Hacker Cinema
Blake's 7
1978 · TV series · 50 min episodes · 4 seasons
Created by Terry Nation
A group of convicts and outcasts fight a guerrilla war against the totalitarian Terran Federation from a highly advanced alien spaceship.
5 positive1 negative1 mixed8 neutralfrom 15 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
16 comments on Hacker News
One of the only episodes of Blake's 7 I really remember is "Orbit", in which Avon and Vila play a game of cat-and-mouse aboard a shuttle that's been stripped back to the wiring but is still doomed to crash into the planet it's trying to launch from unless another 70 kg can be ejected: as Orac helpfully points out to Avon, this is more or less exactly Vila's body mass. The respective faces pulled by Avon and Vila as Orac announces this tell you everything you need to know about their characters.
Another great example of this is British SF, especially 20th century Doctor Who and Blake's 7, vs American SF such as Star Wars/Trek. The British version can be much bleaker. And of course Red Dwarf, which doesn't translate at all into American. (There was a single pilot episode)
Edit: someone downthread mentioned Limmy's Show and Absolutely, to which I would add Burnistoun. Scottish humor is even more grimly fatalist than English.
> UK garage and rave culture took off in the UK with influences from reggae, soul and R&B. Now with the help of BBC Radio 1
I think there's an important middle step here, which is stuff that wasn't "banned" but was nevertheless not on the playlist, and the pirate radio stations whose personnel gradually went mainstream. Both from the Radio Caroline era (Jonnie Walker, rock) and Kiss FM (Trevor Nelson, UK garage). Let's not forget the government's attempts to ban the rave scene.
In comics you had 2000AD and Judge Dredd, inspired by the French Metal Hurlant.
> If you really want to argue for British dystopian science fiction movies
Not movies, but TV: Doctor Who (often dystopian), Blake's 7, the Prisoner, and the little-seen but extremely prescient Doomwatch. And of course the darkest nuclear apocalypse movie, Threads. Filmed in the parts of Thatcher-era Sheffield which looked like they had already been nuked.
UK always simply had less money and a narrower set of TV/radio gatekeepers. The diversity and inventiveness is there nonetheless. So, yes, a lot of things have to get American money and licenses in order to be made.
Nice read, thanks for great share.
I'd forgotten Minsky was such a good writer.
And oddly reminded of an episode of Blake's 7 where Villa the hacker destroys a malevolent mind holding the ship captive, by telling it jokes until it explodes.
Such a great time with so many interesting home computers like the oric, jupiter ace, dragon32, acorn atom, sinclairs, etc.
The 'Oric' name, at the time, made me think of 'Orac' from the tv series Blake's 7, but now, maybe 'Alas, poor Oric' is more appropriate, lol.
After Stephen Greif left Blake's 7 and they replaced him with that awful guy, every episode with Space Commander Travis in it was excruciating. Apparently Mr Greif died last December.
Yup. Kind of amazing what you can do with decent stories. Blake's 7 and 70s Doctor Who were notorious for cheezy effects, sets, props and costumes. But the stories really were pretty decent. Blake's 7 eventually annoyed me by how slow it progressed, but if you relax and accept that it's slower than your typical trek episode, it's perfectly fine.
The same era saw Survivors, The Tripods and Children of the Stones. Cheezy effects but very decent stories and still worth watching.
I grew up watching Yes, (Prime)? Minister. The 70s to the early 80s were really the golden age of British TV. This show, Blake's 7 (if you like sci-fi and haven't seen this it's still great, go watch it), Dr Who's golden years (ie Tom Baker), even the Goodies. probably even Grange Hill (which had a high school student die of a heroin overdose).
One particularly prescient piece was the Nuclear Deterrant [1]. Even 40+ years ago this episode argued that nuclear weapons were mostly pointless because you'd never use them and instead you should invest in smart weapons. The linked segment even has a line that the Soviets can't take Western Europe, they can't even hold Afghanistan. Consider that in light of Ukraine. Think about where munitions have gone and "smart" weapons are particularly prevelent.
And of course the writing and performance for Sir Humphrey in particular was absolutely top notch.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o861Ka9TtT4
The TV series of Logan's Run and Planet of the Apes are reasonably obscure because they weren't too popular (I've got hold of both them, by the way).
Some other titles to pique your interest:
1981 BBC version of The Day of the Triffids
1979 Tales of the Unexpected (not scifi really)
1979 Sapphire & Steel (with the most annoying introduction - they are not elements!)
1979 Quatermass series
1979 The Omega Factor
1978 Blake's 7 (should not really count as obscure due to the impact the series had)
1977 The Fantastic Journey
1977 Children of the Stones
1977 Beasts (anthology series by Nigel Kneale)
1975 Sky
1975 The Invisible Man (really cheesy, featuring David McCallum)
1975 The Changes
1974 Zodiac
1973 The Tomorrow People
1970 Timeslip
1969 The Owl Service
1968 The Champions
1966 The Time Tunnel
1966 Mission: Impossible
1965 Out of the Unknown
1960 The Strange World of Gurney Slade
1958 Quatermass and the Pit mini-series
1955 Quatermass II
That kind of thinking still exists. The most recent example I can think of is Ghosts on CBS as the US version of the UK Ghosts. CBS' streaming service (Paramount+) will even recommend the UK original and you can compare them side-by-side.
(Another somewhat recent example to mind was FX's Wilfred as the US version of the Australian Wilfred TV show. Hulu picked up the Australian show so that you could compare them side-by-side. For streamers this is easy content recommendations.)
TV and Movie executives are always looking for "low risks" and "proven formula" will always be a way to lower risk. Shows and movies from the same originating country get "rebooted" all the time. Doing a fresh take across cultural boundaries is interestingly a higher risk as studios try to figure out if the original premise has legs in the new country. Some of what we see is survivorship bias: The US Office was huge so that gets mentioned a lot. But there were a lot of similar attempts that never made it past the pilot because the risks were too high or it just didn't seem to work or whatever.
Off the top of my head, similar to this US IT Crowd pilot there are also "lost" pilots you can find for US Doctor Who and US Red Dwarf. The fascinating thing about both of those attempts occurred during different points of the height of the PBS/BBC partnership. Up until about the late 90s/early 00s PBS was the most common importer of BBC programming from the UK. (That shifted when the BBC decided it could be a stronger revenue stream, starting chasing bigger bids from US cable channels, and then eventually cofounded the BBC America cable channel.) At various points in time PBS' biggest audiences tuned into Doctor Who, Red Dwarf, and Blake's 7 (among others on the sci-fi side of their programming), so even in the "old" TV era these US attempts knew there was some pre-existing audience familiar with the original UK shows through PBS at the time. So streamers have exactly created that as a "new" idea or new thinking so much as shifted the economics of it. (PBS was public funded and not making a lot of money for how popular its showing of UK shows were. Streamers are all big for-profits that use multi-cultural content for moats around their subscription fees. Including BBC America's current home AMC+.)
Probably not. The author seems american; The site has a very US news bias, and only has US politics filtering.
Which is a shame. I hope the author plans to expand it to have a more global viewpoint.
For those that don't know - 'Blake's 7' was a 1970s UK sci-fi TV show that had a portable 'super-computer' called Orac, whose personality was arrogant and aloof. The show was set in a dystopian future where a despised militarised government rules the galaxy. Still worth watching even now to be honest.
I still find Blake's 7 one of the best shows ever made while a lot of people cannot watch the styrofoam and other crap effects. I never saw those then and I still do not (we do some marathons of the old with friends, some are 20something), the storytelling and less than actionpactness is part of the dystopian and lost feeling. The absense of 16 year old (looking) unrealistic starry-eyed teens helps as well giving this brutal Federation world it's atmosphere.
I find it a crying shame a lot of people cannot appreciate these shows, movies or games. They are not that different...
Author here. I wasn't sure if it was bad etiquette to submit my own article to HN but decided in the end that it might actually interest the community.
For fans of metal and sci-fi, I should mention that Dutch musician Arjen Anthony Lucassen does much more than just write science-inspired metal operas for Ayreon. He also has another project called Star One[0], where each song is based on an iconic sci-fi movie, book or series (Blake's 7, Doctor Who, Dune, Alien, Star Trek, A Clockwork Orange...).
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/STAR_1
Growing up in Bulgaria (I was born 1976) I caught the last years of "communism" (there was never such thing really), but I caught a lot of good time as a kid.
A lot of the classic bulgarian kid movies were about kids roaming the streets of the city, village, forest, etc. For example the whole family goes to a tourist resort, beach, and then you see kids of different ages going together somewhere.
One of my favourite shows as a kid was Verano Azul (spanish - Blue Summer) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verano_azul) - it was very popular on Bulgaria, and it also reflected the kind of play we used to have in there.
One of my other popular shows (Blake's 7, we did not had Star Trek back then) - was also very popular - outside we would play as characters from the show - like Zen, Oracle, Blake and other characters from the show. Sometimes few, othertimes dozen, and few times we were like 40-50 kids gathered from group ages from 1st to 8 or 9th grade playing together (bullying was all the time there I guess, I've never noticed it seriously - it wasn't an open concept, neither taboo - more like unknown thing - that just happens and you deal with it. It's different now that you know it, and have a child on your own, and live in USA - like me).
As kids, often we would go to the nearest construction site (usually high-rise building in construction) and do stupid things. It was the norm to fight with sticks - plastic or wood, throw stones, rocks at each other - and almost everyday come with blood here and there (no big deal, I survived).
My biggest adventure by far was, when me and my one year older cousin (he was 6 or 7 then) took the road to walk from one city (Chernomoretz, Bulgaria) to another (Burgas) - here is the route on google maps - http://goo.gl/EfRMsK - It's 26km - and we walked, took some bus, did a lot of stupid things (bent signs, ate stuff that we should not do). But overall had pretty good time. We started off like 8:00-9:00AM in the morning, and showed up at my grandparents apartment somewhere in afternoon. It was all because I thought we need an important plastic truck which was there.
Then with my other grandma we went couple of times to her village in the summer, and there I would roam the village, river, forest ( http://goo.gl/8HyhbQ ) - and come back late at night, sometimes 10:00pm, sometimes 2:00am - and I was 2nd or 3rd grade.
I guess she was afraid, but one thing she knew, or kind of expected it - is that other people if told that I'm lost would look for me, scorn me if they had to.
In short: I had respect of everyone bigger than me, and everyone else too. The situation in USA currently is that the first time you open your mouth against some kid to scorn him, and you might end up in prison. And that might be the right thing to do... But it's very unhelpful, since the kids no longer respect you.
It's quite different now with our son (soon to be 6) - he grows much faster than me emotionally, intellectually - he asks things that I would've asked much later in my kids' life. On top of that he's supposed to start his real life working much older than me (if he's willing to finish uni/ etc.)
Got the "Dangerous book for Boys" and would seen read it to him. I have to learn some american stuff after all (for example I do only understand the rules of soccer and basketball) :)
I came in here to make the same point, though I too was pondering the karma hit. Have an upvote.
To drag another tangential fantasy/sci-fi reference into the discussion, in an episode of Blake's 7 Avon and Vila smuggled their supercomputer Orac into a space casino so Vila could play against The Klute, a wizened Davros-like house chess genius with a terrifying laugh. The prize for winning or drawing was 10 million space credits, lose and The Klute could choose your destruction.
Sayonara karma.
> (I am so sorry Adam, for the record I love that film. I don't care if it contradicts my comment, that film rocks.)
There's a time for watching movies as much as for anything else. The problem with TV is that is puts you at one end of a big tube while they're feeding the other, with little choice as to what you get and lots of commercials.
I haven't watched TV for years now, but I do watch lots of anime and right now I'm at episode 3 of Blake's 7. The difference is I choose what I watch and try to make it as diverse and interesting as possible.
There's a lot to say about how I choose what I watch/read/listen. Sometimes I do just waste time on comedies, but sometimes it's a very active and rather difficult process of search and selection. I often go from an anime to a book of from reddit to a movie. Recently a sum of factors, mainly Junni Kokki (anime) but including a discussion here last week led me to some heavy Confucianist reading. This is a topic which would be perfect for a web 2.0 startup, but I haven't seen any serious contenders and I don't have my ideeas settled yet. But just imagine: what if you could jump from somebody's profile here to his favorite media (books/movies/shows/music/articles)? What if you could make a ... gestalt of what hacker news or reddit or digg reads/watches/listens? It took me 26 years to find out Ayn Rand existed (just an example). Before the net it could've taken me a lifetime or more. It's time to lower that a bit more, don't you think?