30 Days of Blake's 7 - Day 1
May. 2nd, 2026 04:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
julesjonesDay 1: Favourite season
So what I get for my long-running failure to read DreamWidth more often than once a fortnight is finding out a day late that there is a Blake's 7 daily post thing going on. I estimate about five days before I fall into my usual lax posting habits...
Anyway, favourite series is 1 and 2 together. First and foremost this is because it's Blake's 7 that actually has Blake in it. That follows through to a couple of other things - there is an actual story arc, and very clear characterisations of people who don't necessarily want to be doing this, or at least doing it this way.
It also has Paul Darrow's scenery chewing tendencies more firmly controlled by the directors/producers than was the case in series 3 and 4, which in most episodes is A Good Thing. (The scenery chewing worked towards the end of series 4, when Darrow gave up on the inconsistent characterisation by different writers and decided to just play Avon as increasingly psychotic after years on the run being responsible for people he didn't want to be responsible for.)
And it has the Blake And Avon Show, which was not Terry Nation's original intention, but which everyone sensibly ran with when Avon became a breakout character. The interplay between a caring but utterly ruthless revolutionary and a cold, selfish, sharp-tongued character who just wants everyone to leave him in peace is fascinating. This is not just me looking at it through smut-coloured glasses, because I thought this long before Watervole told me to watch a couple of episodes with the sound off and look at the body language. This is, I think, the prime example, but when you look at the crew as a whole these characters, played by these actors, are very, very believable as a disparate group of people thrown together by circumstance and forced to rely on each other.
So what I get for my long-running failure to read DreamWidth more often than once a fortnight is finding out a day late that there is a Blake's 7 daily post thing going on. I estimate about five days before I fall into my usual lax posting habits...
Anyway, favourite series is 1 and 2 together. First and foremost this is because it's Blake's 7 that actually has Blake in it. That follows through to a couple of other things - there is an actual story arc, and very clear characterisations of people who don't necessarily want to be doing this, or at least doing it this way.
It also has Paul Darrow's scenery chewing tendencies more firmly controlled by the directors/producers than was the case in series 3 and 4, which in most episodes is A Good Thing. (The scenery chewing worked towards the end of series 4, when Darrow gave up on the inconsistent characterisation by different writers and decided to just play Avon as increasingly psychotic after years on the run being responsible for people he didn't want to be responsible for.)
And it has the Blake And Avon Show, which was not Terry Nation's original intention, but which everyone sensibly ran with when Avon became a breakout character. The interplay between a caring but utterly ruthless revolutionary and a cold, selfish, sharp-tongued character who just wants everyone to leave him in peace is fascinating. This is not just me looking at it through smut-coloured glasses, because I thought this long before Watervole told me to watch a couple of episodes with the sound off and look at the body language. This is, I think, the prime example, but when you look at the crew as a whole these characters, played by these actors, are very, very believable as a disparate group of people thrown together by circumstance and forced to rely on each other.
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Date: 2026-05-02 07:55 pm (UTC)