Back in the distant past, by which I mean the late 1970s, the choice of television stations in the UK was limited to three, two of which were from the BBC. I am the youngest of a family of six children, and I’m sure you can see that even only three channels would be more than enough to bring such a family to open warfare in the event of a programming clash. Let me pluck an example from the air: what might happen if, say, Coronation Street were scheduled against Blake’s 7? 

Terrible things, that’s what. 

In this battle, not unlike that in which the Federation took on the Andromedans (or, indeed, Ken Barlow took on Mike Baldwin) I notoriously backed Team Coronation Street. I’ve never been allowed to forget this, particularly as Team Coronation Street won. In 1980, a watershed year for my family, my father (not a technically minded man, but one who craved peace and quiet) rented a VCR machine. We were, I think, the earliest adopters of that technology in our neighborhood. It was a beast of a machine, with a top-loading deck and levers, something I imagine that the Radiophonic Workshop might use to make very big clunking noises. Fully analogue, but sufficient to bring about détente. In future, Blake’s 7  was recorded (I still have tapes from that time…and no machine on which to play them, clunking or otherwise). 

I can’t remember the exact moment when I was lured out of the Rovers Return onto the Liberator but given that I was entering tweenhood, I suspect it was somewhere between Avon fainting so beautifully in “Aftermath” and Vila’s funny jokes in “Ultraworld.” I have very strong memories of the third season of Blake’s 7, and a particular fondness for that crew, including Tarrant. What was on screen fed directly into playground games with my mate Jan; episodes such as “Rumours of Death,” “Sarcophagus,” and “City at the Edge of the World” landed upon the fertile ground of a creative and playful nine-year-old mind and were so formative that I have a hard time detecting which parts of my imagination are my own and which are Chris Boucher’s. A band of squabbling rebels, a group of people who would much rather be somewhere else forced by circumstances to work together for a common goal, remains one of my favorite set-ups. Firefly does it, of course; so does Star Trek: Deep Space 9 (at the end, with Garak, Kira, and Damar). Andor does a great version too. Terry Nation and Chris Boucher tapped into an eternal tale: Robin Hood and the merry men; or the Grimms’ fairy tale “How Six (Plus Orac) Made Their Way in the World.” Success in these ventures is optional and perhaps not even desirable. 

I’ve told the tale many times of how the end of Blake’s 7 traumatized me, and how I received a gracious apology from Chris Boucher, the show’s script editor, who wrote that last episode. If you don’t know what happens at the end of the show, I won’t spoil it, I’ll just say—terrible things, that’s what, and right before Christmas. Once the fourth season of Blake’s 7 was done, and repeated, that was apparently that, as far as the BBC was concerned. Blake’s 7, with its 70s production values and theatrical style, didn’t sit with the brash and breezy TV of the 1980s. Like Bagpuss, it was a saggy old cloth cat, baggy, and a bit loose at the seams—but, like Emily, some of us still loved it (or were still trying to get past the devastation, and not yet emotionally equipped to tell the difference). My playground games, fueled by my discovery of fanzines, began to transmute into heartfelt (and very short) short stories. For my first ever interlibrary loan, I made the wonderfully patient staff of St Helens Central Library seek, locate, and deliver unto me Trevor Hoyle’s novelization of the first few episodes. I am pausing for a moment as I write, to recall the sheer thrill of holding that book (it was a hardback too, possibly my first hardback) in my grubby little 1970s paws. 

Backing Team Coronation Street now seemed the biggest mistake of my young life. All those episodes that I had never seen and would never get a chance to see (if the BBC had its way)! Too awful to contemplate. When a small selection of heavily edited episodes was released on video cassette, I borrowed them repeatedly from the local Blockbuster video shop, interspersing them with episodes of the fresh and daring new science fiction show Star Trek: The Next Generation. (This was how I spent my Friday nights, when my peers were out boozing and dancing at Jester’s night club.) From TV Zone I discovered the existence of the Horizon fan club. From the Sheffield Space Centre, I ordered back issues of Horizon’s publications. There is a panel in Kate Charlesworth’s Sensible Footwear: A Girl’s Guide,¹ an LGBTQIA+ history of postwar Britain, in which young Kate, on the verge of coming out, sits on the edge of her bed, holding a missive from the lesbian magazine Arena Three. “It’s from the lesbians!” she thinks. “Lesbians touched this!” Thus was I, with the Horizon letterzine. “It’s from the Blake’s 7 fans! Blake’s 7 fans touched this!”

After that initial contact with Horizon (and the wonderful and kind North West Local Group, who welcomed shy and geeky teenage me and her very earnest poetry about Anna Grant) came my encounter with online fandom, where I made that set of friends who have been, are, and will continue to be the best friends of my life. Even when I wandered off into other places—Cardassia Prime, and Minas Tirith—the Liberator would always draw me back. Like I say, it shaped the contours of my imagination; these friendships are the ones that have shaped my life. The episodes that I had never seen—and never thought I would see—were by now familiar, part of the warp and weft of our mutual in-jokes. 

One of the great pieces of luck of my life was that my writing was hitting more-or-less a professional standard at a time when someone could find you on the Internet and ask you to pitch. This is how I started working in franchise fiction (with Star Trek: Deep Space 9 books), and, of course, once you have a track record, you get approached to do more work. To say that writing Blake’s 7 was on my bucket list would be something of an understatement, but Big Finish do have a knack of making these small dreams come true (and I believe that my first audio drama with them made me the next woman to have a writer credit on the show after the unique and irreplaceable Tanith Lee). My audio play, The Ministry of Peace—performed by Paul Darrow and Jackie Pearce—is one of the best things I’ve done, although one reviewer said that “the politics McCormack presents herein are so particularly cynical as to invite questions of Toryism…” Yes, probably, but it’s exactly how Blake’s 7 is in my head. At a convention, not long before Paul Darrow died, I presented him with the cover sheet of The Ministry of Peace and asked him to sign it for me. “I’m the writer,” I croaked, with all the poise of that shy and geeky sixteen-year-old. Cue tremendous fuss. Hugs. Signature. My hand got held. I’m looking at that cover sheet now. Paul Darrow touched this, and he wrote: “Love Paul.”

All of which is to say that when Peter Anghelides approached me to ask if I wanted to participate in a joint project from Big Finish to novelize the first fourteen episodes of Blake’s 7, it was not the kind of project I was ever going to turn down. Those early episodes, which once upon a time, had seemed to be forever out of my reach! Which two episodes might I like to do? As I recall, “The Way Back”/”Space Fall” were already taken, so I asked for ones which I thought would give me scope to do the kind of thing I like doing best: writing up female characters and adding detail to sketched worlds: “Bounty” and “Deliverance.” For the project, we had access to Terry Nation’s drafts scripts, and were able to borrow as much as we chose. I mostly made use of extra story beats and some sharp character work that hadn’t made it onto the screen; other authors have adapted more freely. It’s a beautiful set of books, and I’m grateful to have been involved. 

At the end of last year, Chris Boucher died at the age of 79. Blake’s 7 is billed as Terry Nation’s, but Boucher’s talent made the show fly. As Erin Horáková puts it, “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’.”² Writers have their heroes, and Boucher was mine. The scripts are exquisitely crafted and the dialogue sings. The vision of the world is bleak and sometimes desperate, but am I being too fanciful to think that behind it one always senses the hope of the idealist—however crushed? The first stories I told myself involved the Liberator, and something about the show—that however desperate your situation, however annoying your comrades, you might as well keep on fighting the good fight—keeps running through the stories I find myself telling. 

 

Thought shall be the harder, heart the keener,
Courage the greater, as our might lessens.

 

So the Maldon poet wrote, and perhaps, if they too had seen Blake’s 7 at an early age, they would add that a little bickering never did any harm, and might even sometimes help. Maybe; maybe not. 

 

¹Kate Charlesworth, Sensible Footwear: A Girl’s Guide – a graphic guide to lesbian and queer history 1920-2020 (Myriad Editions, 2019). 

²Erin Horáková, ‘Boucher, backbone, and Blake – the legacy of Blake’s 7’: http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/articles/boucher-backbone-and-blake-the-legacy-

© 2023 Una McCormack