Sci-fi fans can celebrate a victory today after the BBC announced that it is to screen a big-budget drama series with echoes of Blake’s 7.

The original series about a group of galactic outlaws battling the evil Federation, which was first shown in 1978, remains one of British television’s most enduring cult programmes. Fan conventions recall the wobbly sets and malfunctioning weapons as much as the ambitious attempt to create a British Star Wars for the small screen.

After resisting calls for more than 25 years to revive the show, the success of Doctor Who has inspired the BBC to update the Blake’s 7 concept in the search for a new science-fiction hit. Outcasts, a drama from Kudos Film and Television, the company behind Life On Mars and Spooks, is about to go into production for BBC One.

The series is being made in co-operation with BBC Wales, which revived Doctor Who and created a popular spin-off, Torchwood, at its Cardiff base.

Set in a future century with the prospects for Earth looking increasingly precarious, Outcasts follows the race to find an alternative home in the Universe. In return for their liberty, a group of social misfits and criminals become the pioneers of a large new settlement on a near planet.

The criminals range from a brilliant deviant to the petty thief. They are the “outcasts”, fascinating but ultimately dispensable, who must build the conditions for a new life. The scenario has similarities to Blake’s 7, in which Blake, a political dissident, escapes deportation to a remote planet by forming a gang of reluctant rebels, who include a smuggler and a thief.

The starting point for Outcasts was the assertion by Professor Stephen Hawking that, “I don’t think the human race will survive the next thousand years unless we spread into space. There are too many accidents that can befall life on a single planet.”

Where sci-fi once meant laser battles between Velcro-suited heroes and villains, Outcasts reflects the new breed of American space series that explore politics and moral dilemmas.

It is influenced by Battlestar Galactica, a spin-off from the 1978 feature film, which has become a metaphorical critique of American foreign policy.

According to the BBC, Outcasts promises a “tense and fast-paced series about cooperation and conflict, idealism and power, sexual competition and love.

Most of all it is about our life’s big imperatives — cheating death, seeking suitable mates and surviving as a species”.

Jane Tranter, Controller of BBC Fiction, said: “Following the unique success of time travel in Life On Mars, I’m naturally extremely excited about the dynamic duo of Kudos and Ben Richards [the writer of Spooks] joining forces to create a further dimension in BBC drama.”

Boldly going on and on

— Terry Nation’s Blake’s 7 survived for four series from 1978 until 1981 despite the premature departure of Gareth Thomas, who played Blake. His rebels were left in the hands of scheming Avon (Paul Darrow). It was revived recently as a series of web audio short stories

— The Quatermass Experiment, Nigel Kneale’s story in 1953 of an alien presence invading Earth, terrified millions of viewers. It prompted three sequels and a BBC Four remake

— The Time Lord First materialised in November 1963. The Doctor Who series ran until suspension in 1989. David Tennant, the tenth incarnation, is about to face his toughest challenge against John Simm’s mysterious Mr Saxon

— Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek crew first boarded the Starship Enterprise in 1966. Ten films and four spin-off series later, the original’s plea for interspecies harmony lives on

Source: Times database

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