David Jackson died around 2000, so Gan is either recast or absent.
Blake's 7 - First Time Watching on BritBox
- Thread starter JD
- Start date
Yep. Scoones wanted to design Liberator, and was upset when he didn't. His Liberator design is quite Star Destroyer, and very human big ship.
One of the Early Years releases was "When Vila met Gan" which featured Michael Keating as Vila and Owen Aaronovitch who played Gan in the re-imaged releases.
thus old Vila, new Gan.
I think this is the most recently active Blake's 7 topic, so I'll post here. If mods think it makes more sense to start a new topic, let me know.
Big Finish has just published a limited edition box set of hardcover novelizations of the first season of Blake's 7. Preorder price was £100, now it's £150 (I think; I'm seeing it in Canadian dollars) and the shipping cost for overseas customers is in AYFKM territory. 1500 copies, books only for sale as a set, no apparent plans for ebook or paperback editions, so I went ahead and preordered. It arrived today, a week after the shipping notification (shipped by DHL). The individual books probably average no more than 150 pages. The authors are Paul Cornell, Marc Platt, Gary Russell, Jacqueline Rayner, Una McCormack, James Goss, and Steve Cole. Each adapts two episodes, drawing on early draft scripts, other resources, and forty years of thinking about the show, so these are intended to be a lot different from the old Hoyle novelizations (which only included a few of these episodes), and they may also be significantly different in some respects from the aired versions. It's an interesting approach with some good writers, and I'm curious to see how they turn out. It's not clear whether they're doing more seasons; it's been pointed out that all of the stories adapted here were written by Terry Nation, and there are some restrictions on what Big Finish has been able to do with Blake's 7 -- no series D stuff with Soolin and Scorpio, for example. So this may be a one-off.
Meanwhile, in the last year or two we've also had two unauthorized but well put together fannuals, two unauthorized short story anthologies, three print editions of B7 spinoff tales originally released only as Big Finish audiobooks, and a new unofficial post-Gauda Prime novel by people associated with one or two of the other unauthorized books.
That's a lot of recent activity for a series that's only generated a few dozen books in four decades. Some of it is glammed up fanfic, printed through Lulu.com, but I was generally impressed by the quality of the first fannual, so I'm reasonably hopeful about most of this stuff.
More on topic... my rewatch has accelerated a bit, considering I started this one a few years ago, and I'm into the third season now. I successfully made it past "The Harvest of Kairos."
Big Finish has just published a limited edition box set of hardcover novelizations of the first season of Blake's 7. Preorder price was £100, now it's £150 (I think; I'm seeing it in Canadian dollars) and the shipping cost for overseas customers is in AYFKM territory. 1500 copies, books only for sale as a set, no apparent plans for ebook or paperback editions, so I went ahead and preordered. It arrived today, a week after the shipping notification (shipped by DHL). The individual books probably average no more than 150 pages. The authors are Paul Cornell, Marc Platt, Gary Russell, Jacqueline Rayner, Una McCormack, James Goss, and Steve Cole. Each adapts two episodes, drawing on early draft scripts, other resources, and forty years of thinking about the show, so these are intended to be a lot different from the old Hoyle novelizations (which only included a few of these episodes), and they may also be significantly different in some respects from the aired versions. It's an interesting approach with some good writers, and I'm curious to see how they turn out. It's not clear whether they're doing more seasons; it's been pointed out that all of the stories adapted here were written by Terry Nation, and there are some restrictions on what Big Finish has been able to do with Blake's 7 -- no series D stuff with Soolin and Scorpio, for example. So this may be a one-off.
Meanwhile, in the last year or two we've also had two unauthorized but well put together fannuals, two unauthorized short story anthologies, three print editions of B7 spinoff tales originally released only as Big Finish audiobooks, and a new unofficial post-Gauda Prime novel by people associated with one or two of the other unauthorized books.
That's a lot of recent activity for a series that's only generated a few dozen books in four decades. Some of it is glammed up fanfic, printed through Lulu.com, but I was generally impressed by the quality of the first fannual, so I'm reasonably hopeful about most of this stuff.
More on topic... my rewatch has accelerated a bit, considering I started this one a few years ago, and I'm into the third season now. I successfully made it past "The Harvest of Kairos."
I am sure they did a giant brain in Blake's 7 long before Dr Who did the same kind of thing with the Ood. I remember Blake and Cally standing in front of a giant brain.
^ Ultraworld from Series C. I'm not sure this is the first giant brain in sci-fi though.
I'd seen that series of books, was tempting but was an awful lot. I may reconsider. I also need to get at least one of the annuals at some point!
I started my own re-watch this year, to tie in to it being 45 years since 7 year old me first started watching what would become one of his favourite TV series ever. Averaging an episode a week and I'm blogging about it here.
My latest blog is Bounty but have seen up to Deliverance, just haven't written that blog yet.
Is it wrong that I've always had a soft spot for the Harvest of Kairos? (I suspect when I get round to it this time my view may well have shifted!).
I'd seen that series of books, was tempting but was an awful lot. I may reconsider. I also need to get at least one of the annuals at some point!
I started my own re-watch this year, to tie in to it being 45 years since 7 year old me first started watching what would become one of his favourite TV series ever. Averaging an episode a week and I'm blogging about it here.
My latest blog is Bounty but have seen up to Deliverance, just haven't written that blog yet.
Is it wrong that I've always had a soft spot for the Harvest of Kairos? (I suspect when I get round to it this time my view may well have shifted!).
Was Ultraworld one of the series episodes because I remember it as an actual TV episode?
Ta thanks..... Blake's 7 is one of the few shows where the bad guys won
In my 'Behind the Scenes' book, the writers talk with producer Vere Lorrimar (sp) and head writer Chris Boucher about the finale and their response was, once they found out the series was ending after season four, the two of them sat down and tried to figure out an ending and they decided that they didn't want a 'ride off into the sunset' where further adventures await, they wanted something memorable and killing the cast was it.
They said that five people trying to take down the Federation was the same as five soldiers trying to take on the entire Nazi army; you just couldn't do it and, eventually, the odds would be against you and you'd wind up either captured or killed.
It's interesting in that same book, Paul Darrow gives an explanation for the smile at the end when he raises the gun at the Federation soldiers.
He's smiling because he knows the gun is out of bullets and that he doesn't stand a chance.
God, Paul Darrow was all kinds of awesome. I wish he was still around. 
It would have worked had our plucky crew gained allies and support along the way. People who would band together to take down evil Earth
I really need to get back to watching this sometime. I only watched the first 2 or 3 episodes before I got sidetracked and never got back to it. It was pretty good start though.
If we're including prose sci-fi there was IT in A Wrinkle in Time, which came out in 1964, 16 years before the air date Wikipedia has for that episode.
Was Terry Nation a pessimist?
Also the BBC kept changing the scale of models throughout the series where some ships looked huge then smaller, then huge again.
From my 'Behind the Scenes' book
Mary Ridge was on the receiving end of a good-natured gag when she first came in to discuss her work on "Terminal", the closing episode of series three. Although it was the director's first episode of Blake's 7, that didn't deter the practical jokers of the visual effects department. "In our preliminary chat about blowing up the ship, the vis-FX boys were throwing around all sorts of ideas. Suddenly, one of them said, 'Of course, there's a big explosion, and bodies will come tumbling from above. . ." I was getting quite carried away with the idea of all the floating bodies, when I remembered that Avon had said he could actually fly the Liberator by himself with the help of the two computers, so who could the bodies be?"
"The vis-FX guy said, 'Oh, you don't understand, Mary the Liberator is storeys high, stack after stack.' Well, it was my first episode, and although I'd gone back and discovered various things about it, I didn't remember that. I checked it out with David - 'Are there really a lot of people up there?' - and he laughed and said, 'Rubbish!'"
"I remember we wanted to put different floor levels in, so we could have the beams falling down and sliding off," recalls Jim Frances. "The ship had caught a virus, so we were doing whatever we could to simulate that, but we only had a certain amount of time to convert the set from its normal state to destruction. We made up lots of the virus from rigid brown foam, and pained it up so we could just staple it in place, and then top it off with Slime. It was 'round the time that they banned the stuff, so we had to buy every little pot of it we possibly could. I'd even gone to Harrods, and we ended up with a dustbin full, which still wasn't enough. We cleaned out every place for miles around to get hold of it because it worked so well. We'd used it before, and thought we'd be able to get enough, until it just started vanishing from the shops when we most needed it."
"We bought up all the straight Slime,' continues Mike Kelt, "and all that was left in the shop was Slime with Worms, so we had to buy that. We tried to take the worms out, but then thought 'the hell with it', and just put up the Slime with Worms. It was great, because we were plastering the walls with this stuff which was supposed to be corroding away and dripping down the walls."
Mary Ridge was on the receiving end of a good-natured gag when she first came in to discuss her work on "Terminal", the closing episode of series three. Although it was the director's first episode of Blake's 7, that didn't deter the practical jokers of the visual effects department. "In our preliminary chat about blowing up the ship, the vis-FX boys were throwing around all sorts of ideas. Suddenly, one of them said, 'Of course, there's a big explosion, and bodies will come tumbling from above. . ." I was getting quite carried away with the idea of all the floating bodies, when I remembered that Avon had said he could actually fly the Liberator by himself with the help of the two computers, so who could the bodies be?"
"The vis-FX guy said, 'Oh, you don't understand, Mary the Liberator is storeys high, stack after stack.' Well, it was my first episode, and although I'd gone back and discovered various things about it, I didn't remember that. I checked it out with David - 'Are there really a lot of people up there?' - and he laughed and said, 'Rubbish!'"
"I remember we wanted to put different floor levels in, so we could have the beams falling down and sliding off," recalls Jim Frances. "The ship had caught a virus, so we were doing whatever we could to simulate that, but we only had a certain amount of time to convert the set from its normal state to destruction. We made up lots of the virus from rigid brown foam, and pained it up so we could just staple it in place, and then top it off with Slime. It was 'round the time that they banned the stuff, so we had to buy every little pot of it we possibly could. I'd even gone to Harrods, and we ended up with a dustbin full, which still wasn't enough. We cleaned out every place for miles around to get hold of it because it worked so well. We'd used it before, and thought we'd be able to get enough, until it just started vanishing from the shops when we most needed it."
"We bought up all the straight Slime,' continues Mike Kelt, "and all that was left in the shop was Slime with Worms, so we had to buy that. We tried to take the worms out, but then thought 'the hell with it', and just put up the Slime with Worms. It was great, because we were plastering the walls with this stuff which was supposed to be corroding away and dripping down the walls."
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