The Annotated Blake’s 7 - The Teleport and The Music (Cygnus Alpha cont)

Inside the spaceship

Zen and the art of teleport maintenance

First off, a quick word on what we don’t see aboard the Liberator.

The main discoveries of its wonders are nicely spread over the four episodes from ‘Space Fall’ to ‘The Web’, with additional features - although nothing we mightn’t expect - popping up afterwards as and when needed. (The medical/surgical unit, we might note, is set up for ordinary human beings.) But we never learn what exactly our heroes eat, or about sanitation.

We would hardly expect to see scenes of Tarrant on the toilet, so we can overlook that. Personal hygiene is mentioned precisely twice in the entire series, re Kerril and Avon’s line about bathing in ‘Rescue’, which makes you think of him scrubbing his back, humming ‘Distant Star’ and playing with a rubber pursuit ship. So we just assume that hairdressing and hygiene are a matter of high-tech course, both in the Federation and aboard the Liberator. Vila’s five o’clock shadow in ‘Powerplay’ is a very rare example of somebody in the production giving it some thought. Facial hair is used in both of Blake’s return appearances to suggest his hard life after the Liberator.

But the lack of information on the catering is something of a surprise. You’d expect one of those ‘look at this amazing food of the future’ cutesy dispenser scenes you see in the very early Tardis, or in Star Trek or Lost In Space, often involving whizzo pills or unexpectedly flavoursome cubes. But no.

We will never see an actual meal on board the Liberator. The ‘luxury yacht’ aesthetic of series C has a couple of moments. Dayna apparently has a bowl of crisps to hand for the massively inappropriate light relief conclusion of ‘Children of Auron’ - because there’s nothing like passing around a few salty snacks to lighten the mood after the near genocide of a planet of millions of people. There’s a bigger buffet in ‘Death-Watch’, but this party fare is the closest we see to our heroes tucking in.

The Liberator crew were mesmerised by Servalan’s attempt to memorise everything on Larry’s conveyor belt

Drinks are another matter. From ‘Hostage’ onwards there are coloured fluids about. ‘Moloch’ begins with Vila bringing in a tray of drinks, like Mrs Overall. He’s seen knocking back ‘Adrenalin and soma’ from what looks suspiciously like a salad dressing bottle in ‘Volcano’. (Alcohol will get its own entry in due course.) Maybe there’s a ‘no grub on the flight deck’ rule, in case a crumb gets into the workings, though liquids are surely more dangerous.