Tour the galaxy on $5 a day

Press, 8 May 1980, Page 19

Tour the galaxy on $5 a day

Review

John Collins

Waste not, want not, is clearly the way of the third century of the second galaxy. Blake skilfully rotates his spaceship, four food mixers driving a vegetable strainer, before the prostrate cameraman, and “Blake’s Seven” (TV2), television’s first no-budget space series, blasts off through an infinity of dots of silver paint to a black curtain where their arch-foe, the Supreme Commander, rotates bustily and evilly in her own craft, a silverpainted, well-patched tractor tyre. Like, the props, the plot is itself recycled. Blake’s improbable adventures, wobbling cheaply from potato planet to egg-box star city, are reconditioned variations on “Flash Gordon tnd the Clay Men.”' Only Ming, galactic pervert, whose plywood death craft always seemed in danger of vibrating off its control wires, is missing. The third century of the second galaxy turns out to be the 19505. Servelan. Supreme Commander, of the Terran Federation, must have won first turn at the dressing-up box for the series. Her plastic ballgown is almost right for pacing archly among the airbeds that seem to form her control panel.' She didn’t have much of a' say this week, just the odd scene or two, far from what action there was, acting contemptuously towards her assistant, Travers. Travers doesn’t look the

type to be interested in a bit of banter with ladies in tight plastic gowns. He himself is clearly into leather. a tendency evinced by his choosing from the dressing-up box a pair of leather trousers even though they are far too small for him, and by his extraordinary habit, in the third century of the second galaxy, of wearing over his left eye what appears to be a patentleather cricket box. This must be some impediment to him in his task of piloting the tractor tyre through space using the complex bank of desk calculators, toasters, and alarm clocks at his command. The Supreme Commander, whose looks alone must go a long way towards binding the Federation, is certainly not obsessed with hounding down Blake just to get the name of his tailor out of him. Blake and most of his men battla adversity in ski jackets held in position by handlebar tape., One, living testimony to the 8.8.C.’s financial crisis, soars through space dressed as Friar Tuck. He isn’t even armed with the regulation weapon, a

Christmas decoration that glows dimly in the general direction of the target. He hasn’t even got a repainted crash helmet for going out the air-lock in, “Blake’s Seven” has a tight cash-flow situation in, er, real terms, as Hon.Derek Quigley might put it. Hon. Derek Quigley, so identified by a bold subtitle is according to “Eye Witness” (TV2), a Minster determined to cut back Gumment spending. <• He was interviewed by Neil Roberts with the persistence one might expect from an interviewer trying to determine on the public’s behalf how sacking people from Gumment departments is supposed to reduce unemployment and why it is a good idea to get these people into private industry to produce more stuff when the same man who wants this done attributes much of our present penury to our inability to hock off even the stuff we turn out now, Neil was calmly insistent, and Hon. was dapperly explanatory, as one might have expected from his profession, which we were told was lor. Neil, like many television interviewers, seemed preoccupied with getting Hon, to admit- he wants the Prime Minister to go; and Hon., a credit to the Gumment, managed to get by on repeating snippets of his speeches until time ran out. This head-to-head stuff never really goes anywhere; but it’s cheap. Blake would approve.