The War That Almost Broke a Classic Fandom

January 22, 2025 9:11 PM

The War That Almost Broke a Classic Fandom. Blake’s 7 fans and actors mixed regularly at cons and on the pages of zines—until an anonymous letter changed everything.
posted by chariot pulled by cassowaries (22 comments total)

As someone who's never heard of this property before, it sounds like poor Blake has only 7 fans.
posted by I-Write-Essays at 9:17 PM on January 22 [9 favorites]

I follow the Ao3 RSS feed for B7 and I'm here to tell you, the slashers unsurprisingly won that war, at least on Ao3. It's not all Blake/Avon or Avon/Vila, but a lot of it is.

I'm old enough to have seen the later seasons of B7 when they came out in the UK, but too young and isolated to have been in the fandom. So this was all news to me, and pretty sad.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 10:33 PM on January 22 [1 favorite]

Blake's 7 was incredible. Dark, nihilistic, ahead of its time. It's like the anti-Star Trek.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 10:45 PM on January 22 [2 favorites]

From Monday's Guardian.
posted by Paul Slade at 11:13 PM on January 22 [3 favorites]

This whole story is wild, but my favorite part is the picture of "A Guide to Blake’s 7 Erotica, a 100-page-plus index of fanworks", which is fantastically emblazoned with "First Edition".
posted by Literaryhero at 11:36 PM on January 22 [8 favorites]

BBC World Service broadcast Blake's 7 reruns in the early 90's so I was familiar with the show when I went to a Babylon 5 convention and saw Jacqueline Pearce at a signing table. She was beyond nice to those few of us who recognised her.
posted by Molesome at 1:55 AM on January 23 [2 favorites]

Dark, nihilistic

And kind of camp (in the best possible way)?
posted by Phanx at 3:21 AM on January 23 [1 favorite]

Amazon offered two-month subscriptions to Britbox for next to nothing around Black Friday, and I found myself plunged into Blake's 7 for a month and a half; I just finished watching it this past weekend. I'd never seen any of it before, but I knew of it vaguely from Doctor Who adjacent media. The effects are often not that great, the pacing is sometimes slow, the stories are occasionally jargon-heavy and difficult to follow, the writing for the women is often (as Sally Knyvette alludes to in the article Paul Slade links to) weak and seemingly an afterthought (although that does improve as the series goes on, probably in part because the creators realized it was costing them players), but...it's great. The vibe is wonderful, and the cast is just so great.

It's easy for me to imagine the fans' heartbreak when they felt Paul Darrow was turning against them, because I can't imagine how cool it would feel to hang out with Paul Darrow in the first place. I think if you started to feel like people this charismatic were your friends, it would be very upsetting to realize that perhaps that feeling wasn't shared. For the kinds of people who were very serious science fiction fans in the '80s and '90s, people who had probably been through the wringer socially much of their lives, I think this would be especially upsetting.

The intersection between fandom and friendship is quite a subject, and it's clear to me this writer knows their history. (I don't know that history, but it seems like they do.) I would be interested to read more from them on this subject. It seems sadly relevant today; I'm thinking here of the way Neil Gaiman (who, God help us all, wrote an introduction to a Blake's 7 book, because of course he did) exploited his own fame to take advantage of people, to say nothing of the way that much larger music stars have done the same.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 5:35 AM on January 23 [4 favorites]

I should add, I'm definitely not comparing this situation to the malevolence of those modern actors, but I am saying that the kind of parasocial relationships that first came into being in the early days of fandom were what would ultimately facilitate bad actors taking serious advantage of admirers.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 6:08 AM on January 23 [2 favorites]

And kind of camp (in the best possible way)?

Avon and Servelan are arch to a degree that Eero Saarinen could only dream about.
posted by Horace Rumpole at 6:30 AM on January 23 [10 favorites]

I tried to watch Blake's 7 back in the 90's. The word "heroes" is doing a lot of heavy lifting describing this show. In any other world, they'd have shot each other in the first 10 minutes.
posted by JustSayNoDawg at 6:51 AM on January 23 [3 favorites]

Man, this takes me back. I was peripherally involved in SF fandom in Chicago in the early 80s. I knew some people who were more involved, including a lesbian couple who made stuffed-animal dragons and sold them at cons under the name Dragons in Stained Glass. It probably would have been in the winter of '83/'84 that they came into possession of some taped Blake's 7 episodes and held a viewing party with the goal of bootstrapping a Blake's 7 fandom in the area. The quality of the tapes was terrible—someone explained to me that it was because they were recordings of PAL broadcasts, which have more scan lines than the NTSC TV we were watching them on.

Anyhow, I went off to college not long after that, and lost contact with those folks. But I'd be surprised if they weren't connected to some of the people in this article.
posted by adamrice at 6:52 AM on January 23 [3 favorites]

Speaking of Chicago, one of the things that I've read about is how Star Trek got professional conventions; the first one (I think) was in Chicago in 1975, and was supposedly quite successful (although that seems to have been a lie), and which led to the same people doing a pro con (ha) in New York the next year which became a legendary fiasco.
posted by Halloween Jack at 7:04 AM on January 23 [3 favorites]

The intersection between fandom and friendship is quite a subject, and it's clear to me this writer knows their history. (I don't know that history, but it seems like they do.) I would be interested to read more from them on this subject. It seems sadly relevant today; I'm thinking here of the way Neil Gaiman (who, God help us all, wrote an introduction to a Blake's 7 book, because of course he did) exploited his own fame to take advantage of people, to say nothing of the way that much larger music stars have done the same.

The analogues go further than that. This line struck me:

Fans often self-identify with their affinity object, and in many ways, an attack on fandom becomes an attack on the self. To question a fan’s loyalty is to question the fan’s personhood.

This took a moment to process, but is obviously true. And it's something that clearly can be leveraged politically (indeed, that's what this story is all about), and I think it clearly has been leveraged politically by our current president to great effect.
posted by billjings at 12:53 PM on January 23 [4 favorites]

When Alan Moore and Tim Perkins began their project about the spirituality of a certain English poet, painter and mystic, they joked it should be called "Blake's Heaven".

[In the end they went for "Angel Passage"instead.]
posted by Paul Slade at 3:29 PM on January 23 [2 favorites]

Thanks for your posts about Blake's 7, CPBC. As a Dr. Who fan I had assumed Blake's 7 was something like "The Power of Kroll" without the fun doctor bits (not even a tin dog!), but a couple of years ago a metafilter post convinced me to give it a try, and now I'm definitely a fan.
posted by gamera at 3:58 PM on January 23 [1 favorite]

This was a great article, thanks for posting! I love Blake’s 7; I first saw it on my PBS station (in NY) in the 80s. They aired it either right before or right after Doctor Who. My dad is an OG Star Trek fan from the 60s so any and all sci-fi got an airing on our TV. At the time, I don’t think I quite knew what to make of B7, as it is indeed the anti-Trek, but I do remember being oddly fascinated by Servalan.

The article makes me wonder if there was more going on behind the scenes between Darrow, his wife, and those 3 fans, for them to have had this very public and very acrimonious split. That said, there is an inherent and probably unresolvable tension between fandom and capitalism, and the Slash Wars are the result of that.
posted by DiscourseMarker at 7:00 PM on January 23

Cruise of the Gods is an excellent, lesser-known Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan movie about an ocean cruise for fans of a fictional sci-fi show not unlike B7. Fandom's not really the focus, but it does show how some fan-objects lean into the attention and others don't.
posted by GeorgeBickham at 12:38 AM on January 24 [2 favorites]

Reading this article, I'm once again grateful that I am in a profession where the renumeration process is very well defined and straightforward. There's so much expected of actors.
posted by quillbreaker at 8:27 AM on January 24

I do remember being oddly fascinated by Servalan.

Servalan was an early fashion inspiration of mine. Her monochrome outfits, the super-short hair: she was making villainy look not just good, but fantastic.
posted by gentlyepigrams at 8:27 AM on January 24 [3 favorites]

Coming slightly late to this, but a friend who was very active in B7 fandom and knew Paul Darrow commented about it. The issue that Darrow had, according to her, was not so much with slash per se as with 'Real Person Fanfic' (RPF) slash. It's one thing to see a fanzine with a story about Blake and Avon having sex in a cabin on the Liberator. It's quite another to see a story about Paul Darrow and Gareth Thomas having sex behind the set during a break in shooting, especially if you are Paul Darrow.
posted by Major Clanger at 9:17 AM on January 26 [2 favorites]

It's quite another to see a story about Paul Darrow and Gareth Thomas having sex behind the set during a break in shooting, especially if you are Paul Darrow.
Ew yeah...that is not cool. I can totally see how that would make him and his wife upset.
posted by DiscourseMarker at 12:52 PM on January 28 [1 favorite]