Charlie Brooker on "Blake's 7"

(From episode five of "How TV Ruined Your Life")

"A grit-toothed, we're-all-gonna-die space opera from Dalek creator Terry Nation. This was an epic tale of political exiles perpetually on the run from the evil Federation. It was a miserable existence. Space itself was a washed-out dystopia of brown and grey hexagons where the highlight of your day was finding a war memorial in a quarry... The crew were constantly being shot at and shaken around like despised stepkids each time the Liberator hit a cosmic pothole. It didn't even have a happy ending. The entire cast were gunned down in a final episode so devoid of hope it seemed to have been filmed on a camera made of frozen widows' tears. The dying was probably a sweet relief, really, since during their brief lives they'd been continually tortured by the technology that was supposedly assisting them. The chief source of their torment was Orac, a whirring, winking, smart-arse in a box who loved himself almost but not quite as much as an iPhone, and who treated his human companions with the haughty condescension of a professor of Latin snorting at an especially stupid peg."