At the end of last week's edition of SF:UK, it was announced that this Saturday/Sunday's programme would feature Dan Dare, Flash Gordon et al. -- and Blake's 7. Doubtless it will be broadcast somewhere between 1:00 and 2:00 am as usual... the time-slot is criminal, bearing in mind the way the 'Guardian', for one, has been picking out the programme week after week as one of its three Saturday recommendations.
I'm not sure whether the prospect is to be looked forward to or not. The presenter is obviously a genuine SF enthusiast, even if he does occasionally resort to the usual gambit of making his subjects look silly, and the format so far has basically been a fairly conservative combination of talking heads and clips from the material under discussion, despite a tendency to occasional weird camera-work, presumably thought to be in keeping with the futuristic theme.
To date the programmes have ranged (in my opinion) from insightful -- H.G.Wells, Frankenstein (what I saw of it -- that was the day the cloaks changed), Clockwork Orange, The Prisoner -- to unbelievably laboured attempts to present an argument using material that blatantly failed to back up the hypothesis -- Thunderbirds as sex symbol, Dr Who as acid dream. The Judge Dredd/2000 AD edition sounded plausible, but I don't know enough about the subject to judge whether the punk analogy was fair or not.
However, going by the Boys' Own company in which it is to find itself, I would guess that the forthcoming programme means to concentrate on the 'Robin Hood' aspect of Blake's 7 -- rescues, tangled loyalties, and heroics between the stars. Which sounds promising, to me at least; character junkies may have other views!
(It could be worse: watching the presenter try to draw parallels between Thunderbirds and the 'auto-erotic' Crash was so dire you just had to laugh. By the time they got to 'Sean Connery in a red nappy' we were literally doubled over gasping in hysterics.)