What The actual FUCK
Does THAT
Mean?
“In 1975, Terry Nation attended a meeting with Ronnie Marsh, the BBC's Head of Serials, to discuss ideas for new television series. Marsh was looking for formats for co-productions with American television channels.
Nation suggested a number of ideas, mostly for crime dramas, none of which appealed to Marsh.
According to Nation, "...the interview was drawing to a close when I surprised myself by starting to detail a new science fiction adventure.
‘Have you got a title?' someone asked.
“Blake's 7” I replied without hesitation."
Nation left the meeting with a commission for a pilot script and "...the bewildered feeling that
I could not trace The SOURCE of The Idea".
“The Quest. We were on a journey to a better place, provided we could overcome all the obstacles that the journey tests us with. If Hollywood is to be believed, we’ve now stopped using the plot of The Quest, and the idea of progress, to understand ourselves.
As the sociologist Robert Nisbet has written, ‘The skepticism regarding Western Progress that was once confined to a very small number of intellectuals in the nineteenth century has grown and spread to not merely the large majority of intellectuals in this final quarter of the [twentieth] century, but to many millions of other people in The West.’
The Story Structure which Western culture adopted to replace The Quest is Tragedy.
Tragedy, Booker tells us, is the story form that always ends in Defeat.
According to Aristotle, The Downfall of a character in a Tragedy is not caused by outside forces, such as The Gods or Fate. Nor is it the result of vice or moral deficiency. Instead, there is a central character flaw in The Heart of The Hero which cannot be resolved.
Aristotle used the word hamartia to describe this flaw, which translates as To Miss The Mark or To Err. To possess hamartia is not to be a “bad person”, for there is no moral Judgement involved.
But it compels You to act in a way that causes events to evade Your Control, and these actions inevitably result in Destruction.
Booker, in the spirit of literary theorists since Aristotle, defines Tragedy in a particular way. Tragedy ‘shows A Hero being tempted or impelled into a course of action which is in some way dark or forbidden’, he wrote.
‘For a Time, as The Hero embarks on a course, he enjoys almost unbelievable, dreamlike success,’ he continued.
‘But somehow it is in The Nature of The Course he is pursuing that he cannot achieve satisfaction.
His mood is increasingly chequered by a sense of frustration.
As he still pursues His Dream, vainly trying to make his position secure, he begins to feel more and more threatened – things have got out of Control.
The Original Dream has soured into a nightmare and everything is going more and more Wrong.
This eventually culminates in The Hero’s violent destruction.’
This is not, I Think, a million miles away from How We see ourselves Today.
The secondary character of Avon seemed to me to be a far more attractive and dominant character than Blake himself.
"Aaah. He (Paul Darrow) took hold of the part and made it his own. It could have been a very dull role, but this particular actor took hold of it and gave it much better dimensions than I’d ever put on paper. He is an enormously popular character. He is incredibly popular – and rightly so. He’s a good actor. I think he’s terrific. I enjoy watching him all the time. This is how stars emerge, I suppose : it’s the actor’s doing."
