Fascism threatens to become fashionable. I use the term loosely, but then people do. Call it totalitarianism, and in some guise or other it is a staple theme of teledrama: an all-purpose enemy, decked out with military precision, paramilitary uniform, uniformity of thought, one fatal flaw, and - of course - our hero as dissident, battling against the odds to defeat it or perish.
Twenty-five years ago, Orwell’s delineation of the brute gave television one of its first drama classics, with 1984, and since then the theme has rarely been untouched. To popular series it has been a godsend: The Avengers, The Prisoner, The Guardians - how the ominous roll rolls - and many more, have spun the same yarn in different settings, from the modestly futuristic to the utterly fantastic. This season, the BBC came up with another variant, with Edward Woodward being a liberal-humanist, pink-lefty Scarlet Pimpernel (wouldn’t we all?) in 1990.
Blake’s Seven (BBC-1) sweeps us back into space, in the wake of Star Trek and the more solemn moments from Doctor Who. Not that the latter veteran Time Lord is without his freethinking message - far from it - but he does have a nice line in jokes which actually concentrates the acid. Blake’s Seven comes from a neighbouring stable - created by Terry Nation, who spawned the Daleks - but it does not trade in jokes. It is more a mix of olde-worlde space jargon, ray guns, Western-style goodies and baddies, and punch-ups straight out of The Sweeney.
Admittedly, there is no escaping its message. The universe is run by an outfit The Enemy as Bureaucracy, and our heroes are prisoners on a space train whose second-in-command has ethics straight out of the wardens’ room at Belsen. The skipper does not much like it, of course. Wretched business, war.
Anyway, here is episode two gone, and Blake (Gareth Thomas, erstwhile chum of Charley Barlow’s) is set for escape, towing a cold genius (Paul Darrow) and a space pilot conveniently shaped like Farrah Fawcett-Major (Sally Knyvette). So The Federation is in for a pretty subverted time, you bet.
Which all might go down as moderate fun, had one not turned to Personal Report (ATV) and come face to face with the real thing. This occasional replacement for World called The Federation, an idea near enough home to be allegorical had we not already been fed so many versions of in Action, back for three weeks, started with a clarion call on human rights. Ostensibly the view of Doctor Peter Henriot, a jesuit, it simply allowed a number of people to tell what they know of torture, terror, and repression in today’s world. The last 10 minutes, with one woman talking of Paraguay, was especially chilling, and revolting in its detail. Henriot was saying that civilised nations could not play ball with such regimes and still spout about “human rights” in international public. Space fantasies, after all, are much more comforting.
