But there’s nothing there worth stealing! Trying to be 12 again and watching “City at the Edge of the World”. Blake’s 7. Season 3. Episode 6.

There are lots of reasons for wanting to be 12 again these days.  Oh, I don’t want to be a 12 year old, a 12 year old in 2018.  I want to be a 12 year old in 1980.  At least, that’s what I want when I’m too tired and angry with the world to really think things through.  Because you forget the tedious, mundane and repetitive aspects of being 12.  You forget the petty persecutions of school life and the grating restrictions of parental home life  What you you remember are the golden moments, moments which shone all the more brightly because of the persecutions and oppressions.  You remember those moments and you want to go back and be frozen inside them, seeing them with fresh 12 year old eyes.   In fact, you want the logically impossible.  You want to enjoy the freshness of perception, the awe and wonderment you enjoyed as a child along with a mature adult appreciation of the relative value of such moments.

It’s a problem you share with William Wordsworth.

One of these moments I’d love to get back was seeing the Blake’s Seven episode “City at the Edge of the World” for the first time.  I saw it again last night and was reminded of what I’d originally felt and the extent to which I can’t expect to feel it again.

Like many early adolescents in the early 1980s I worried that I would never find love.  Feargal Sharkey played in my head for much of the decade (“A good heart these days is hard to find….”  “it never happens to me, it never happens to me – maybeitsadoorthatslockedandtheresnokey…”).  Television was full of people falling into one another’s arms and I couldn’t identify with any of them.

But I could identify with Vila.

Watching Blake’s Seven, many of us liked to think of ourselves as Avons.  We liked to imagine ourselves cutting a figure in a stylish black uniform, dealing out withering put downs to those who doubted our resolve and superior intellect. Yes, we liked to fantasise with Avon’s voice and I like to think I can still manage a passable Avon impression to this day.  But I for one knew that if I were ever to join this crew, I wouldn’t have been Avon.  I would have been Vila.  I would have been the one who tried to get out of going down to dangerous planets. I would have feigned illnesses.  I would have regularly succumbed to whatever galactic stimulant distracted me from the plethora of near death experiences that I got prodded into on a weekly basis.  Yes, when we (I) looked at Avon, we (I) saw who we (I) wanted to be.  When were looked as Vila, we (I) saw who we were (are).

In “City at the Edge of the World”, my least fave character Tarrant (loved the actor Steven Pacey, loved his performance, loved hating  the character) is at his worst – bullying Vila into doing a contract job on a mysterious planet.  The villain of the piece (if it isn’t Tarrant) is the deliciously over the top Bayban the Butcher as played by Colin Baker, a true psychopath’s psychopath.   Paul Darrow would, just a few years later, attempt to redress the imbalance of competitive campery with a suitably ludicrous cameo villain appearance in a Colin Baker Doctor Who adventure called Timelash.  But the plot is almost incidental.  The important thing is that Vila shows courage and intelligence and falls in love with someone called Kerril.

Kerril spends much of the first half of the episode calling Vila either “Killer” (as a joke) or “Little Man”.   Vila is often assumed to be small, but in fact Michael Keating is of average height.  Having everyone assume that you are negligible  is a very useful self-defense technique.  Then Kerril changes out of a military uniform and into a kind of hessian tunic and her personality changes completely.  Ho hum.  I suppose we’ve only got 49 minutes to tell this story.

They escape through the door  that Vila has been contracted to open (Vila being allowed to take some extended professional pride in his own specialism), and find that they’re part of a planned odyssey that has been millennia in the maker.  They emerge (having had sex – yes – Vila definitely had sex at some point) – into a pastoral wonderland.  They are doe-eyed hand-holding Adam and Eve for about 90 seconds, before Vila’s defining kleptomania kicks in and he starts thinking about grabbing stuff and trying to get home.

A whole population begins its exodus.  Kerril escapes with them as Vila “does the right thing”.  Vila will be cherished as a folk hero by a whole planet full of new colonists.  He has been enshrined in that status by the prophetic tones of Valentine Dyall himself.  Bayban then destroys himself and the city with a laser cannon.  Vila is left to grieve his lost love.

Oddly enough he is cheered by Orac, who tells him that he – Vila – is quite foolish enough to make any number of amorous mistakes in future.  Vila keeps going on about Kerril’s legs – even though she’s not wearing an especially skimpy or leg revealing garment.  But the main thing is that apparently we live in a universe where even Vila can love and be loved in return.  Vila is greatly cheered by this, and so was I.

Michael Keating’s finest hour shows him as a complex resourceful human being who would rather stay alive than be a bully or a hero.  Chris Boucher (a fine writer mentored by the great Robert Holmes and, together with Terry Nation, one of B7’s 2 most important story-tellers) creates a story for Vila that opens up a window to a version of the pastoral and which should melt the heart of anyone who isn’t made completely of stone.  Even Avon melts a bit.

So I watched the episode again and loved it again – partly for its own considerable sake and partly in gratitude for the sense of unique hope it gave me when I was twelve.  “City at the Edge of the World” told me that the universe is a very large place and that if someone like Vila can find love – then maybe so could I.

You can’t really put a price on that – can you?