Last week I watched The Incredible Journey of Mary Bryant. There’s not much I can say about it as a historical drama as I’m not familiar with the true story that it’s supposed to be based on. In general terms there are some things which I thought it got right and which you don’t necessarily see so much in more traditional costume dramas. Oppression and inequality were shown working as a system which dominated everyone rather than being the fault of individuals. There were no pantomime villains. The governor, lieutenant and marines had varying degrees of power and privilege, but they weren’t really free and clearly wanted to be somewhere else. Women were shown making patriarchal bargains to survive in difficult circumstances. Everyone from the governor to Mary made perfectly rational decisions to do really horrible things. As Marx said, we don’t choose the circumstances in which we have to make our choices.

But what really struck me was how similar it was to 70s science fiction series Blakes 7 (like Dexys Midnight Runners it shouldn’t have an apostrophe – Wikipedia is wrong!). A disparate group of convicts is transported to a penal colony and escapes in a boat/spaceship. None of them is unambiguously good or bad. They don’t like or trust each other but necessity forces them to work together. The only thing they have in common is a need to be free from an oppressive empire. You probably get that in lots of stories, but there were some more specific things. The scene on the beach where Will gets shot was very, very similar to the final scene of Blakes 7. Cox says almost the same things that Vila says about being forced to join the convicts. Will even has Avon’s smile! And Mary deciding to leave Sam is not too different from Avon deciding to kill Dr Plaxton by turning the engine on before she can get clear – in both cases their ruthlessness saves everyone else and proves them to be capable leaders but not nice people. So I wonder if the makers of the Mary Bryant series were consciously or unconsciously influenced by Blakes 7. Obviously it can’t all be a Blakes 7 rip-off because it’s also based on history. Which leads me to wonder whether Terry Nation knew about and was influenced by the story of the real Mary Bryant when he came up with Blakes 7. That would be an interesting case of intertextual relationships: a science fiction series influenced by historical events which goes on to influence a historical drama based on the same history. Intertextuality can be complicated like that.