Stuck in Blake's Heaven

Stuck in Blake’s Heaven
A little nostalgia is good for you – but a 30 year obsession with a seventies TV programme means you need to move on

Take a cast of dysfunctional main characters, bind them together with some caustic, ironic dialogue and spangly costumes. Mix well into ever surprising combinations and season with moral ambiguity and an air of disillusionment and you have the wondrous Blake’s 7: one of the best television programmes on the British small screen in the late seventies, early eighties. Apparently, the series is being remade and will reappear on television in 2009.
As a confused 14-year-old, Blake’s 7 was the TV panacea that kept me sane with its scathing and rebellious, yet oddly comforting, presence. Even now listening to the theme tune again for the first time in decades makes my chest tighten with anticipation and excitement.
In 1978, stuck in stultifying rural Norfolk and just on the brink of discovering the nihilism of punk, Blake’s 7 was the perfect vehicle to vicariously offload my nascent cynicism and disillusionment. It was wonderfully contemptuous (with Avon’s sneer sometimes threatening Sid Vicious proportions), yet safe and comforting (rickety sets and sparkling cat suits were hardly scary – nor was watching it at home while eating cheese and salad cream sandwiches).
‘Everyone’s out to get you,’ Vila is told in the penultimate episode of the last series, by which time I now had unforgiving pink hair, an ear lobe triple self-pierced with a safety pin and Crass painted on the back of my leather jacket. ‘I always assume that wherever I go’, Vila replies.
The perfect dialogue for an anti-social disillusioned teenager growing up in Thatcher’s Britain. Quotes to inspire a slight rebel embarking on that fiendishly problematic process of establishing my identity – which when it came to fruition could now probably best be described as, er, caustic, morally ambiguous, disillusioned and with a love of spangly costumes. Perfect then. No wonder I loved Blake’s 7 so much.
But, and forgive me if the exact details of the sound recordist, supporting cast and sub-plots are a little hazy now. For all that was almost, er, 30 years ago. And I’m happy to admit that I have moved on since then. Indeed, I haven’t watched it since. Not once, until a friend kindly loaned me a rather shaky video copy of the last ever two episodes to jog my memory for the purposes of writing this piece.
It was nice to revisit it again but I haven’t actually thought about Blake’s 7 much in the past three decades. I can’t say it has played a big part in my life. Actually, I left it all behind for a progression of new, if admittedly less inspiring, tv favourites: Brookside (hmmm!); This Life; Newsnight Review; Seinfeld, The Sopranos, Jordan and Peter… It may not actually be better quality, or more worthy, but at least I have moved on.
But some people never move on. They stay stuck in a Blake’s 7 time warp, forever pondering the miniscule nuances of every episode, every character, every member of the production team.
So why is it that a few super fans, who loved it so much they just can’t leave it behind where some believe it should stay – back when the seventies melded into the eighties? Why do some fanatics still obsess about it, love it, watch and watch again old episodes, go to Blake’s 7 conventions and feel it was the pinnacle of British television history. And is it actually bad for you to think about Blake’s 7 so much? Well psychology just might have the answer…
Psychologists believe that if you carry a torch for Blake’s 7, you could be succumbing to what researchers have labelled – nostalgic consumer bonding. It might worry friends and family and others who are bored of your obsession, but apparently it’s not dangerous, it’s not catching and it might even be good for you – in moderation.
In the US, Professor Morris Holbrook an expert on marketing at Columbia University, in New York and his colleague Professor Robert Schindler, a business professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey, have researched just what it is that makes us fixate on a programme like Blake’s 7.
Their experiments reveal that some people appear to ‘imprint’ on popular products such as television programmes like Blake’s 7.
Mere exposure isn’t enough – so simply watching lots of times won’t do the trick. Rather you have to have some peculiar, and almost spiritual, deep emotional experience of bonding with the programme at the time. You have to associate it with something rather wonderful that you remember doing at the time, or some particularly strong feeling, such as watching Blake’s 7 while your parents praised you for being such a marvellous child, made you feel good and loved and wanted and fed you the most delicious cream cakes you had ever eaten in your life while you watched Blake and Avon roaming around the universe.
Or maybe you watched it while having your first sexual experience? Or more likely for most teenagers imagining your first sexual experience while your hormones surged
This potent cocktail of a favourite consumer product mixed with a good memory, in turn, leads to a powerful, enduring bond in your psyche that renders the programme with a special significance. It’s a done deal and you are inextricably and forever in love with Blake’s 7. . I don’t recall having such an epiphany while watching – which is probably why I haven’t thought about it since, even though I loved it at the time.
If you did, now, for eternity you are hooked on watching episodes of Blake’s 7 and endlessly discussing them for ever more. It’s like a drug – and you may even need to buy extravagantly priced memorabilia from the actual show to feed your addiction. The bond is so deep, you may never even escape. It’s a love thang for Blake and his team that can teleport you right back to the halcyon days of your first delicious experience of watching the original programmes. For Proust is was a bit of a buttery Madeleine cake, for you it’s watching Blake’s 7.
And such reminiscences may actually be good for you. Nostalgia is bitter sweet and we are urged to live in the moment, but apparent the occasional trip down memory lane can actually give your spirits a significant lift. A tiny trigger of Blake’s 7 has the power to unleash a flood of sunny memories that makes you more cheerful and can prove an antidote if you feel blue, according to research from psychologists at Chicago’s Loyola University.
"Reminiscence can motivate you," says Fred Bryant, researcher at Loyola University. More important, it can give you "a sense of being rooted, a sense of meaning and purpose—instead of being blown around by the whims of everyday life."
Researchers at the University of Southampton in the U.K. have also found nostalgia can make you feel happier. Studies by psychologist Tim Wildschut reveal that more nostalgic people report higher self-esteem, less depression and feel more positively about friendships and close relationships.
So nostalgia is good for you – but in small doses! Never any more than 20 minutes a day, according to the psychology researchers. Not in great dollops of all-day splurging, gooey, watching-past-episodes-every-day, having dirty dreams about Avon, obsessive-type of way. A little bit now and then – just to cheer you up on a gloomy day.
So yes, I have moved on, but I guess it won’t do me any harm to keep hold of my newly acquired video of Blake’s 7 if it’s that good for my self-esteem and mood. And while I’m at it, I just might log on to Amazon and order the whole boxed DVD set…but I’ve moved on. And I’ll only watch a bit every now and then, promise…