Rachel In Danger

Continuing in my quest to get round to watching every last film and television programme that Ronan Vibert and Stephen Greif have ever appeared in before I die, I’ve just finished viewing the cult classic Rachel In Danger on YouTube.

The first of the noted Armchair Thriller serials from the late Seventies, this is the famous one that stars Stephen Greif as a delightful South American terrorist named Juan.  And it’s such an oddball of a thriller, that programmes like this don’t tend to get made any more.

Just to start with, most of the major characters involved don’t have the slightest idea what ‘cool’ and ‘sophisticated’ means.

Rachel herself is a dumpy, frumpy introvert of an eight year old girl, brought up in Scotland by her strict, if somewhat eccentric mother.  She is a committed vegetarian bookworm – and extremely intelligent.  If you offered her pink glittery ballet slippers and a feathery tutu, she wouldn’t hesitate to spit on your grave from a great height.  There’s no wavy long blonde hair in bunches, either.

As the series opens, Rachel is sitting on the Intercity train from Glasgow to London Euston.  Her mother says it is fine for her to travel down on her own as long as she uses her commonsense.  Despite her claims to the contrary, she probably still feels so angry with her ex-husband that she’ll do anything she can to avoid further direct contact with him.

During the journey, the little old lady in the next seat takes Rachel under her wing, in a gentle hint to viewers that later on the small girl will be devoid of help and protection at the very time she needs it most.   

Meanwhile, down in London, it’s all starting to go a bit Pete Tong (thus creating the inciting incident).

Rachel’s dad Peter Warmington is a nerdy university lecturer who took a job abroad somewhere in South America after his marriage to her mother broke down when she was just two years old.  Now he’s been offered a post at London University, so he’s returned to the UK.  Rachel’s mum has suggested that father and daughter get to know each other in person during the summer holiday before he starts his new job.

In a previous letter, Peter told his estranged daughter that he is ‘not a political animal’. This turns out to be his first mistake.

While making the final preparations for Rachel’s arrival, Peter is both surprised and delighted to bump into an old acquaintance at a street market.  Juan is someone he met back at the university in South America.

Juan claims he has been sent to the UK on business.  Peter feels lonely and isolated, so he invites him back to the temporary flat he is renting round the corner for a cup of coffee.  Big mistake number two.

Back at the scruffy dump of a flat, Juan questions Peter in some detail about his expected arrangements and movements over the next few days.

Peter assumes he is just taking a friendly interest.  Big mistake number three.

Once Juan has all the information that he needs from Peter, he disposes of him with the aid of a handy cigarette packet concealing a lethal stiletto blade.  “Don’t mind if I smoke?” he asks politely, then ker-CHUNK!  Juan appears to have a weakness for nifty little gadgets he picks up in the sales at the spymaster store in down Kensington.

This series certainly isn’t afraid to major on seriously bizarre murders.  In a later episode, a Welsh hitman disposes of the Brummie traitor via a deadly round of butties on a park bench.  You’ve got to love any programme that features Welsh Marxist terrorist hitmen in kitsch T-shirts, pretending to be university students and tourists on daytrips to the capital, before marmolising their targets with the aid of a well-aimed cheese and ham pickle!

Juan, it turns out, is actually the leader of an international cell of hardline Marxist terrorists.

I assume it was probably decided to make the cell international in composition because having all the terrorists originate from just one country could have had the scriptwriters accused of trying to stir up some covert sympathy for certain real-life terrorist organisations of the time – most probably the IRA in this case, though maybe also the PLA, ETA or the Baader-Meinhof gang.

Juan’s cell consists of a suave South American businessman, an intense young German academic, a scruffy Brummie forger and a stroppy Japanese woman. They all travel round the world helping each other commit violent acts of protest against their respective regimes.

Their plan on this particular occasion is to assassinate a member of the royal family at the next garden party due to be held at Buckingham Palace.  Juan intends to gain access to the event by taking over Peter Warmington’s identity.

This should be quite easy because the two men are of the same physical type. Plus Juan knows a lot about British culture and speaks fluent English with only a very slight accent.  He has probably targeted Peter precisely for this very reason.

The Japanese lady is supposed to be posing as Peter Warmington’s second wife, who she met while they were both working in South America.

However, there is one slight problem – Rachel.

Either Juan didn’t know that Peter has a daughter – or else he believed that Rachel would be staying at home in Scotland with her mother until the terrorists had completed their mission in London.

After the murder, Juan decides to stash Peter Warmington’s body in the airing cupboard, on the grounds that he and his colleagues won’t be staying in the flat for long enough for it to start to smell.  Tell you something for nothing, they must feel pretty damn certain that they won’t get extradited from their respective countries of origin, then, because the very first thing the police will do once the new tenants have reported the murder is establish the corpse’s identity.  Once they have discovered he was the real Peter Warmington, they’ll obviously decide that the fake one needs to start helping them with their enquiries as a matter of urgency.

Just after Juan has finished concealing the corpse, there is a knock on the door.

It is the police.  They want to know why he has not come to meet his dear little daughter at Euston station as he promised her and her mother he would.

Well, mainly because he doesn’t know he now has a daughter – nor that she has been duly dispatched from Scotland to London by his estranged wife.

Juan is caught on the hop.  To avoid suspicion, he is forced to improvise.

Rachel, he insists, will provide the perfect cover.  With a daughter, he and his second wife can now not only get into the garden party, but up much closer and more personal to their intended target (who is never named, presumably to avoid upsetting the Royals, by inadvertently implying that this could be based on any real assassination plot, thus giving the genuine terrorists out there a few handy hints for their own nefarious plans).

To ensure that she cannot betray them, they will murder her straight afterwards.

Wormauld the Brummie is a kind-hearted, sentimental sort of bloke, so naturally he objects to this.  He suggests they should spare her life.  Then he will escort her back home to her mother in Scotland.

If they don’t agree, then he won’t give them the official garden party invitation he’s managed to forge so brilliantly.    

Now he has a temporary daughter, Juan finds he has to keep improvising.

He claims that his female Japanese colleague is actually his second wife, and thus Rachel’s step-mother. They met while he was still in South America because ‘Japanese people are everywhere these days’.  He didn’t want to tell Rachel and her mother by letter or telephone because the news was far too important.

Because Rachel is now kipping in the spare bedroom, the Japanese lady must obviously sleep elsewhere.  As she is now apparently his wife, Juan has the bright idea that she should sleep with him.  This even appears to involve sex with the cheeky bastard, as he then has the audacity to complain about her bad performance in bed the next day!

She does not like him at all, so quite why she agreed to have a shag with him I really couldn’t say (according to Japanese culture, is it bad manners to turn a man down in these sorts of circumstances?  Haven’t got a clue, I’m afraid).  Though I could well imagine Juan arguing that as Rachel is a very intelligent girl, she will of course be perfectly aware that her father and stepmother must have sex together, so she will realise something is up if they don’t.

As an adult woman, I think it would have been really funny if the Japanese lady had told him that because he has upset her so much, no way is he going to get any tonight – and if he isn’t going to sleep on the sofa then she is.  Or she complained about what a load of old rubbish he is in the sack.  Just to add a note of realism or three to the proceedings.  However, if Juan is prepared to resort to physical violence to remind the Japanese lady just who is in charge and why, he presumably wouldn’t take very kindly to being refused – or criticized - in bed.

Somebody who has watched all the episodes on YouTube keeps complaining about this Japanese character being very aggressive in her general attitude.

This could possibly be a more subtle allusion to the frequent personality clashes that were reported in real terrorist gangs from the Sixties and Seventies, most notably the Baader-Meinhof gang.  Some of the women members wanted to prove they were every bit as tough and uncompromising as the men, so of course they made sure to err on the side of excess in this respect, and could often end up pretty narky.

Being such hardline Marxists as it is implied in the script, questions of both doctrine and dedication no doubt spark the most massive rows between the members of Juan’s cell.  Plus Rachel’s mere presence has obviously given the Japanese lady a severe fright – and people who are terrified can often become extremely aggressive.

The Japanese lady loathes Rachel because she realises that the little girl represents a serious security risk to their carefully laid plans.  Both Juan and the Japanese lady are aware that Rachel is very intelligent – which only increases the threat that she poses to them.  As both a pretend stepmother and a real woman, the Japanese lady is able to make a more accurate assessment of the potential danger than Juan.

Juan’s stroke of genius is to devise horribly plausible explanations for everything that could possibly provoke awkward questions – from Rachel or anyone else.

For example, when Rachel asks her presumed daddy why he bothered marrying the Japanese lady if they don’t like each other very much, he replies: “Well, I expect it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Later at the garden party, he delights in informing a posh lady guest that Rachel happens to be his daughter by his first wife, so ‘of course her step-mother loathes her.  It’s just one of those things, really.’   

Stephen Greif handles all the social satire with his usual deft touch – and a slight, but perceptible edge of real glee at the acute discomfort experienced by the stuffiest of the British characters.  Quite appropriate for such a hardened class warrior as Juan, not to mention great fun for Greif.

Like Harry Fenning, Juan the terrorist and Peter Warmington the lecturer both subscribe to the bad taste school of Seventies menswear.  Their version is slightly more low-key than his – but still worrying all the same. 

What we are talking about here is beige dogtooth jackets with a slight safari cut and front yokes in tan suede.  The lemon yellow cotton shirt is worn without a tie and the top couple of buttons undone at the neck, leaving a few faint wisps of chest hair to poke out at the top (I couldn’t make out if he was wearing a vest or not.).  

Moving down, the trousers were cut to make even the finest of masculine bums look slightly flabby and square from the back.  Let’s be brutally honest here, no-one would respect Commander Travis if his trousers did the same.  Remember the considered opinion of Spike Milligan’s Jewish ex-tailor colleague during the war: “You need to make a soldier look attractive to the opposite sex – or think he does.”

Juan finishes his elegant loungewear off with Peter’s ghastly pair of horn-rimmed bottle-bottom spectacles.  A taste for frowsty eyewear obviously runs in the family, seeing as Rachel sports them too.  Wonder if her mum back in Scotland has an equally frumpy pair?

As Juan doesn’t seem to need to wear glasses himself, Peter’s prescription gives him headaches, so he has to keep taking them off.  This is the first sign the police have that not everything is as it should be.

Because he’s considering changing the way that he looks, Juan informs Rachel, he is now trying to get used to going without glasses sometimes.

Cuddles and Bubbles

Just in case anyone out there in the worldwide blogosphere (sorry, this is still the most appallingly inept neologism imaginable - but at least I've got nothing to do with it) is wondering (somehow I doubt it - but then, you never know these days ... ), this particular entry has been prompted by a protracted bout of watching Citizen Smith online.

My ostensible reason for hanging out in the YouTube version of late Seventies Tooting was to attempt to learn more about exactly how many scenes and how much dialogue a sitcom writer can hope to pack in the space of half an hour.  I'm currently writing the first of two 25 minute sitcom episodes for my MA course at the moment - which can prove a bit of a bugger when you don't have all that much practical experience just yet.

However, coughing, snuffling and sneezing all over the shop as I was yesterday afternoon made this sort of sustained concentration rather more difficult than initially anticipated.  So instead I got in some concentrated Harry Fenning watching.

And guess what?  Turns out that Stefan Elnore Travis is by no means the only misunderstood 'psycho' out there in tellyland.

So why did Stephen Greif decide to chuck in his lot with Harry in the end?

Well, according to this interview here: 

http://www.denofgeek.com/television/43623/interview_stephen_greif_on_blakes_7.html

there were as always a lot of rather complex reasons.  Back in its Terry Nation incarnation, the Federation appears to be a grim and bitter place where laughter and good cheer are in short supply.  So the sunshine and bonhomie of Citizen Smith’s failed revolution must have come as a great relief to him.  Greif’s subtle sense of the absurd gives him a fine touch indeed in comic roles – and it is Harry Fenning who lives in a society relaxed enough to be able to laugh at revolutionaries and criminals, rather than locking them away or zapping them into oblivion.

Happily there was rather more room for manoeuvre in this role – and Greif seems to have relished the challenge.  Indeed, the way in which he managed to broaden out Harry Fenning shows perfectly just how actors can actively collaborate with writers and directors to lift a script and create a real work of art out of it.

Because he is a fine actor, Greif’s touches of comedy never diminish Harry Fenning or his potential for serious aggression.  Instead, they really help to turn him into a three-dimensional being.

Take his outfits, for example.  Even by the standards of the late Seventies (and remember, fact fans, this was the decade of my childhood, so I was actually priviliged to live through such sartorial traumas for real), tartan tuxedoes and black shirts worn with kipper-width white satin ties count as serious offences against manhood.

However, if you watch the programme for longer than five minutes, you soon discover that, strange as it may seem, the frankly rather disturbing Harry Fenning also has a more endearing, almost childlike side.

It's probably this gauche teenage part of him that reckons all the awful, slightly cartoonish outfits he sports during the series count as the ultimate in gentlemanly 'smartness' and 'sophistication'.  (So quite how Wolfie and co came to mistake him for the MP they wanted to kidnap in that famous episode The Hostage, I couldn't tell you.  And why Fenning didn't start shouting and bawling as soon as they laid hands on him outside the Conservative Club in the first place also remains a mystery.  Might have guessed Harry would be a paid-up grovelarse junkie of Maggie-Maggie-Maggie-OUT-OUT-OUT, though.  Can you IMAGINE what he would have been like during the Eighties????????!!!!!!!!!!!!!) 

When he's not bowling round the local hostelries putting the frighteners on susceptible rival publicans, Harry enjoys nothing better than winding up Wolfie and his mates.  Like Stephen Greif says, this probably counts as a very welcome interval of light amusement in what must usually be a very aggressive, somewhat stressful daily round.

Now as a child, I must confess I never quite understood the Fenning sense of irony.  I probably drove my dad round the bend and up the wall by constantly asking him why Harry kept referring to Wolfie and Ken as 'Trotsky' and 'Gandhi' when those were certainly not their proper names.

I know for a fact that euphemisms like 'legitimate businessman' and 'fell off the back of a lorry' continued to puzzle and disturb me for years.  I also never could work out just why Harry Fenning needed to pursue his so-called ‘respectable’ careers as a publican, businessman and mini-cab company owner when his true love was always crime and violence.  After all, the villains in Batman never wasted any time in putting on a front.

Later as a teenager, I got the impression that Fenning was one of those men who think they are a lot more intelligent than in fact they are.  Watching the series yet again today, I am not so sure.  Yes, he certainly has a childlike side.  I imagine he probably uses this to lull a lot of people into a false sense of security.  But all in all, like Commander Travis, when it comes down to it, Fenning is actually a pretty astute bloke.

Presumably his childlike side is what may account for the fact that he appears to have a reputed mistress with the nickname of 'Cuddles'.

Now, I don’t know about you, but to me 'Cuddles' seems a very old-fashioned nickname for a funky Seventies chick with blowdried hair to have ended up with.  

‘Cuddles’ sounds much more like some sort of plus-sized goddess played by Hattie Jacques in a red and white spotted Fifties bombshell halterneck dress, plus a pair of outrageously vertiginous scarlet peep-toe fug-me winkle-picker shoes and a Kiss Me Quick Squeeze Me Slowly hat that Harry has bought for her on that daytrip they took to Margate.  Underneath it all, she no doubt wears a black lace basque complete with stout stockings and suspenders.

When she is in a good mood, Cuddles laughs her head off at all the rude jokes on the telly (Frankie Howerd and Kenneth Williams are particular favourites) and thinks nothing of whipping you up a huge tea of shepherd’s pie, carrots and peas with pineapple upside down cake swamped in half a can of evaporated milk for afters (typical menu that Harry gets fed round her place before having certain other bodily comforts seen to.  Hope he doesn’t take his washing down there – but at least Joan is probably British rather than American, so did not receive lectures in ‘Introduction To Marriage’ whilst she was at college.).

Of course, Joan 'Cuddles' Tofkin is just one of the many, many characters referred to in sitcoms who you never ever see.  Therefore, viewers and listeners are at perfect liberty to imagine them however they want.  The above description is just my personal idea of what Joan may be like.  (Certainly my investigations into fan fiction for both the article that I am writing and the panels I took part in at Redemption 2011 have revealed that it is sometimes the characters just like this who capture the imagination of the aspiring writers.  As we saw previously, Vila Restal’s mum is a good example.  So maybe the above is my own personal mini-example of Citizen Smith fanfic?  God only knows what Citizen Smith slash fiction is like, though I can now hazard a reasonably accurate guess ; ) … )   

Remember, her husband Tofkin does appear onscreen (quite prominently in two episodes) – and he certainly doesn’t seem the type to have an especially young or conventionally glamorous wife.  From what I know of John Sullivan’s work as a writer, if Joan was ever meant to be like that, then someone would have said so right away.

So menacing psycho-racketeer extraordinaire Harry Fenning may possibly have a pleasingly plump mistress – and he definitely likes nothing better than being cuddled.  This reveals him as more sympathetic, quite surprisingly and delightfully human.

Good luck to the bugger.  

What bothers me most about Citizen Smith on the current viewing is the sheer bloody blokiness of much of the humour.

Okay, nearly all the main characters in the series are male, so obviously you might expect the masculine point of view to be fairly predominant in the scripts.  However, what I am talking about here is sexism.

By ‘sexism’, I mean the really wearing way in which the men all jockey to constantly score points off each other, thus establishing the Tooting social pecking order from alpha to omega male.  Harry is obviously the alpha male par excellence in their tiny community – and Joan is regarded as one of the prime proofs of his high status.

Brazenly shagging some other bloke’s bird brings Harry extra kudos amongst the habitués of The Vigilante.  Such roguish behavior only makes him even more of a man – hence all the tiresome posturing and over-exaggerated pronunciation of vulgar demeaning expressions like ‘rumpy-PUMPy!’.  Meanwhile, Joan seems to be regarded as basically a bit of a slag.

If you just pause to look at the situation from the female point of view, it starts taking on a radically different complexion.

Poor old Joan Tofkin has a bit of a sad life, so in some ways you can't really blame her for her behaviour.  Her husband is suffering from serious long-term mental health issues, he has had to be put away in the bin, people probably gossip about her in the supermarket and avoid her on the street, and she can't divorce him for fear that it might send him totally over the edge.

Probably her affair with cousin Harry is meant as a bit of company and comfort during a time of trouble and need, rather than an all-in assault against respectable morals.

It would be very interesting indeed to talk to her and the other women characters from Citizen Smith while the men were absent and hear just what they had to say about the situation. 

I know some people criticize John Sullivan for a perceived over-reliance on stupid female characters (Shirley’s mum from Citizen Smith and Marlene from Only Fools And Horses and The Green Green Grass being the two main offenders here), but speaking as a woman, it is entirely possible that some of their silliness could be exaggerated or even feigned.

After all, if you had the choice between Harry Fenning dismissing you as being a few sandwiches short of a picnic or roaring with rage and chasing you down a dark corridor brandishing a broken-off chairleg, which would you pick?  (If you are my mother, Fenning would know immediately that your reference to his ‘foster children’ was meant in deepest irony.  But you would manage to get away with it big time because you combine the face of Elizabeth Taylor with the devastating posh charm of Margot from The Good Life.  Not that you ever see any women like that round The Vigilante of a Saturday evening during the Seventies.)

Mrs Tucker always had me seriously impressed.  I strongly suspect that knitting the set of balaclavas with the smiley faces on may have been her particularly creative way of making a veiled political protest against the so-called ‘revolutionary’ activities engaged in by Wolfie, her husband and their various equally daft mates.

Poor Shirley was so fed up with the lot of them that she became one of those many people who got the hell out of the country shortly before Mrs Thatcher swept to power.  Wonder if she ever came back?  Or was she another who started a completely new life abroad?

While we’re still on the subject of sexism in sitcoms, I need to agree wholeheartedly with Andy Merriman when he states that Hattie Jacques probably would NOT have been a fan of Little Britain.

Yeah, yeah, I know that Matt Lucas and David Walliams would no doubt lose no time in telling me that greed, hypocrisy, fear and loathing are all worthy and venerable targets for humour and satire.

As a larger woman myself (size 20, in case anyone is wondering), it disturbs me that big women characters like Bubbles DeVere and Ting Tong the so-called ‘mail order bride’ are presumed to be physically unattractive to the opposite sex, so therefore reveal themselves as both presumptuous and deluded when they persist in acting as if they are.  If they display any sexual desire for one of the men, then that is considered a monstrously greedy and rapacious lapse in good taste, rather than a simple fact of life.

At the same time, the Rob Brydon character and the mail order groom bloke are both only too obviously up for it with fat slappers – only they are careful to do it well out of the eagle eye of society, so that they do not lose precious points in the pecking order by getting it on with ugly useless women rather than beautiful desirable ones.  This suggests that fat women with sexual feelings and intelligent minds are regarded by these men as a sort of guilty secret indulgence, on a par with a woman pigging out on huge tubs of triple chocolate ice cream when she’s alone at home and pretending to like quinoa and alfalfa salads.

If Ting Tong really is a mail order bride (or feels she has to pretend to be, for whatever reasons), then like many women living in less economically advantageous societies even today, she might well have to employ her femininity and sexuality simply to ensure her survival.  Rather than starve on the streets, she might have to grit her teeth and charm the pants off a pompous, hypocritical, deeply unattractive man in order to lay her hands on his wallet.

Meanwhile, Bubbles DeVere seems to get slapped down because she has the temerity to want too much – food, sex, money, beauty, men who should be off-limits (hang on a second – why’s it apparently just fine for Harry Fenning to knock off his cousin’s estranged wife when Bubbles DeVere is roundly condemned for seducing her newly remarried ex-husband?  And how come Joan and Bubbles end up castigated as greedy sluts whilst Harry and whatisname are lauded to the skies as the toast of the lads?).  

Commander Travis is innocent

Commander Travis may be a hard man.

He may be a seriously nasty bastard if you manage to get on the wrong side of him.

He may end up a pretty unhappy and disturbed character.

But he isn't - and never has been - either a psychopath or an extra-terrestrial!

Over the past 30 years, many sci-fi fans out there have had no hesitation at all in calling him either or both.

Anyone who jumps to his defence, especially a woman, is immediately accused of being, at best, a bleeding-heart liberal like the Modern Parents from Viz, or, at worst, a star-swept lilac-haired tangerine-eyed Mary Sue who needs to buy a copy of Women Who Love Too Much and start reading it immediately.

Well, my answer to that is BOLLOCKS.

Okay, I freely admit that Travis (Mark 1 version) is perhaps my favourite character ever from Blake's Seven (albeit followed extremely closely by Avon and Servalan.  Vila and Carnell are also pretty good creations).

His story arc in the original version is extremely sad and even today I cannot bring myself to watch the end of Star One.

The problem is, I've always felt that Commander Travis, like many of the canon characters in this series, ended up suffering from a seriously bum rap.

Now, the first question I'm sure the scriptwriters of the new audio reboot must have had to ask themselves is: how did this misfortune happen?

Like detectives, they must have had to go back to the scene of the crime to re-examine it.

And the scripts of the original series unfortunately show that a lot of the blame has to be laid at the doors of the writers.

As a scriptwriter in training, I've always thought that it would be a vital part of the job description for the writers of a show to have the ability to create plausible, three-dimensional characters that exchange lines of snappy, vivacious dialogue with each other and prove a real joy for the actors to play.

If they cannot deliver on this promise, then they need to start looking for an alternative career immediately, as there will be a whole great gaggle of wannabes streaming through the back door to replace them.

That's why it surprised me so much to learn of Terry Nation's alleged deficiencies as a writer.

According to the seriously academic study of him that was published not that long ago by Manchester University Press, he was never that hot on writing dialogue.  It didn't matter which show he was working on, the same problem cropped up time and time again. Even though the basic working conditions of the late Seventies were very different to those of today, it was still considered a pretty tall order indeed for him to write every single episode of the first series of Blake's Seven all by himself.

I imagine that he was well aware that his entire professional reputation was on the line at this point - so I can't imagine he must have felt terribly happy when Stephen Greif started expressing his discontent with Travis.
 
Greif has always come across to me as one of those extremely practical and down-to-earth actors who would never dream of complaining unless they believe they have just and ample cause.  When they do make their thoughts clear, it is because they want to put in the very best job they possibly can and need to know how the difficulties that stand in the way of this could be resolved to everyone's satisfaction.

To sum up his dispute with the Commander in a nutshell, he thought Travis had very quickly turned into a morose, obsessional, one-dimensional cipher, who badly needed broadening out and humanising as soon as possible.

He had rapidly become bored with portraying the character and he felt sure the audience would soon get fed up with watching him too.   

Luckily Chris Boucher turned out to be a dab hand with the dialogue - and much of the Commander's subsequent savage line in wit can ultimately be traced back to him.  It is indeed a great shame that Stephen Greif didn't stick around in the end to get the benefit of it.  (Still would have loved to have seen what he would have made of Trial.  Regret to say that I don't feel the same way about Hostage, though.)

Now, as both an excellent actor and fully paid-up member of Mensa, Stephen Greif was doubtless quite right in his assessment of the situation.

Problem is, I suspect he ended up greatly over-estimating both the emotional needs and the critical abilities of many members of the audience.

Despite the constant whinges from certain sections of the viewership that television has slowly and irrecoverably been going down the tubes since at least 1960, it seems abundantly clear from the fond, rosy-hued reminiscences that they share in various forums that many fans have been pretty satisfied at some fundamental level with whichever shows that they personally happen to follow.

If the example of Algernon Fraser the mad scientist from The Floating Island Of Madness is to be believed, more than a little of this satisfaction must come from the fulfillment of audience expectations.

Despite the fact that many critics and academics saw the success of Blake's Seven to lie in its portrayal of a flawed, dysfunctional future society and its various citizens in very grimy shades of grey, more than a few viewers don't seem to have regarded it in the same light.

This is abundantly revealed in some of the fan fiction that has been produced about the series.

Because Roj Blake is firmly seen as a 'goodie' by certain viewers, his point of view is often accepted without question by them - even when there are serious grounds for taking what he says with a massive great pinch of salt (at the very least).

One of the classic examples of this occurs when he states that Commander Travis has 'no friends'.
 
If you look at this statement properly, it is more than a little obvious that Blake probably doesn't have the slightest idea what he is talking about.

First of all, exactly how well does he really know Travis?

How many times has he met him?

When they met, what did they say to each other?  And why?

Unless there is something major that Blake isn't telling his new crew (and by implication, us in the audience too) - then it is very likely that Blake has only met Travis a few times at most, and quite possibly only on the one occasion when he shot him. 

Travis, if you will recall, had been ordered to arrest Blake and the other dissidents.  However, it all rapidly spiralled into an extremely nasty, bloody disaster for both sides.

The Commander will have started off by announcing something along the lines of: "Put your hands up.  You're all under arrest."

At this stage, Blake is rather unlikely to ask him to sit down and enjoy a nice cup of tea and a slice of ginger cake.

Although there appears to be some dispute about what was then said by whom to whom and why, I think we would still be fairly safe in assuming that a squadron of extremely aggressive and determined troopers attempting to arrest a bunch of very frightened and pissed-off protestors are not going to be in the right frame of mind to get to know very much about each other's lives and priorities.

The strong implication would therefore have to be that Blake then read up about Travis in some sort of report or other afterwards.  If it was a media report, then the question has to be asked - would any Federation journalist really be able to include the fact that Travis has no friends in their report, without it being cut or censored in some way?  (Knowing the way that our own media tends to report incidents analagous to this one, I can't see how the hell it would be relevant to the story anyway.)  If it was written by some dissident reporter, then I'd be extremely interested to know what their source for this information was.

Or perhaps Blake was simply listening to rumour and hearsay, circulating on both sides.

We simply don't know.

In any case, it is impossible for the new crew of the Liberator to go and check out the background to this story - and I would reckon that Blake is fully aware of this.

Remember, Blake is an experienced revolutionary/terrorist (delete as personally applicable) leader with an agenda as long as your bloody arm.

Now that Travis is on his trail, Blake realises that he has no real chance of beating the Commander without the help and support of his new comrades in need.  Therefore, he must rally them to his defence as quickly as possible.

Like any effective leader, Blake has learnt over the years that appealing to the basic human emotions is a dead cert when trying to convince people of your views.

Therefore, he will probably want to spin a story that subtly, but powerfully, reminds his listeners that they are all in danger.  They are all in this predicament together.

Because he already suspects that Avon and Jenna are in two minds about whether to stay, Blake really needs to pull the stops out at this point.

So he emphasises that Travis threatens not just Blake - but every single one of them there and then.

The classic technique used in these sort of situations is to demonise your enemy.

Thus Travis becomes (in Blake's account, anyway) the cold, ruthless, remorseless psychopath that he has remained in the minds of many over the past three decades.

Now, to be fair to both Avon and Jenna, I think they are quite probably aware that there may be some wide, even gaping holes in Blake's account.  But they know only too well from previous experience that the Federation is not going to all this time and trouble unless it is totally serious about eliminating them.

This means that, whatever the precise truth of Blake's tale, it is cast-iron certain that Commander Travis is a.) a nasty bastard and b.) he means business.

At the same time, to be equally fair to Terry Nation, he very likely wanted the viewers at home to identify with the very different personal dilemmas being experienced by Blake, Avon and Jenna during this particular episode - and to ask themselves some tough, hard questions about what THEY would do if they found themselves in such a situation.
 
However, both classic narrative and psychological theory would have none of this ambiguity.

According to them, there is nothing the average human being hates and detests more than uncertainty.

Archetypes provide you with islands of safety that you can cling to when buffetted hither and thither in the storms of chaos that constitute modern life.

The first thing you need to do when flung into a narrative of any sort is find someone to identify with.

Blake demands that we take him as our protagonist, our friend, our comrade, our hero, our rock.  Anyone who opposes him must surely be our enemy too.

Okay, that's the theory.

But if you adhere to it too closely, then life dies.

And as Stephen Greif pointed out, you can end up with some seriously tedious telly.

Another vital point that many of these traditional archetype lovers completely miss when they blithely label Travis a psychopath is the basic reason behind the existence of armies in the first place.

As the great quote from General Patton? [let me check this and I'll get back to you] puts it, no good general wants to die for his country.  Instead, the purpose of combat is to make the other bastard die for his.
 
The Federation Space Force will thus have been designed to be as effective as possible.

A key way to ensure peak operational efficiency must be to attract the right type of recruits.

Now, I don't know about you, but if I was a Federation recruiting officer interviewing the teenage Travis and asking him to explain just why he wanted to join up, I personally don't think I'd be terribly impressed if he admitted straight out that he was an aggressive little fuckwit that really fancied the idea of shooting as many people as possible in a total orgy of ultra-violence while wearing a pair of seriously cool shit-kicker boots.

Granted, Travis is a pretty intelligent, astute bloke, whatever else you may happen to think about him, so presumably he would have known better than to come out with a suicidly stupid statement like that, even if he did secretly believe it.

However, ever since the dawn of history, armies have known only too well that some of the people that attempt to join up end up being far more of a liability than an asset.  Because the consequences of untrammelled recruitment can be catastrophic, it makes perfect sense that the Federation Space Force would do everything in its power to make sure that only suitable recruits got through the door in the first place.

So presumably Travis and all the other applicants must have been put through their paces with a punishing battery of searching psychological and emotional assessment exercises.  If they wanted to go straight in for the fast-track officer training, then the tests must have been even more stringent.

We would have to assume then, that he must have passed all the exams with flying colours and managed to convince the recruitment assessors that he was a good bet for future officer training.

Once safely in and having passed the basic induction process, Travis seems to have done pretty well for himself.

Not only has he managed to get promoted to a high rank fairly quickly, but he has also received advanced training in some extremely specialised and dangerous disciplines and carried out a range of highly sensitive assignments.

Because he hasn't got chucked out on his bum +/demoted by now, the likelihood is that, on the whole, he must be putting in a satisfactory performance at work (assuming we discount the entire Zircaster can of worms for the moment).

So if the Federation Space Force apparently don't have grounds for diagnosing Travis as a psychopath, then what the hell else could be wrong with him?

The obvious answer - and one that would be of particular resonance to today's audience, particularly in the aftermath of two Gulf Wars and the dreadful debacle continuing on in Afghanistan - is that he is suffering from some sort of emotional injury that has either been caused by combat conditions or made worse by them.

In the original series, you'll recall that he ended up suffering appalling injuries during his run-in with Blake.

Now, he does insist to Servalan in Seek-Locate-Destroy that he is not all that bothered by his wounds, particularly now that he has made a full physical recovery (as far as possible) and the army surgeons have done such a great job installing his cyber-replacements.

Sorry, but the next point that has to be made here is that, if we can't believe every word that Blake says to be gospel truth, then there are no grounds for assuming that Travis always states exactly what he really thinks and feels either.

Travis knows only too well that if it wasn't for Servalan offering him a lifeline in the form of the Blake assignment, he would be in deeply serious shit following the Zircaster balls-up.  At best he would be looking at the very real prospect of being dishonorably dismissed from the service.  At worst, he could even be executed.

It is therefore in all his best interests to appear as normal and functional to Servalan as possible.

As the Supreme Commander of the entire force, Servalan is not only a savvy operator generally, but also a consummate politician.  She surely must have heard a great deal about the various forms of psychological injury that soldiers are prone to during the course of her career.  It is very unlikely, therefore, that she truly believes Travis when he assures her that his terrible injuries mean as little to him now as he assures her that they do. 

She knows he is desperate.  Therefore his motivation to succeed is high.

And if he DOES end up failing, then she has got him right by the short and curlies.

Another vital factor to bear in mind is that Servalan is female.

One of the more sympathetic aspects of the Commander's character that we do get to hear about, albeit far too briefly, during series 1 of the original version, is his appreciation for attractive women, like Keira the mutoid pilot used to be before she got converted.

If it is true that Travis is a man who is attracted to women, then naturally he will be extremely concerned to create a good impression upon them.  He will be anxious to convey to his new female boss the idea that he is not only a tough, effective officer, but also a proper successful alpha male.

According to his way of thinking, Servalan will assume that physical appearance doesn't matter as much to a man as it does to a woman - especially not a male officer who knows and accepts that injury is one of the many high prices that soldiers have to pay in combat.

Women give in to their feelings, whilst men don't have any.

Yes, it's a pretty traditional way at looking at the differences between the sexes - but whoever said that the army was the most advanced bastion of society?  Certainly in Britain during the late Seventies, anyway.

Now, I have to be brutally honest and admit that I reckon Travis is talking total and utter crap here.

The injuries he suffered during the fight with Blake were quite utterly appalling.

People with these sort of injuries in everyday life usually need to have further outpatient contact with a doctor over quite a long period.  Even after the articial eye and arm have been installed, the doctor would need to keep ensuring that that the person is continuing to live comfortably and function normally.

It is generally recognised by doctors that these particular type of injuries are likely to cause a person considerable psychological trauma that may take many years - and much anguish - to come to terms with.

I would therefore strongly suspect from the way that Travis behaves, especially in relation to Blake, that he has got a very bad case of post-traumatic stress disorder, rather than being a raving psychopath.

Now THERE'S another extremely interesting and important point!

Has anything like this been diagnosed in him - either just after Blake's attack or more recently?

Has any psychological treatment been prescribed or offered?

If not, then why?

It's obvious that Travis is in a pretty bad way in the emotional sense.

If yes, why hasn't it worked?

Or has Travis refused it?

If he refused the treatment, why?

How the hell can you say that something as fundamental as this is of no importance to Travis and his life?  Writers worth their salt knew all about the dramatic potential in circumstances like this during the Seventies, for God's bloody sake!

What about all those war films starring characters like Douglas Bader who suffered terrible injuries, but managed to overcome them to fight again?

The only conclusion that I can come to is that exploring this dramatically very promising issue might have been regarded as putting Travis in serious danger of becoming a bit too sympathetic a character.

And an extremely interesting possibility has just occurred to me for the current audio version of the series.

Giving Travis an eye patch and an artificial arm these days might be regarded as a touch TOO cheesy, tacky and obvious.  Also, you can't see them on the radio - and characters running round describing the Commander's disabilities every five minutes sounds far too reminiscent of The Gun That I Hold In My Right Hand Is Loaded for comfort.

So, what about having Travis escape from his run-in with Blake still physically intact - but his mind is slowly succumbing to post-traumatic stress disorder?

Just going for a quick slash - some personal observations on the slash fiction of 'Blake's Seven'

Let's be honest here - slash fiction is a sensitive topic at the best of times.

In literary terms, it often tends to be regarded as the embarrassing cousin whose existence you prefer never to acknowledge - until they turn up at your wedding drunk, loud and disorderly as your typical Wetherspoons bar on a Friday night at 11 pm and proceed to regale all your prissy new in-laws with the tale of how during your student days you once decided to impress a new acquaintance with your ability to fly like Superman, only you miscalculated your flight path and fell 10 feet down the nearest manhole.

Actors frequently hate it because they often feel that in some fundamental way, the characters they portrayed in the series that inspired the fanfic somehow 'belong' to them.  Any differences between their views of the character's sexuality and those exhibited by the fans in the slash fiction can therefore be seen as a threat to their artistic integrity.

However, slash fiction must fulfill a vital role in fandom, otherwise there wouldn't be so much of it written across the different fandoms, nor would the actors and the fans clash so seriously over it.

I have been reading a lot of slash fiction recently because I am hoping to attend the Redemption 2011 convention in Coventry next February and am seriously considering taking part on the slash fiction panel.

Because Blake's Seven is my favourite sci-fi fan show, I feel I am best equipped to comment on the slash fiction associated with it.

Here are my basic conclusions so far:  

1.) There don’t seem to be any physical descriptions of what the people who enjoy sex with the canon characters actually see/hear/taste/smell of that character’s body. 

For example, in Ask Tell Pursue, the Travis in question is specifically stated by the author to be the Stephen Greif version of the character.  Stephen Greif and Brian Croucher both were and still are very physically striking men – but distinctly different in appearance. 

Why was the Greif version chosen for this story?  No indication is given. 

Very little attempt is made at describing what Travis 1’s body looks like, whether clothed or unclothed (apart from stock generic descriptions like ‘leanly muscled’.)  So you get almost no indication of what it is like as a physical sexual experience for Avon to make love to this specific man.

(Incidentally, if you want an example of a key physical detail that a lover of either gender would probably notice in Travis 1’s appearance – and that doesn’t make Stephen Greif want to dive for cover with sheer, utter embarrassment – he has surprisingly long, languorous eyelashes on his remaining eye.)

I would presume the almost complete lack of physical descriptions of the characters is due to the slash stories being written specifically for people who are already great fans of this particular series.  Therefore, they are assumed to be pretty conversant with all the canon characters.  Any additional or subsequent descriptions are considered not to be needed, because this would suggest the reader remains ignorant of the most basic details known to all the other fans and thus does not count as a properly paid up admirer of the series at all. 

Readers who still require descriptive details after this would probably be considered ignorant newbies or interloping lurkers, not proper fans.

2.)  Characters are often portrayed in their most basic, archetypal version – more like a mythical figure than a three-dimensional human being.

This would tend to suggest very strongly that a major need of the readers is to turn the canon characters into figures analogous with gods and goddesses, Jungian archetypes or key characters from the great myths and legends of the world’s many cultures. 

Therefore, Avon = Superman/Superlover, Servalan = Evil Bitch Glamorous Stepmother Queen, Vila = the Trickster figure etc.

Any sign of frailty or imperfection in the canon characters means that they are obviously human beings rather than gods or archetypes. All signs of everyday reality will be ruthlessly stamped on.

By the way, this may be another reason why so little specific physical description of the individual characters and their sex experiences is given.  If a character in bed with Travis 1 notices the surprisingly long, languorous eyelashes on his remaining eye, for example, the obvious implication is that Travis may not be the icy-cold, evil, hard psychopath that most people take him for. 

You are forced to confront the fact that he is a real man, with depths and nuances to his personality that perhaps you never suspected before.  He has stopped being a mythical archetype – and we can’t have that sort of thing going on when we need our heroes and villains to get us through the night!

3.)  Characters never seem to worry about the sexual consequences and emotional fall-out that the rest of us stuck here in the real world do.

So far, I don’t think I’ve come across a single B7 slash fiction story in which Servalan, Jenna, Cally or Soolin end up conceiving an unexpected baby after sleeping with Avon.  Or Servalan has slept with both Avon and Tarrant during the same week, and now she is not sure who the father of her baby is, so she has to ask them both to take a DNA test.

Or Blake has to confront the fact that he may be gay or bisexual after Avon has seduced him and he has ended up having sex with another man for the first time.  Or Travis catches the clap off Blake during gay sex, so he has to take himself down the Space Force Officers’ GUM clinic for treatment.

Critics will probably argue that the primary purpose of the slash story is to get yourself off in the best way possible by seeing your favourite characters getting off in the best way possible.  Reality only gets in the way of pleasure.

(Though I would pay bloody good money to see the B7 soap opera in action!  Who’s the father of Servalan’s baby?  Tune in next week for the shocking surprise twist finale … Avon’s determined not to pay any maintenance, whatever happens.  If he needs to, he’s quite prepared to stitch Tarrant up.) 

4.)  No-one ever has rubbish sex in any of these slash stories.

Although I must admit to finding Office Politics highly amusing and effective as a story, the sexual encounter between Servalan and Travis remains a stylised skirmish, rather than anything approaching a realistic intimate relationship.

Why doesn’t Travis refuse Servalan’s overtures?  He might well not fancy her at all in real life.  He might consider an affair with his boss a guaranteed form of professional suicide (quite apart from what he is already managing to arrange all on his own …).  Or he might consider the time, the place or both highly inappropriate.

Even if he does still decide to go ahead, he could end up suffering erectile failure, due to nerves – or exhaustion from all his hard work chasing Blake (fnerr, fnerr etc).

Perhaps Servalan discovers he is not as well equipped as she had hoped in the trouser department and decides not to bother after all.  Or maybe she plots the big seduction in great detail – then has to bail out at the last minute because it's the wrong time of the month.

Why can’t Travis just be crap in bed?  Or Servalan?

Even with the best will in the world, they may just not be in the right frame of mind to experience an orgasm that day.

(Please see point 3 for the expected critical reposte to this issue too.)

5.)  Sexual encounters are used as a symbolic means of establishing and exerting dominance and control over another character.

Hence Travis is symbolically ‘defeated’ and ‘punished’ through gay sex with Blake or Avon, as in One Afternoon.

[Though if Travis suffers from sensitive skin as claimed in this story, I think it unlikely that the cream he has been prescribed to combat this has been laced with a spicy scent.  He might also be allergic to strong perfumes, particularly on his raw, inflamed skin.  Just a minor observation, but there we go.]. 

Servalan has also done the same in this delightful little tale because it seemed the ‘ideal’ way of conditioning him to total unquestioning obedience of her (hee, hee, doesn’t seem to have worked very well, does it?). 

6.)  Sexual encounters are used as a symbolic means of a character being forced to confront their more tender, vulnerable side.

Practically EVERY Blake and Avon slash going falls under this rubric.

Avon sleeps with Servalan not only to ‘defeat’ and ‘punish’ her for her evil – but also to ‘prove’ to her that she is ‘only’ a woman.

An orgasm is regarded as the classic signal of defeat/surrender.

I must confess that I am NOT at ALL keen on either of these two tropes, as I consider them both terribly sexist and homophobic.

7.)  ‘Humiliating’ sexual encounters are used as a symbolic means of demonstrating that a so-called ‘evil’ character is a dishonest hypocrite.

Hence all the innumerable tales in which Travis is gay or bisexual, but does not face up to this vital fact about himself until Blake or Avon buggers him into the most mind-bendingly ecstatic orgasms, despite himself.

In these stories, Travis always seems to slope around shagging the trade on the quiet, trying to persuade himself that he is either just engaging in a bit of men who have sex with other men in order to get himself through the dark night of the soul - or he's so pissed-up on booze that he is no longer responsible for his own decisions and actions.

You never seem to get a story in which Travis is out – and proud.  But if he can take an odd sort of pride in his facial disfigurement, why not his sexual orientation too?

While we’re still on the subject, incidentally, I have not yet come across a narrative in which Blake is the one who constantly cruises for the most lurid forms of gay sex wherever and whenever he can find it.  Why not?  Is the great revolutionary too fine and noble for that sort of thing?