Blake's 7

Last night was pretty quiet. I was watching a number of episodes of Blake's 7 from the DVD that I got on Wednesday. It was a really good show. It was a British science-fiction show that ran from about 1977 to 1981 and was like a kind of combination of Star Trek and Star Wars, but it was much darker and grittier than those two. Basically, it was set in the future and was about a group of disperate rebels and criminals who use this advanced alien spaceship to fight against a tyrannical federation. The show was often pretty bleak, and even the "good" characters barely tolerated each other and were usually very cynical and miserable. Especially the character Avon (played by Paul Darrow), who became the lead in the later seasons, who always gave the impression of being quite willing to kill anyone if it in any way suited his purposes. The show did suffer from spaceships that looked like they were made from a child's model kit and the fact that the scenes on alen worlds all looked like they were filmed in the same quarry, but it was very well written and it also had a very strong vein of dark humour.

Today I stayed in all day. It's freezing cold and there is snow and ice all over the place outside.