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Originally posted by Pex the Unalive:
Tom Baker lives in France now, from what I understand, and tends to pop up from time to time in various things around the UK being progressively weirder than he was on the show.

Originally posted by rtvu2:
Do you know anything about Blake's 7? I remember seeing that too and was alaways kinda confused about what the concept of that show was. I remember watching an eposide wiht the crew and then a whole different crew in another.

On January 2, 1978 a Cult was born…

An attempt to mount a serious space opera, Blake’s 7 was British television SF at its best and was arguably every bit as great an influence on the genre as the original Star Trek series.

It heralded the beginning of a new creed of television SF, but unfortunately for British television it also represented the last of a dying breed.

Conceived by Terry Nation, creator of Survivors and other successful genre shows as The Dirty Dozen in space, over its four season run (1978-1981) more than ten million viewers tuned in each week to watch Blake and his rebel band of misfits take on the Federation. Even now the show commands a substantial number of devoted fans around the world.

Premiered in the wake of Star Wars, elaborate SFX played second billing to imaginative stories and ‘real’ characters, with some self-deprecating British humour thrown in for good measure. Blake’s 7 greatest strength and enduring popularity owed much to the fact that its heroes were fallible, often morally ambiguous and could be killed.

Twenty-five years on television SF is still mapping the paths first explored by Terry Nation’s creation. At a time when SF shows often discard good storytelling for overblown visual effects the time is ripe for reviving a show that represents the best traditions of the genre.

This new mini-series adventure Legacy takes up the story thirty years on from when Blake, Avon and his fellow compatriots were seemingly killed in a cliffhanger finale, ambushed by the Federation.

With new recruits to Avon’s band of rebels, the adventure is only just beginning…

Original Series Premise

Paul Darrow, best known for his role as the enigmatic Avon, explores the inspiration behind Terry Nation’s original series and the reason for its enduring popularity.

The basic premise of Blake’s 7 circa 1977 was ‘inspired’ by such films as The Magnificent Seven and The Dirty Dozen, themselves variations on ancient themes of adventure, Seven Against Rhodes and The Lays of Ancient Rome. Indeed, even recent history serves to illustrate the excitement of a small band of ‘heroes’ taking on the might of a dictatorship. Examples are ‘The Alamo’, ‘Rorke’s Drift’ and even the ‘Cuban Revolution’ - which began with only twelve men.

Roj Blake (our lead protagonist) was conceptualized as a wronged hero. A man of honour obliged to fight the evil and corruption of his environment. But of course his opponents, the Federation Dictators, were ultimately unbeatable. Thus, there is a kind of melancholy air to Blake’s storyline.

One man, or even those that Blake was able to recruit in support of his cause, could not defeat the Federation, a kind of Nazi Germany. Thus Blake became a ‘Lawrence of Arabia in Space’ trying to bring together disparate dissident elements to oppose the Federation and stand some kind of a chance of success. In the end, Lawrence’s success was short lived, as is illustrated by the continuing struggles in the Middle East today. Blake too would inevitably fail – but it was the personal nature of his victories however small that acted as a draw for the audience.

Blake, in television audience terms, was a hero of his time. But the late 1970’s early 1980’s proved to be a time of change and Terry Nation was aware of this. Audiences were beginning to demand a degree of realism, a gritty edginess to their drama. Low budget effects and studio built scenery were tolerated with affection, just so long as the characters were portrayed in the style the audience was growing to expect and require.

So it was that Terry, whilst describing the Blake character as a sound, decent man of honourable intention, decided to leaven his series with a group of recognisable misfits. Criminal rejects, instantly recognisable and secretly admired by the increasingly sophisticated audience.

Whilst accepting that the eponymous hero must always behave heroically, the others were to be allowed carte blanche. Terry knew that, while Blake may eventually overthrow the Federation or at least contribute to its demise and possibly survive to reap the spoils, others might not be quite so pure of heart. The clean Blake would need someone to fight dirty on his behalf. And so Terry created Kerr Avon.

Recruiting Avon was like Cock Robin doing a deal with the Sparrow to fight the Crows - a clever juxtaposition of character that gave the audience two concerns. Would Blake and the others survive to fight another day (in the next episode)? Would Avon betray them? The audience was constantly aware that the Sparrow finally killed Cock Robin and in Blake’s 7 they were not disappointed. But, and again this is how Terry broke a kind of mould, sympathy was with the Sparrow/Avon.

Of course, it was necessary to introduce some ‘glamour’, and Jenna was a sort of Lara Croft. Then there was the ‘loveable rogue’, Vila; the silent, not too bright, ‘man mountain’, Gan; the unpredictable, but attractive ‘alien’, Cally; a super computer to please the science oriented viewers, Orac; and a couple of evil, politically corrupt, ‘baddies’, Servalan and Travis.

But, as the series progressed in sophistication, in line with its audience, these apparent stereotypes revealed certain subtleties and each character in his/her own way became more recognisable, more believable as human beings in an inhuman environment. Classic Hitchcockian technique… put ordinary people in an extraordinary situation.

This, despite limited funds that did not invite comparison with the production values of Star Trek, was key to its original success and enduring popularity. Add to this an innate understanding of film noir technique and the instinctive grasp of the fact that the audience’s heroes are not necessarily ‘the good guys’ and Terry amply compensated for the production shortfalls.

In the end, Blake’s 7’s ‘hero’, was no such thing. He was a flawed, self-serving, cynical realist, Avon. The audience liked him as they admired JR in Dallas. They didn’t ‘believe’ any more (remember this was the money grabbing eighties) that there was such a thing as a genuine, all round, ‘good guy’. They were right and Terry Nation knew it.

In the two decades since the broadcast of the four series of Blake’s 7, Avon has been consistently voted as favourite hero and villain in numerous polls worldwide and the series itself recently topped the bfi poll as the favourite British TV programme of all time.

So, in brief, Terry Nation had taken the ‘heroic’, concept of an adventure story and, turned it on its head. He’d set his story in ‘Space’, the new Wild West and peopled it with gangsters.

It was inevitable then, that the eponymous hero, a hero who appealed to those who longed for simple truths and tidy resolutions, had to go and go he did. If TV audiences had learned nothing else, it was that simple truth is unattainable and there are few happy endings. Instead of riding off into the sunset, Blake was brutally gunned down by… guess who? The rest of his Seven were similarly and brutally dispatched. The last man standing was the last man that adventure story mythology would have allowed. But he was the one the audience expected to survive and they cheered him on.

It is no exaggeration to state that, with the possible exception of Soames in The Forsyte Saga, Terry Nation created a series that promoted a character that the audience loved to hate, or hated to love. No previous, popular TV series had promoted a sociopath as its hero. Of course, in TV series today it is almost de rigueur.

It never pays to underestimate an audience. You can fool them for only some of the time. Terry Nation, in an apparently simple, ordinary, adventure romp, showed that he was ahead of them and they eagerly followed.

Originally posted by Sanity or Madness?:

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Originally posted by Pex the Unalive:
[b]Tom Baker lives in France now, from what I understand, and tends to pop up from time to time in various things around the UK being progressively weirder than he was on the show.

The only things I recall him appearing in in recent years are Randall & Hopkirk (Deceased) (the Reeves/Mortimer version, playing Wyvern, Marty's ghostly teacher) and, worryingly, Challenge TV's new Fort Boyard, where he did the Captain (weird guy in a tower asking riddles).[/b]

Thomas Stewart Baker (born January 20, 1934) is a British actor, mainly associated with the role of the Doctor in Doctor Who, whom he played for seven years.

Baker was born in Liverpool, to a poor Roman Catholic family, and left school to become a novice monk. He remained in the monastic life for six years, but left and went into the Merchant Navy, at the same time taking up acting, at first as a hobby. In 1971, he got his first big break with the role of Rasputin in the film Nicholas and Alexandra.

In 1974, Baker took on the role of the Doctor from Jon Pertwee, and quickly made it his own. His eccentric style of dress, particularly with his trademark long scarf, and speech made him an immediately recognisable figure, and the viewing public quickly forgot his predecessors. He remained in the role for longer than any of them, and left the show in 1981. His decision to move on was regretted by many of the programme's fans, and his incarnation is generally regarded as the most popular of the Doctors (See List of Doctor Who serials).

Prior to leaving Doctor Who, he had married, as his second wife, his co-star Lalla Ward, but they divorced after 16 months.

Baker's subsequent career was relatively unremarkable. He played character parts on television and radio (including an Elizabethan sea captain in Blackadder and Puddleglum in the BBC's production of The Chronicles of Narnia), but became mostly known for doing advertising voiceovers. In the late 1990s he had a recurring role in the revival of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased). His distinctive voice has become a gift for impressionists, and he is regularly impersonated in the popular comedy series Dead Ringers. He had a part in the 2001 BBC Radio 4 version of The Thirty-Nine Steps as Sir Walter Bullivant. He also narrated the comedic BBC radio series Lionel Nimrod's Inexplicable World and later Little Britain and continues to narrate the television series of the same name.

Baker had a brief foray into the world of music, providing the monologue to the track Witness to a Murder (Part Two) on the album Six by Mansun.

Also a talented writer, Baker created a short fairytale-style novel titled The Boy Who Kicked Pigs (ISBN 057119771X), which has been described as "A Grotesque Masterpiece". He has also written an autobiography, entitled Who on Earth is Tom Baker (ISBN 000638854X ).

In 1987, he married Sue Jerrard, who had been an assistant editor on Doctor Who. They moved to a converted school in Maidstone, Kent where they kept lots of cats before emigrating to France in 2002.

Originally posted by Lightning Lad:
So far the CBC in Canada has the exclusive North American preview scheduled for April 5.