The Annotated Blake’s 7 - Cygnus Alpha Part 1
Dear Vere and Liberator Loot
King Vere
And so we arrive at our first planet. With everybody full of first-night enthusiasm, a real - and presumably costly - effort is made. There is extensive night shooting. We never see Cygnus Alpha in daylight, unless that enormous but dim disc in its sky is its sun, which is a horrible thought. There is back projection with location lighting to match it, and a fog machine to hand. The crucified body is a magnificent prop. There are a handful of beautifully composed shots - Kara against the moon, the lovely moment of the convicts’ legs trudging through the moonlight mist.
It won’t be long before there’s a planet every week, so any old quarry or moor will suffice. But this time around (and next time, as Saurian Major was filmed first), some thought and invention has gone into the realisation in an attempt to really sell it. It does - Cygnus Alpha is the nightmare that its reputation from the preceding episodes suggests. It looks like a very hard life on Cygnus Alpha, nibbling on barbecued rat and sipping brackish water. Bad enough even before you get to jihad Blessed.
This episode also marks the coming of Vere Lorrimer, the series’ most prolific director and its later producer. As a director, Vere is very - very - dependent on the quality of scripts. ‘Seek-Locate-Destroy’, ‘Aftermath’ and ‘The City At The Edge Of The World’ are magnificent, while ‘Hostage’ and ‘Moloch’ are not.
The cast’s anecdotes paint Vere as loveably avuncular, somewhat confused and schoolmasterish, from the generation one (or two) above them - he was 61 in 1981, which is pushing it for a producer. Funny stories abound; scolding them for giggling at the Moloch puppet which only made the giggles worse, referring to Jenna and Cally as Jam and Jelly, trying to get Steven Pacey to sing very fuddy-duddy romantic lyrics to a school orchestra arrangement of the theme in series D. Then there is his spirited reaction to a woman slagging off the previous night’s episode in the BBC canteen - ‘Madam, I directed that ‘rubbish’!’
He doesn’t seem to have been a particularly domineering producer, though his instincts for the new setup of series D are good ones; that the crew had too much going for them in series C, and needed more of a struggle. This hits on a slight problem with series C, with its defunct Federation and luxury spaceship, where the crew seem always to be lounging about reading, drinking or tuning their harps between episodes. Vere stripped them of all that, stripped them even of their comfy clobber. There is a slight clash there with the steer given by Terry Nation from his Beverly Hills Winnebago, that the heroes should now be on the attack. ‘I won’t run!’ Avon snaps at Vila in ‘Traitor’, which is odd considering that they seem a depleted force without the Liberator.
That’s all in the future. In 1977, Vere had a BBC staff directors’ CV as long as your arm. You cannot and couldn’t be that erratic or unworldly in that job. You only survive in that environment by being a master of ‘get in, do it and get out’. Speed is the most vital talent for a TV director. I was once party to a fraught discussion about a special effect between a director and a line producer, one lunchtime in a catering bus. The director wanted to linger on some coverage and reaction shots he had planned, but he was already running slightly behind schedule. The producer was insistent and overruled him. There was no time, and the effect had to be done.
Vere is obviously much happier in studio, and with actors, than with effects and action. His pacing and blocking are elegant in TV Centre - the scenes in Hal Mellanby’s underwater base, for example, are all very nicely done. He is far happier with recognisable dramatic emotions and situations - seduction or romance or political status games - than science fiction and fights. ‘Seek’ is a masterly introduction to both Servalan and Travis, with many nice flourishes. Travis checking on his ‘ring of steel’ is executed very well. But when things get fantastic, or physical, Vere can lose his grip. The aforementioned puppet comes hot on the heels of the suspended body of Colonel Astrid, both of which are meant to be horror highlights. The props are terrible, yes - but Vere shoots them head on, brightly lit, with nothing to soften them.
His approach to action scenes on film can be very frustrating - he fumbles them, seeming to shoot each element individually to assemble later. That’s a very tricky method when you need things to interact and flow. There are often telling little pauses between shots, which last fractions of a second but make the action look unreal - Vila bopping the trooper with his equipment box in ‘Seek-Locate-Destroy’, or the incredibly naff pause before Dayna and Avon are teleported away before Dayna can shoot Servalan in ‘Aftermath’. It often seems as if there are shots missing.
He never seems to get enough coverage, rendering the big fight scenes in ‘Cygnus Alpha’ and almost all his others confusing and phoney. You can tell he directed the location scenes in ‘Assassin’ because the lines of sight are unclear, and hordes of people seem suddenly to run in from nowhere. ‘City’ features a pirate who gets taken by surprise, because he seemingly can’t see Cally when she must be standing right in front of him.
‘Hostage’ is a disaster in this respect (and most others). It features Blake, Avon and Ushton looking over a cliff top from a point which the reverse cut reveals is at least six feet below the cliff top -
There is an incomprehensible ‘establishing shot’ of Travis hidden in shrubbery that is dropped in from nowhere and establishes only that there is nobody in shot, in true Harry Hill ‘TV Highlight Of The Week’ fashion.
And there is an unintentionally hilarious cut between Vila literally screaming at the top of his voice into his bracelet on the planet and Cally mooching on the Liberator flight deck in reaction. ‘Did you hear that?’ she asks Jenna. ‘Yes, it sounds like Vila’s in trouble,’ Jenna replies, as if he’s dropped a subtle hint rather than been yelling ‘TELEPORT, TELEPORT!’. Such scene transitions, filmed months apart, are the kinds of thing a director needs to be on top of.
Similar location scenes caught by Michael E Briant or Derek Martinus are exciting, bish bash bosh. Briant even succeeds in making the security robot tense.
Here, as nearly always with Vere, the climactic fight is very dicey, and indeed choppy. It is cut like salami. People appear and disappear, with a BBC sound effect of men fighting added (I think it might well be the one sampled by The Smiths on ‘Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me’). The throwing of a spear on film that strikes its target on videotape is particularly egregious, an example of ‘we professionals notice, Joe Public doesn’t clock a darn thing’. It was bad enough for somebody to go all the trouble of adding a film effect to Pamela Salem’s gory demise on the DVD release, decades later.
Vere once described Blake’s 7 as ‘cowboys and Indians’. He pretty clearly doesn’t grasp the science fiction elements of the show (it’s telling that he later dumps the term ‘spatials’ for miles). Not long afterwards we’d get, in this genre, younger people who were all over all of that, but who understood far less of what was going on underneath, who understood far less about people. Vere knew all about people.
The Liberator, The Wealth And The Wardrobe
It’s pleasing that we see Leylan and Artix again in this episode, because it’s not strictly necessary. The London could easily dump its human cargo and be off, with no damage to the narrative. Presumably there’ll be a nasty court of inquiry waiting for Leylan at the end of the eight months of the return trip. (And here’s another problem with the stated length of that journey. Blake’s escape attempt was stated to be four months in to that voyage, and the Liberator drifted alongside at the same time. But everybody in this episode behaves as if it was about half an hour later, and the London has reached Cygnus Alpha.)
The lengthy black-and-white flashback to ‘Space Fall’ is unusual, but necessary in a series that hasn’t set up its premise and is still attracting new viewers. It also makes for a very slinky link to Blake, Avon and Jenna exploring the Liberator.
And some of the things they find there make me wonder - who exactly were its previous crew?
This question is supposedly answered by ‘Redemption’ at the top of series B. The Liberator - or DSV2 - is the spaceship of the System, the supercomputer-controlled cyborgs who boss about their three planets from a ginormous space station. And fair enough, that fits with the decor, with Zen, and with the advanced capabilities of the ship.
But then, why is there a room on board the Liberator packed with an extensive glamour wardrobe of glitzy gladrags? And why is there another filled with treasure beyond the dreams of Avon’s avarice? ‘There must be almost as much wealth in that single room as there is in the entire Federation banking system!’ he drools.
Are these really the kinds of things we can imagine the po-faced, computer-regimented Alta of ‘Redemption’ going out into deep space to obtain? A heavily-armed mission to explore and document space, with an offence/defence military goal, that I can accept, and that fits with the Liberator’s battle computers, neutron blasters and force wall, and with Zen’s enormous store of information. But the collection of gaudy evening wear and the chests spilling with diamonds and pearls? That feels more like a spaceship under the command of Gemma Collins and Dane Bowers than those sniffy, snitty Altas. I have visions of them travelling to all the wealthiest planets, teleporting down and stuffing plastic bags full of gowns and jewellery.
There is also the matter of the space battle that caused the crew of DSV2 to flee in the life capsules. This battle is never explained - it’s as much of a mystery to the Altas as to Blake and co, as we will later learn - but let’s give it some thought for a bit. It will later take a concerted attack by a sizeable portion of an intergalactic fleet to damage the Liberator to a similar ‘abandon ship!’ level. Who was the Liberator fighting in the supposedly dead space halfway along the trip to Cygnus Alpha, which is presumably well within Federation territory? It can’t have been other System ships, as they don’t know about this fight, and they have far subtler and cannier ways of taking back control, as we will see. We might also note that the fleeing crew - let’s call them Gemma and Dane - never try to get back to the Liberator the way our heroes do in series C.
Could there have been a mutiny on the DSV2? Maybe some of the still-human slaves we see in ‘Redemption’ were on board as servants, revolted and took command, and after a nice run swanking about the galaxy looting and shopping they ran into some other massively powerful space people, maybe space people they’d offended and who wanted their clobber and booty back?
As we see, Zen is remarkably pliant at cooperating with whoever’s in charge of the ship once they’ve got past the security system. Gemma and Dane could easily have got off and left that security system on, as our heroes themselves do in ‘Dawn Of The Gods’. (It seems to activate automatically when the crew have departed, though there’s not a mention of it when Klegg’s men and Tarrant board the ship in ‘Aftermath’.)
Within the fiction of the series, the two rooms Jenna discovers serve important narrative functions. The wardrobe is there to make our heroes look fabulous. (They look even more fabulous when they break out the Hudson and Rocker collections.) And the wealth is there to give Avon another motive for running out on Blake.
But does he really need it? It’s not as if he was committed to the cause before Jenna pointed him towards it. He has already pointed a gun at Blake the moment after he finds one, in a deeply ironic moment. We should remember that this is the ‘very beginning’ that Blake later says he trusted Avon at.
The jewels strike me as unnecessary, and the trouble is that they make some later episodes, especially in series C, seem a bit silly. What do the Liberator crew want kairopan, or rare minerals, for? They’re already as rich as Croesus. Why is Tarrant talking about ‘spoils’ in ‘Volcano’, when he’s already sitting on treasure that - if Avon is correct - nearly equals, in hard commodities, the wealth of the entire Federation?
The crux of this episode’s B story - the temptation of Jenna - would work just as well, perhaps better, without the ‘strong room’. It’s an embarrassment of riches.
NEXT TIME - Zen, the theme tune, and BRIAN BLESSED
Q: Is Vere Lorrimer the B7 crew member with the most B7 name?
GLITZY GLADRAGS!!!!!!