It was 40 years ago this week that my parents sat their seven-year-old son down to watch a new BBC One show about spaceships. “It will be like Doctor Who,” they no doubt told me. Instead, broadcast at 6pm on a Bank Holiday Monday, the first episode of Blake’s 7 was a procedural drama about a fascist state framing a political dissident for child molestation.

By the end of that 45 minutes, Roj Blake, played by Gareth Thomas, had been sentenced to exile, and nearly every other sympathetic character had been murdered by the state. “A mix of olde-worlde space jargon, ray guns, Western-style goodies and baddies, and punch-ups straight out of The Sweeney,” said Peter Fiddick in his Guardian review at the time.

While Roj Blake was the innocent man fighting against the system, the rest of his crew upon the stolen alien spaceship Liberator were bona fide villains and outlaws. None more so than Paul Darrow’s Avon. In one episode Avon weighs up the pros and cons of leaving most of the crew stranded on a planet below to die while he makes off alone with the ship. Blake, the revolutionary, wanted to bring the whole system crashing down. You suspected that more than a few of the crew would have been much happier stealing a couple of million credits and retiring to a backwater planet that had nice weather.



“People forget the series was a big mainstream hit,” says Jonathan Helm, who runs @MakingBlakes7, a Twitter account dedicated to documenting the production of the show. “It was getting huge viewing figures, despite going up against Coronation Street. It definitely rode on the Star Wars wave – there was a real thirst for sci-fi in 1978 – but there was something for everyone. Action and adventure for the kids and teens, and mature themes, humour and sex appeal for the adults.”

Jacqueline Pearce as Blake’s Federation opponent, Servalan. Photograph: Ronald Grant

A lot of that sex appeal came from the always glamorous Jacqueline Pearce’s Servalan, the series’ exceptional villain. Her androgynous cropped hair set her apart from the usual stereotypes of women in power on 70s TV. British Paralympian Tanni Grey-Thompson, a fan as a child, remembers her vividly: “She wasn’t this insipid female character waiting to be ‘saved’ by some bloke.”

While she could never quite get the better of Blake, in story after story she ran rings round the buffoonish bureaucrats at the highest levels of the state. She was utterly evil, but delightfully watchable.

Blake’s 7 was a bold show that wasn’t afraid to break formulas, which is why it's so fondly remembered 40 years on

“It felt really hi-tech,” says Grey-Thompson. “A step up from Doctor Who in terms of technology. I remember reading about computers the size of a room, and here you had Zen and Orac. I really wanted one of the teleporter bracelets, and tried to make one.”

We are perhaps more demanding of story arcs in sci-fi/fantasy TV drama now. While re-watching some of the series over the past couple of years, I found it bizarre, for example, that one episode – Shadow – sets up the concept of a drug-pushing, all-powerful space mafia organisation that is financially propping up the evil Federation, but which is never mentioned again.

Gareth Thomas as Blake. Photograph: Moviestore collection Ltd / Alamy/Alamy

And while BBC budgets could deliver a decent-looking costume drama in the 70s, the programme sometimes struggles to convince that the action is really taking place on the far side of the galaxy.

But Blake’s 7 was a bold show that wasn’t afraid to break formulas, which helps to explain why it is still so fondly remembered 40 years on. Originally pitched by creator Terry Nation as “the Dirty Dozen in space”, the show dispatched or changed major characters at regular intervals – including the lead. There have been numerous attempts to get the series rebooted or re-made for TV over the years – the Guardian has reported on positive announcements in the past decade by both Sky One and the SyFy channel – but none have come to fruition. But like many a slice of cult TV, new audio dramas with the original cast are still being made. Those stories are now sadly without the central protagonist of the first two series, after Gareth Thomas died in 2016 aged 71.

While there remain elements that date it to the time it was made and the budget it was made on, Blake’s 7 stands out among British television science fiction and fantasy shows. It wasn’t simply superhero good against evil. Forced together by circumstance, a group of uneasy criminals who you never quite believe trust each other, are made to work together for a greater good – with the addition of futuristic weapons, a beautifully designed spaceship and a sarcastic talking computer in a box who found speaking to humans tiresome. What’s not to like?