This review of a very early Blake’s 7 audio drama was published in TV Zone issue 99 (February 1998). I can only barely remember writing it, and I didn’t actually have a copy of it anywhere until recently, when Peter Griffiths, who had commissioned me to write it, sent me a copy of it he found a couple of weeks ago. Thank you to Peter for giving me the chance to write it and for unearthing it and sending it to me after so many years.
AVON: Are you going give it to me?
SERVALAN: How can I stop you taking it?
The SevenFold Crown is a new Blake’s 7 radio drama serial written by Barry Letts, who produced Doctor Who in the Seventies and wrote the Doctor Who radio dramas The Paradise of Death and The Ghosts of N-Space. The SevenFold Crown has just been released as a two-tape set by BBC Worldwide and will be broadcast on Radio 4 later this month, to celebrate the twentieth anniversary of the first broadcast of Blake’s 7 in 1978.
When Avon’s sleep is disturbed by a fabulously silly dream in which he is being flogged and menaced by Servalan, he decides that the lady herself is responsible, and heads off to the planet Ferno to confront her. Down on Ferno, Avon and Vila discover that Servalan has one of three parts of the SevenFold Crown, an ancient alien artifact that (as usual) confers incredible Mind Powers on its wearer. Our heroes’ quest for the remaining parts takes them to the planet Torella (which has a thriving tourist trade despite its medieval
justice system and high rates of random capital punishment) and the mysterious planet of the ancient Devani.
Freed from the constraints of year-long contracts, the cast all overact marvellously. And since the dialogue lacks the clever bitchy flight-deck banter of the TV series, overacting is often necessary.
But why go into it in any more detail? The teleport keeps malfunctioning, Orac refuses to give the crew crucial information, Avon tries to abandon a crewmember, Servalan tricks the crew into teleporting the wrong person up… Honestly, everything you would expect from a Blake’s 7 anniversary special and more. Even the sound effects and the teleport music sound authentic.
All the male principals from Blake’s 7’s final year are back: Paul Darrow as Avon, Michael Keating as Vila and Steven Pacey as Tarrant. And (thank God!) so is Jacqueline Pearce as the sequinned psychopath, Servalan. Josette Simon and Glynis Barber were (ahem) unavailable, and so the remaining female crew members have both been recast. Angela Bruce (Brigadier Bambera in Doctor Who’s Battlefield) plays a reasonabiy convincing Dayna, while Paula Wilcox’s Soolin is disappointingly girly and cheerful — not at all like the laid-back hardfaced bitch Glynis Barber played in the TV series.
And, of course, everyone sounds much older. Steven Pacey has particular trouble recreating Tarrant’s growly character voice, while Servalan sounds a little huskier and a little more formidable. Paul Darrow is the same as ever, although he delivers his lines in such a macho and deadpan way he must often be in danger of dislocating his jaw.
Freed from the constraints of year-long contracts, the cast all overact marvellously. And since the dialogue lacks the clever bitchy flight-deck banter of the TV series, overacting is often necessary. For example, Avon: “I have torn out the throat of a tiger with this very hand” or Servalan, discussing Vila’s imminent execution: “Your friend’s head would make a simply ducky little souvenir for somebody, wouldn’t you agree?” (Not really.)
In fact, the script is this serial’s big weakness. The SevenFold Crown is full of stupid technobabble and laborious dialogue where characters describe to each other in detail all the exciting events unfolding before their very eyes. There is also a tendency for Letts to try to end each scene with a punchline. Unfortunately, he is not much of a comedy writer, and the lines are just not funny. “If I get shot with a hallucinatory blaster,” wonders Vila, “do I really die, or shall I just pretend?”
If you make it that far, at the end of the tape there are a few short interviews with the principal cast members. You won’t hear much here that hasn’t been said before in fanzines and programme guides, but it’s nice hearing it said in the actors’ voices. A special award for sneaky disparagement goes to Steven Pacey, who expresses “amazement” and “astonishment” at Blake’s 7’s success. And when he’s asked about Tarrant’s personality, he replies “What personality was that, then?”
Nice one. Steven. Well spotted.
Airing 17 Jan 1998. BBC Radio 4.
Written by Barry Letts
BBC Audio, ISBN 0 56338200 7
Price: £8.99
Out now
This essay was first published in Outside In: Makes It So, a collection of essays published by ATB Publishing in 2017 to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the debut of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
For this collection, each author contributed an essay on a single episode or movie. My essay is based on the Series 4 episode Clues.
Many thanks to Stacey Smith? for the commission, and for her well-judged editing suggestions.
Ensign Gladys McKnight
Personal Log, Ensign Gladys McKnight, Stardate 44501.3
9 stone 5 lb (pathetic), alcohol units: 9 (ditto), cigarettes: 2 (stupid replicator malfunction; edgy af right now), calories: 3897 (fuck off. seriously).
Horrifically hung over this morning. Stupid Reg. He’s gotta be the most absent boyfriend I’ve ever had. Got a text from him yesterday, cancelling our date last night. “Sorry, sweetheart. Lots of work on in Engineering. Geordi’s been riding me non-stop ever since Ventax II. I’ll make it up to you.”
Didn’t believe him for a second. “Computer, locate Lieutenant Barclay.”
“Lieutenant Barclay is in Holodeck 3.”
Asshole.
Day off today, because that whole Harrakis V thing finished early. (No idea what we were doing there. Being tormented by some all-powerful alien entity, I imagine. At least this one didn’t want to kill off half the crew. Poor Ensign Haskell. I’m still using that stick of Maybelline Superstay 24 Color he lent me.)
The crew spent yesterday raving about their plans for the day off. Alyssa was gonna spend time with Andrew playing parrises squares. (I’ve never heard it called that before.) A whole bunch of crawly suck-ups were going to Worf’s tai-chi class, hoping to get noticed. Picard booked the holodeck for a horrific larping session with the fucking bartender. And Alyssa tells me that Dr Crusher was planning to spend the day growing moss. Wtf is wrong with that woman?
Anyway, I snuck into Crusher’s lab and replaced all her moss samples with scrunched-up sheets of pink cellophane. She’s too stupid to notice: she still doesn’t know that I broke into her quarters last month and replaced four of her wigs with those comedy Nausicaan halloween wigs Mr Mot gave me. She’s been looking like an idiot for last month. That’ll teach her to keep nagging me about emphysema and cirrhosis of the liver.
I was sneaking out of Sick Bay when I crashed straight into stupid Commander Data. He picked me up off the floor and apologised, but he refused to tell me why he had knocked me over, or even to admit that he had done it in the first place. Lying bastard. He should be cleaning tables in Ten-Forward, not patronising actual human beings on the bridge when they’re trying to do their jobs.
“Ensign McKnight. I have been looking for you all morning. There is currently an opening in the conn position on the bridge. Would you care to take the beta shift this afternoon?”
Brilliant. There goes my day off. And conn officer is the stupidest job on the ship. Eight hours of staring at a big screen pressing buttons, like a stinking virgin Gamergater. And have you seen those stupid instrument panels? The ship hits the smallest asteroid and they explode immediately. I’ll be lucky to get through the shift without a huge shard of metal embedded in my head.
Personal log, supplemental
Still alive and shardless, thank Christ. What a waste of time though. By the end of the first hour, I was basically pressing buttons at random just to amuse myself. We’re lucky I didn’t crash us into a quantum filament. Whatever the fuck that is.
I’ve snuck out for a quick fag in the loo. Shift only just started. Feels like there’s still about 24 hours left to go.
Personal log, Ensign Gladys McKnight, Stardate 44502.5
9 stone 3 lb (weight loss mostly due to hangover dehydration), alcohol units: 7 (yay!), cigarettes: 23 (broke into Reg’s quarters and stole all the isolinear chips from his replicator), calories: 2686 (no calories in Tamarian Space Vodka, right? I had difficulty understanding the label on the bottle).
Blacked out on the bridge just after that last entry. Still, not like that time I blacked out in the Observation Lounge, or the other one at the Stellar Cartography Christmas Party.
This time, everyone else went down as well. Thank God. Imagine blacking out mid-sentence during your first shift on the bridge. It would be like the time Ensign Gomez got high as a kite and plummeted off a catwalk to the bottom of the warp core. Alyssa says she’s still eating all of her meals through a straw. Silly cow.
The entire bridge crew are acting like they’ve never blacked out in the middle of a shift before. Pompous, stuck-up pricks. Worf keeps moaning about his sore elbow to anyone who can bear to listen. “Tell Crusher,” I said to him, “or stfu. Crybaby.” Troi screams every time she walks past a mirror. (Has she finally noticed the horrific cameltoe she’s been rocking for the last few months?) And Geordi looks at Data like he’s caught him in bed with the pool boy. Something about Professor Underhill and the ship’s chronometer. Nerd. No wonder he never gets laid by an actual human woman.
I’m beginning to regret breaking into Crusher’s lab now. What a fiasco.
Personal log, supplemental
It’s the middle of my second shift on the bridge. I’m hiding in the loo again. Not coming out until we leave the Ngame Nebula.
They’ve ordered me to delete these last two log entries. No idea why. Something about Troi wandering glassy-eyed onto the Bridge and doing her best Paul Robeson impersonation. Then Data gave a big long expository speech and I kind of zoned out. There’s a lot of standing around talking goes on on this stupid ship.
The upshot of the whole thing is that some poorly-characterised aliens don’t want anyone to know about them. The Paxans. They’re xenophobes, which is ancient Greek for toothless, meth-addicted hillbillies. And we’re supposed to let them wipe our memories. I wouldn’t trust them to wipe my ass.
Which is why you’re reading this. I’m using a warp core manifold to send these logs back to the early 21st century for widespread publication. By the time the 24th century comes around again, I want there to be Paxan teatowels, Paxan sitcoms, Paxan theme parks, and delicious Paxan breakfast cereals.
Make it so. Bastards.
Nathan Bottomley is a Latin teacher living in Sydney. He can be heard constantly complaining about Doctor Who on the podcast Flight Through Entirety.
I’m writing this post from the Royal Suite at the Bangkok InterContinental Hotel.
It’s the largest suite in the hotel. I’m seated at a glass coffee table in the lounge; there’s a lavish entryway, a 12-seat boardroom, a kitchen, a massive bathroom with a sunken bath, a dressing room, and a bedroom larger than all of the other hotel bedrooms I have stayed in in Europe. In fact, I think this suite is bigger than all of those European hotel rooms combined. It’s definitely bigger than our house.
“It’s too big,” said Calvin as we walked in.
We arrived in Bangkok on Sunday afternoon. Calvin had spent a day or two here before meeting me in Siem Reap, so he took me to dinner in a busy fluorescent-lit local eatery. It had been cool in Luang Prabang: it was hot and muggy in Bangkok. The icy beer I had with dinner was magical.
When we woke up on Monday morning, Calvin’s legs were covered in bites. In fact, he was driven out of bed at about 4 AM. Bedbugs, he said. We went up to the Club Lounge to complain, and they moved us to the next room so that they could burn the bed to the ground.
They offered us free dinner in one of the restaurants as compensation.
I think I’ve only been in Bangkok once before, in 2005. (Apple’s Photos app tells me that it was 2004, but I remember having to miss some early episodes of Series 1 of Doctor Who, which means that it was April 2005. Shut up.) Calvin comes here every year or so, and came here frequently as a child; as a result, he isn’t here to do touristy things.
Instead, he’s here to eat, to shop, and to visit the family temple. We’ve been personally blessed twice — a ritual washing and another ceremony that involved a monk drawing patterns on our heads with oil, wax and some kind of powder. We’ve bought some Buddhas and candles and jewellery and had it blessed. We’ve taken the monks out to lunch. We went to a restaurant called Insects in the Backyard, which Calvin thought was superb, even though it just serves unimaginative Western food sprinkled with deep-fried bugs. And the hotel is at the centre of a massive conurbation of giant shopping centres, which we’ve wandered through for hours, eating and buying things. Bigger clothes, mostly.
A couple of days ago, the toilet in the hotel room got blocked. I cannot honestly claim to be blameless in this matter: I’ve been giving the breakfast buffet a pretty serious workout every morning. Plumbers came to the room a couple of times to fix it, but with no lasting effect. And so they asked us to move rooms again.
Calvin was, of course, terribly annoyed. We ended up meeting some sombre and apologetic hotel managers in the Club Lounge, who told us how deeply sombre and apologetic they were, and invited us to call them at any hour of the day or night if we had any problems at all.
The toilet in our third room blocked this afternoon.
I went up to the Club Lounge to make a report, and then settled in to write a blog post. Before long, one of the sombre and apologetic managers came up to talk to me. He was dangerously sombre, to a degree that made me want to crack jokes and cheer him up. He said that we would have to move rooms again.
So here we are. I’m in the Royal Suite, writing a smartarse blog post; Calvin is wandering around complaining about the power points. Complimentary dinner tonight, hopefully followed by champagne in the bath. (Probably not, actually; Calvin is a hopeless prosaic.)
It had taken me two days to get there from Athens. A flight from Athens to Dubai, which was delayed a couple of hours due to fog in Dubai; a night spent in the First Class Lounge in Dubai, since it was too late to get to my hotel; a flight from Dubai to Bangkok; a night in the Novotel at Bangkok Airport; and then a short flight from Bangkok to Siem Reap.
Calvin is clearly much better at this holiday thing than I am. He used points to arrange our first class flights, and he used points to book us into the Sofitel Angkor Phokeethra Golf and Spa Resort at Siem Reap. It’s a massive hotel, with a spa but no golf course, built in a sort of French colonial style. The staff say bonjour to you as you walk past, even quite late in the day.
I met Calvin at the hotel, dropped off my luggage and immediately went on an informal tour of the city. Calvin had arranged it the day before with a tuk tuk driver he met at a temple he was visiting. We spent a few hours careening around the city, had lunch, and took a boat ride up the river Tonlé Sap to a floating village on the edge of a massive freshwater lake. For dinner, Calvin had made a reservation at a famous restaurant called Haven, which is normally booked up months in advance.
For the next two days, Calvin had booked a tour of the temples around the city. We visited nearly half a dozen on the first day, beautiful ruined temples, surrounded and covered by forest, massive and complex, covered in sandstone carvings. On the second day, we spent the morning at Angkor Wat, arriving before 5 AM and watching the sun rise behind the temple, surrounded by hundreds and hundreds of other tourists.
For me, 2017 was the year of visiting temples — in Sicily, mainland Italy and Greece — and I saw a fair number of temples in Japan in 2016 as well. Angkor Wat is the most impressive temple I have ever seen. Not just the size and scale, but the intricacy of the carvings, on nearly every available surface.
We’re in Luang Prabang now. Calvin booked us a room in the Hôtel Sofitel Luang Prabang, a small resort hotel with only 24 rooms, which was the governor’s residence a hundred years ago, then government offices, and finally, a prison. The swimming pool was probably installed after that.
Luang Prabang is much smaller than Siem Reap — 55,000 people. It’s touristy as well, but more in a hippy backpacker sort of way. That’s slightly irritating, in so far as the streets are full of dreadlocked and tattooed young people wearing silk drawstring pants decorated with elephants. But it’s quiet and relaxing. The food is good, both in the restaurants and at the side of the road. And there are fun things to do, but not so many fun things that we’ll be running around non-stop until we leave on Friday.
Calvin organised a tour on our first day: a boat trip to visit a cave containing a thousand Buddha images, and a bus trip to a bear sanctuary and a waterfall. Today, New Year’s Day, we visited as many temples as we could possibly find, and went to the night market to watch young people buying silk drawstring pants. Tomorrow, we’ll be meeting some elephants. Calvin organised it.
Most of my last post was written on the ferry to Patras. I had decided to spend two nights there, not because there’s anything particularly cool about it, but because it the first place where I could see The Last Jedi in English. (English films are usually dubbed in Italy.) I saw the film a few hours after I arrived; I saw it again the following night.
I struggled to find anything much to do in Patras. I had some laundry and shopping to do, and I had to organise a bus ticket to Delphi. A Google search of things to do in Patras wasn’t particularly promising, but it did mention a Byzantine castle on a cliff overlooking the city, not far from my hotel. I climbed up the cliff, but the castle was closed on Mondays.
The bus to Delphi left at lunchtime on Tuesday. To kill time in the morning, I tried the castle again. It was worth it. Even a nondescript Greek town can be incredibly beautiful.
I had already been to Delphi once, on the School Classics Tour in June. We just stayed there one night. It was fantastic though — a warm evening, lots of bars and restaurants open, a friendly little town.
I didn’t really take advantage of it though. We let the boys go out for a few hours of free time, while I waited for them in the hotel bar, editing an episode of Flight Through Entirety.
This time, I stayed there for two nights. I had booked a single room in the hotel at an absurdly cheap rate, but the manager upgraded me to a double room out of sheer kindness and generosity — a room with a view over the valley, towards the sea.
It was freezing cold, of course, and lots of the bars and restaurants were closed. But I was able to spend more time at the archaeological site, which was much less hot and crowded than it had been in June. And it was lovely to be somewhere small and quiet. I really enjoyed myself.
The morning I left, it snowed. Not in Delphi itself, where it was just raining, but on the mountains on either side. I watched the snowflakes falling from the balcony of my room.
The bus from Delphi to Athens goes further up into the mountains, through a town called Aráchova. Everything there was completely covered in snow. I’ve only seen snow maybe twice before, so just days before Christmas, this was magical. (I only have very crappy photos of this from the window of the bus, with a woman’s head in the frame, so I’ll leave this to your imagination.)
I arrived in Athens in the afternoon. Calvin had booked me in at the InterContinental, a much classier hotel than the ones I’ve been staying in for the last few weeks. You can see the Acropolis from here, and the Philopappos monument, which is on top of a hill directly opposite. It was too late to actually do anything: all the archaeological sites close at 3 or 4 PM in winter, but I walked straight to the Acropolis as soon as I had checked in. Just to gaze up at it.
For €30, you can buy a ticket to the Acropolis, which includes entry to the Theatre of Dionysus, the Ancient Agora, the Olympeion, the Roman Agora, the the Library of Hadrian, the Kerameikos, and one or two more sites. When I was here on the tour in June, the only one of these I visited was the Acropolis, so I’ve spent the last couple of days visiting as many of the rest of them as possible. I also made a return visit to the Acropolis Museum.
Yesterday afternoon I went for a walk before dinner, and found myself at the park containing the Philopappos monument. I don’t know what it’s called, to be honest, but there are lots of cool things there, including the Pnyx, where the Athenian Assembly used to meet, and the Prison of Socrates, which we’re just going to say is the site of Socrates’ suicide, and therefore the setting for Plato’s Phaedo. That’s where I took that photo of the Acropolis, just before sunset.
Now it’s Christmas Eve, my last full day in Europe. (I arrived in London on 2 November, so it’s been just less than two months.) Tomorrow I’m flying to Bangkok, where I’m staying just one night. Calvin is there now, but he will have left by the time I arrive. I’ll catch up with him in Siem Reap, and we’ll be heading off together for a tour of Angkor Wat. I’ll let you know how we get on.
Merry Christmas.
Writing: I posted a thing about Star Wars: Episode VIII, which I think was a brilliant film. Don’t read the post if you haven’t already seen it. It’s lousy with spoilers.
