Blake's Back

First up, I just want to note that Yop have a new poster campaign. The precise slogan escapes my mind, but a close approximation would be “Life moves fast. Drink.” I like this so much that I'd adopt it as a general life policy immediately, if I hadn't done so years ago.

But obviously I want to talk about the announced return of another SF behemoth, because no-one can think of new ones these days. In a way, it's a surprise that it hasn't happened earlier. They've brought Doctor Who back, they brought Battlestar Galactica back, it's hardly surprising that Blake's 7 would make a return.

All things being equal, Blake's 7 is much more of a new series waiting to happen than either of the above. Battlestar Galactica was rubbish the first time out, and Doctor Who is a televisual anomaly that was (and, to a lesser degree, still is) completely unlike anything on television. Blake's 7? Ratings of ten million when it aired, with a structure that was essentially a warped version of Star Trek - duplicated so often (Farscape and Firefly leap immediately to mind) that it's pretty much a sci-fi staple.

So here's the thing; I love Blake's 7, but there were tons of things wrong with it. It tended to be badly plotted, the performances were uneven, and the budget was famously low. The notion of Blake's 7 coming back, with lots of money to spend and time to develop a proper story arc, seems like heaven. So how come the only thing I feel is a deep conviction that they're going to arse it up?

It comes down to climate. Anyone who knows anything about television knows that most contemporary science fiction is shite, which is why it's drifted into a niche market populated by sad arseholes who think that the science behind dilithium crystals is more important than drama, or will scabrously rage about the rubbishness of the Doctor Who story The End of the World... because it contradicts The Ark, another Doctor Who story that aired in 1965. It's obvious that people like this, or people who think that Babylon 5 was a Great Programme or that Battlestar Galactica (oh alright then, BSG) is competent, shouldn't even be allowed to air their opinions to anyone. And yet more and more, these people seem to be allowed into the mainstream. When the announcement of Blake's 7's return happened, they had a chat about it on BBC 5Live with a couple of people, one of whom was the editor of SFX. SFX is a magazine that has maintained that 2001: A Space Odyssey isn't as good as 2010: The Year We Make Contact. That it sells to geekchildren is bad enough, but getting a spot on BBC 5Live? Something's gone wrong with the world.

And the terrible thing about geekchildren isn't that they're obsessed – because obsession is good, obsession is what makes for good television – it's that they're obsessed with showing the world that they're not sad and nerdy, that science fiction is important... and by extension, that it's serious. They like to use words like “dark”, “gritty” and “dystopian”, but don't like “silly”, “jokey”, or worst of all, “fun”. Watch BSG and you'll get clunking political allegory and moronic attempts at social realism. But that's okay, because you'll also get interchangeably grizzled Space Captains shouting at each other, which means it's 'serious'. Science fiction is terrified of just being enjoyable tosh.

The thing about Blake's 7 is that it was dark and dystopian. It opened up with a freedom fighter being found guilty of child abuse, and ended up with him - and his entire warped group - getting killed stone dead. And yet it was genuinely funny, and witty, and laced with fantastic dialogue. It was about a bunch of terrorists taking on a corrupt regime, but it knew to make things enjoyable. The bad guys weren't grizzled Space Captains, they were a gloriously OTT seductress and a thoroughly psychotic nutjob with an eyepatch. The most powerful computer in the universe liked to tell people they were idiots and they should stop bothering him. Contemporary sci-fi is almost incapable of doing this sort of... well, 'camp' is the only word that's vaguely applicable... because it's too obsessed with showing everyone how gritty it is.

Contemporary television tries to do it – witness Footballer's Wives, or Dirty Sexy Money – but always fails. The reasons for this are complicated, but the most important one's pretty simple – in order to do camp and silly, you've got to be clever and witty. And TV writers don't do witty any more; in fact, they barely do dialogue.

The best way of demonstrating this is by comparing I'm Alan Partridge to The Office. Both programmes are essentially the same – a comedy of embarrassment about a self-deluded and talentless grotesque's success in a warped and insular world. The difference is that I'm Alan Partridge was written by Armando Ianucci, and has dozens of quotable lines; The Office has none. This isn't to criticise it – The Office wasn't about dialogue – but it refects a sea-change in how television was seen to work. Broadly, it's become more naturalistic, with stumbling half-speeches and awkward silences replacing insane musings on Wings (“They're only the band the Beatles could have been.”)

That's all very well if you're writing a mock-doc sitcom about a bunch of people working in an office, but Blake's 7 is about a bunch of people trying to overthrow the Galactic Federation. The BBC recently tried to make a SF comedy (that'll be Hyperdrive, then), and that wasn't as funny as Blake's 7. In a climate where science fiction means lots of all-action types who speak in intense whispers, dark rooms which are only lit by dim blue neon, interminably macho speeches about war, and 'strong female characters' who are usually men with tits... what chance would you give a dystopian fantasy where the Supreme Commander of the Galactic Federation dresses like a glamourpuss from Amadeus, and one of the characters tries to infiltrate a base by walking up to a security guard and saying “I'm a saboteur and I've come to blow something up, could you point me in the right direction?”

The optimist tells me that Blake's 7 will do what Doctor Who did when it first came back – do exactly what television doesn't do, because it realises that's what will make it popular. But it's going to be made by Sky, for god's sake, and there's no channel more demographically-driven. At the moment, we need the old Blake's 7. We need the wit, the warped characters, the amoralism and the unapologetic silliness. What we'll get will almost certainly be Battlestar Galactica with Essex accents. I'm not saying it's definitely going to fail... but I am saying that, if you disagree with me, then the first time someone throatily whispers “For... freedom,” you owe me a fiver.

P.S. On a more local note, I just switched over to see some people debating about homelessness on Prime Time. One of the blokes was a standard besuited-bloke from the HSE with responsibility for the scumbuckets - sorry, homeless - who actually uttered the sentence - wait for it - "Our levels of customer service could be improved." It would ordinarily make me annoyed that even the homeless are 'customers'... but now I'm imagining Avon saying it ironically after blowing a Federation Communications Centre to kingdom come, and it seems quite funny. When the real world makes less sense than a Blake's 7 episode, you know it's all gone wrong.