More than a little out of date? ... The cast of the original Blake's 7.
There's something inevitable about today's news that Blake's 7 is being re-imagined - re-imagined being the cool word for remade these days.
Sky One has ordered two hour-long pilots of the BBC's other vintage sci-fi series. Blake's 7 was created by Dalek inventor Terry Nation, ran for four years from 1978-81, and was a kind of cross between Robin Hood and Red Dwarf. It concerned an outlaw bunch of freedom fighters travelling aboard the Liberator on the run from the totalitarian Terran Federation in your standard dystopian future.
Yes, modern makeovers of clunky 70s series are fast becoming the new docusoaps, there are so many of them. In fact, the only thing that seems odd is that the BBC has let Sky One run away with a series it created.
But it's also a tricksy old game to pull off. For every Battlestar Galactica there's a Bionic Woman and for every Doctor Who there's a Flash Gordon.
And it's not as if the braying horde feverishly crying "wouldn't it be brilliant if they brought back Blake's 7!" extends very far beyond the frontier of what Russell T Davies rudely calls Ming Mong Land. Doctor Who's iconography was burned onto our national consciousness, and even if nobody actually watched the original Battlestar Galactica, we all remember the lunchboxes.
Blake's 7 would fit right in as a British Galactica. It was dark, intense, it didn't have any jokes in it, and everybody died at the end. OK, so the story of a bunch of fugitive space pirates on outlaw missions against a malevolent regime was updated not so long ago with Joss Whedon's Firefly, but that was canned after just one year.
If they get the team right, there's no reason it shouldn't be brilliant. Matthew Graham, the man behind Life on Mars, has been making noises for ages now about wanting to do a remake.
Still, it's staring to feel a bit like barrel-scraping isn't it? Wouldn't it be nice if someone could invest in some new genre ideas? Just a thought.
