisma. ‘To a man of my spirit, opportunities are duties,’ declares Rudolf Rassendyll, hero of Anthony Hope’s
The Prisoner of Zenda
(1894), and it was that defiant embrace of life that Blake should have embodied as a kind of Jimmy Garland in space. Instead, as played by Gareth Thomas, a doleful-faced actor with a vague resemblance to Tony Hancock, he was, observed Shaun Usher in the
Daily Mail
, ‘a thoroughly decent, rugger-playing chap, rather than a maverick anti-Establishment man-of-the-future’. Thomas himself became disillusioned with the role, and ultimately left the series that bore his character’s name. ‘One of the many reasons why I left
Blake’s 7
was because I wasn’t really quite sure where else I could go with it,’ he reflected. ‘I mean, within the bounds of what could happen in the series, I felt I’d explored most avenues of Blake.’

That development, however, was for the future. When the first episode of
Blake’s 7
was broadcast on the first Monday of 1978, it was clear who was intended to form the centre of the story. As in
Survivors
, the first three episodes form a single, sustained narrative and, as normal with Nation, the back-story is established early on. Some four years before the start of the opening episode, ‘The Way Back’, Roj Blake was the leader of a revolutionary group on Earth, seeking the overthrow of the Federation, but was captured by the authorities. Not wishing to create a martyr for the cause, they brainwashed him, blocking out existing memories through intensive therapy and implanting new ones, before bringing him to court in a show trial, where he confessed his crimes and professed his loyalty to the Federation; they then removed his memory of the trial itself. Now living a normal, unexceptional life amid a population kept in ‘a state of drug induced tranquillity’, he is taken to a meeting of a new rebel group, who are desperate to recruit him to their cause, as a powerful symbol of resistance. But the meeting has been betrayed and Federation troops arrive to break up the illegal gathering.

‘Do not attempt to resist arrest,’ urges the group’s leader, recalling the pacifism of Temmosus, leader of the Thals in the first Daleks story. ‘No matter what the provocation, we must not resort to violence.’ Like Temmosus, he’s promptly shot down along with everyone else, save Blake himself, the sole surviving witness to the massacre. Faced once again with the problem of what to do with this thorn in its side, the Federation frames Blake on a charge of sexually assaulting children and has him banished to a far distant planet, Cygnus Alpha, which – like Desperus in ‘The Daleks’ Master Plan’ – is a penal colony. The episode ends with him on board a prison ship, setting off for exile.

Since we will seldom return to Earth in the ensuing series, our understanding of the Federation is largely shaped by what we have seen in this first episode. It’s a curiously ambivalent picture. The first impression is of the borrowings from other science fiction dystopias, debts not only to the work of Orwell and Huxley, but also to the 1971 film of Anthony Burgess’s
A Clockwork Orange
– in the flashbacks of Blake’s brainwashing – and to one of Nation’s favourite sources, Isaac Asimov’s
The Caves of Steel
: the city here is another sealed dome, there are tensions between Earth and the more sparsely populated Outer Worlds, and there is a largely ineffectual dissident faction that meets in secret. But beyond the surface impression of futuristic totalitarianism, life under Federation rule remains almost entirely unexplored; we don’t see the daily life of the population, what they do for entertainment, how the media operates, what the basis of the economy is, even whether there are political parties. Ultimately Nation has little interest in exploring the nature of a future society, merely wishing to establish the existence of an evil empire against which his heroes can rebel. As with the Daleks, he is evoking a militarism that harks back to the Nazis.

Yet even this is not quite such an absolute as it seems. When Blake is charged, he is assigned a lawyer named Varon to defend him. Although the guilty verdict is pre-ordained, Varon himself is an honest and honourable man who comes to believe in Blake’s story of the massacre and in the trumped-up nature of the charges, even though to do so means challenging everything he believes. ‘If it were true, do you realise the implication of what you’re saying?’ he asks. ‘It would mean there was corruption at a high level of the administration.’ Ultimately the truth does him no good, for both he and his wife are killed, but the fact that such people can exist and thrive within the Federation is an indication that it is not quite as monolithic in its evil as first appears. There will be further suggestions that not everyone in the Federation hierarchy is corrupted by power, and that there remain checks and balances within the system. In the second episode, ‘Space Fall’, the captain of the prison ship disapproves, albeit feebly, of the murderous actions of a subordinate officer, and when we first meet the brutal Space Commander Travis, he is facing a disciplinary inquiry concerning a massacre he ordered on the planet Auros; his methods, another senior officer says, represent ‘the philosophy of an assassin, not a Federation officer’. This, it turns out, is not the stark simplistic evil of the Daleks, but a more subtly delineated society, in which the structures and legal forms are those of a democracy sinking into dictatorship with an increasingly powerful and autonomous security state. In the words of Kasabi, formerly a senior officer in the administration: ‘The Federation is degenerate.’

These nuances, however, are overshadowed by the most shocking abuse of power in ‘The Way Back’ – not the massacre of the dissidents, nor the killing of Varon, nor even the treatment of Blake, but the fact that, in order to frame Blake, false memories are implanted in children, so that they will testify to having been sexually abused by him. The ramifications aren’t developed, but presumably the psychological effect of such a process is no different to a real assault. The charge of paedophilia was a particularly resonant one at the time. In 1976 the home secretary, Roy Jenkins, had asked the Criminal Law Revision Committee to look at whether the age of consent should be reduced and there were plenty of academics and experts, including the likes of future health secretary Patricia Hewitt, who supported a reduction to fourteen years of age. Briefly it appeared as though the liberalising culture of the 1960s might find a new direction to explore, and a campaigning body called the Paedophile Information Exchange sprang up to promote the cause. Then the moment passed and a media panic ensued, focused particularly on child pornography; even as the first season of
Blake’s 7
was being broadcast in 1978, the legislation that became the Protection of Children Act – heavily promoted by Mary Whitehouse – was passing through Parliament. To bring such issues on to television in an early-evening drama was an intriguing decision, even though the explicit references to Blake’s alleged crimes were toned down from the original script.

In characteristic Nation fashion, much of what has been established in the first episode disappears very rapidly. The child-sex conviction does not feature in later episodes, though this was a conscious decision by the production team, recognising that the public mood had become much more sensitive to the issue; when Blake’s trial is revisited in ‘Voice from the Past’, a second-season episode written by Roger Parkes, it is conspicuously not referred to. Less deliberately, the brainwashing, which had provided such a strong visual image in the first episode, appears to have been negated by Blake’s subsequent experiences, so that by the time he’s on the prison ship bound for Cygnus Alpha he has reverted to his revolutionary self. When someone comments that at least he’s alive, he responds vehemently: ‘No! Not until free men can think and speak. Not until power is back with the honest man.’

Meanwhile he is beginning to acquire the companions who will take us through the rest of the first season: a smuggler named Jenna Stannis (Sally Knyvette), who is also an expert pilot; a cowardly thief and locksmith named Vila Restal (Michael Keating); a convicted murderer named Olag Gan (David Jackson); and Avon, a computer expert who came close to stealing five million credits from the Federation’s own systems. It is the latter who will prove Blake’s chief rival as leader of the group, espousing a very different value system. ‘Wealth is the only reality,’ proclaims Avon. ‘And the only way to obtain wealth is to take it away from somebody else.’ He joins the others in staging an attempted mutiny on board, but only with some reluctance. ‘You’re a civilised man,’ urges Blake, trying to appeal to his self-interest. ‘On Cygnus Alpha that will not be a survival characteristic.’ Avon’s casual reply – ‘An intelligent man can adapt’ – suggests a greater degree of self-confidence than he actually displays, for despite his protestations of independence, he remains at Blake’s side, more or less loyally, for the next two seasons.

Blake’s ability to convince others, however, is less impressive. He, Jenna and Avon successfully escape from the prison ship, taking control of the sophisticated
Liberator
, which has been found abandoned, drifting like the
Mary Celeste
through space, and – at Blake’s insistence – make their way to Cygnus Alpha to rescue their fellow convicts. Using the teleportation facilities on the ship (as in ‘The Keys of Marinus’, these involve the use of bracelets), Blake ventures down on a reconnaissance mission to the surface and, discovering a blighted and benighted planet, concludes that the prospects for recruiting crew members are good: ‘From the little I did see, they won’t take too much persuading.’ But when he attempts to do so, he succeeds in convincing only four that their future lies with the
Liberator
rather than with the primitive religious cult presided over by Vargas (played by Brian Blessed in a typically unrestrained performance). Of those four, two are killed, leaving only Vila and Gan to join. One further crew member, the telepath Cally (Jan Chappell), turns up in a later episode and, together with the
Liberator’s
computer, Zen (voiced by Peter Tuddenham), these comprise the seven characters who make up the series title.

If what we see of Blake gives little indication that he is a charismatic, inspirational leader, the same is not true of his arch-enemies, representing the Federation in its most extreme manifestation. ‘Authors, unless they are careful, fall in love with their big villains,’ wrote the critic Richard Usborne, and Nation had clearly saved much of his creative energy for a splendid brace of baddies, who don’t appear until episode six, but who then become an ever greater presence as the season progresses. Even before they speak, Supreme Commander Servalan (Jacqueline Pearce) and Space Commander Travis (Stephen Greif) are a striking pair. He’s dressed entirely in black leather, with a patch over one eye and a laser gun built in to his prosthetic left hand (the injuries are from a previous encounter with Blake), while she’s clad in clinging white dresses and furs, like a cross between Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen and the White Witch of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia, or even Lady Arabella March in Bram Stoker’s feverish last novel,
The Lair of the White Worm
(1911). There’s also a hint in her name of Chauvelin, the principal foe of Blakeney, the Scarlet Pimpernel, and of Severin, the narrator of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s
Venus in Furs
(1870), though her abrupt switches between tactile flirtation and cruel disdain rather recall Wanda, the heroine of that novel. Ambitious, scheming and utterly ruthless, the two of them swagger through their episodes in the manner of the very best – and campest – pantomime rogues.

As head of the Federation’s armed forces, Servalan turns to Travis, the man who apprehended Blake the first time around, and charges him with the mission of tracking the rebel down again. The crew of the
Liberator
have begun to attack outposts of the Federation – a campaign made possible by possession of a ship that can outgun and outrun any in their enemy’s fleet – and there is growing concern that Blake could wreak serious damage on the empire. Some of the governments of the outlying planets are already talking about leaving the Federation, for if it can’t provide security from a marauding gang of guerrillas, then its usefulness must be called into question. There is also the danger that Blake’s actions are acting as a beacon for the discontented. ‘Stories of his exploits are still circulating,’ frets Servalan. ‘They excite people. The fact that he is still free gives them hope, and that is dangerous, Travis. Hope is very dangerous.’ Or, in the words of another senior figure of the Federation: ‘Any damage to the Federation is attributed to Blake. The smallest incident is exaggerated out of all proportion until it becomes a major event. Blake is becoming a legend. His name is a rallying call for malcontents of all persuasions.’ It is as though he has come to occupy the supposed position of Emmanuel Goldstein in
1984
, alleged to be the leader of the Brotherhood, the organisation fighting the ruling party.

Quite how these stories are circulating, however, is something of a mystery, for the rebel movement seems singularly ill-organised and misguided. The meeting in the first episode heard calls for a programme of civil disobedience in order to tie up Federation forces on Earth, thereby allowing the Outer Worlds to pursue their campaigns for independence. It was a perfectly logical strategy that only fell down when it came to proposing the sabotage of food production; starving the people into rebellion is seldom a winning tactic. In ‘Time Squad’ the resistance on the planet Saurian Major was so ineffectual that it has been entirely wiped out, with the exception of Cally. And in ‘Project Avalon’ a key rebel leader is captured and submitted to an interrogation machine that will extract information against her will, leaving Blake to stage a rescue attempt before the beans are spilt: ‘Avalon knows all the resistance movements in this star sector – places, names, everything,’ he explains. One cannot help but wonder at the incompetence of an organisation that would allow so much sensitive information to be in the possession of a single person, rather than distributed through a network of cells; by contrast, the Brotherhood in
1984
operates on the principle of no one person having contact with more than three or four others. As in ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’, Nation’s attraction to the romanticism of resistance outstripped any practical concerns.