Kerr Avon, style icon

I was almost 14 when Blake's 7 first aired, and I'm eternally grateful that we were allowed to watch it. The thing was, Mum wanted to watch it, so it was fine. If she hadn't, we would not have been, because it started during tea time in my parents' house and there was a very strict rule that the television didn't go on at all during meals. Ever. Because it "spoilt the meal". Except, of course, when it was something that an adult wanted to watch; because the moment an adult wanted to watch something, it immediately developed the magical quality of not spoiling meals. Adults could do lots of magical things like that. I've somehow never developed the knack.

But, anyway, we all liked B7 enormously, except my dad, who just hated anything that was fantasy or SF on principle (he would even deliberately not laugh at a joke, no matter how funny it was, if he knew that Terry Pratchett had written it; he was fine if you omitted to mention that fact to him). And I particularly liked the characterisation. It wasn't all good, to be sure; but when it was good, it was truly outstanding. And among many superb characters, by far the finest was Kerr Avon, played by the very underrated Paul Darrow. (I say underrated because he got very typecast as a result, but in fact he was a far more versatile actor than most people ever realised.)

Avon was a highly complex character; I don't think it's an exaggeration to describe him as a Shakespearean tragic anti-hero. Normally I didn't have much patience with on-screen jerks (I was soon to develop a massive dislike of Clint Eastwood because he never seemed to play anything else, though much later I found that he was a perfectly decent sort of person and an extremely good director), but Avon was definitely not just a jerk. For a start, he wasn't as bad as he liked people to believe he was; if you could get a promise out of him, for instance, he'd keep it, and he was actually pretty loyal to the rest of the crew, even if he did keep saying it was merely out of self-interest. I mean, don't get me wrong, he wasn't a nice character. You would not have wanted to go and have a quiet coffee with him. There'd have been far too much risk that he might find some pressing reason to shoot the waiter. But he did have his own moral code, even if it didn't always match up too well with other people's, and he also got all the best lines, which was fun (Paul always delivered them brilliantly). And, besides, he was (like the rest of the crew) fairly broken from having grown up in a dystopian system, and I always had more sympathy for people like that.

But, initially, they put him in costumes like this:

We had a black and white television, so it didn't look quite so bad as it does here, but it still didn't rock any socks. And then there was the rather strange leather thing, which I think was from the second series; I always thought it was black, but years later I saw a colour photo, and it was red, and I thought "oh, great Scott, he looks like a lobster". I couldn't find a photo that was unambiguously that costume, since I should think all the other fans hated it as much as I did, but this may be it:

But the costumes did gradually improve, both as Paul got into the swing of the character and as the budget was increased somewhat due to the programme's popularity. The first one I really and truly liked was that silver batwing creation in the feature photo. While silver isn't my colour (I will go for gold every time), I'd never really previously considered the sheer effectiveness of metallics on black; and the other thing was that it was actually very non-gendered. Avon, as a character, was pretty macho (Paul's major influences were along the lines of Raymond Chandler and the aforesaid Clint Eastwood), so that wasn't immediately apparent until I caught myself thinking "I'd wear that... in gold, though," and realised that I would not appear to be in drag if I did. (I haven't got round to making one yet, but I probably will one day!)

Aha. Diagonal lines. This outfit was really simple, but it was another one I liked a lot; it was that collar/yoke thing. Very easy to do, unusual, and oozing style. And, again, it wasn't noticeably gendered.

Avon always wore a lot of black, but in the fourth series in particular he had quite a few outfits which set it off with white and/or silver, and the one shown in the photo immediately above was probably the one most fans remember best. So, when I decided I was going to cosplay him, that was the one I chose; it'd have been much quicker to make the silver batwing, but this one would be a lot more fun to make. I went to John Lewis and bought myself a lot of plain black fabric, along with some black leatherette and a whole lot of studs; I couldn't get any white leatherette, but I didn't need to. I had, after all, white acrylic paint. So I just painted the white parts of the costume, and that was fine. I had my hair done, fourth-series Avon style (I did actually like his hair in that series; I never was keen on the fringe, though it did improve after the first series), and then went to a B7 con in Bedford, where I went and grinned at Paul. He knew I was going to do it, but he was still taken aback, because we did have surprisingly similar facial bone structure. A little bit of theatrical make-up just to make my cheekbones look a bit more pronounced, and I looked quite a lot like him. He was well used to people cosplaying Avon, of course, but I never saw him look quite so surprised before or after that. (Of course, he did also know what I usually looked like!)

I no longer have that costume, but not for the usual reason. I had this actor friend... well, she wasn't much of an actor really, but she did get to do bit parts now and again, and she looked good in costume, which is always a plus. And she absolutely gushed over this costume, and I said, well, I didn't see I was ever going to wear it again, so she could have it if she wanted. I don't know if she still has it; she went a little off the rails and we lost touch. But I'd like to think it's still out there somewhere. It took quite a lot of work.

Anyway... Avon is quite possibly solely responsible for the fact that my base colour is almost always black, and has been for most of my adult life; black wasn't a colour you wore in my parents' house, unless, of course, you were going to a funeral, but he very much opened my eyes to what you could do with it. He probably also had a hand in kindling my general love of metallics, and I dare say he had a few other more subtle stylistic influences that you could pick out if you watched me for long enough. And when I say "Avon did this", that's shorthand, because Avon's style came from a lot of people - very largely Paul himself, who got more and more of a free hand as people realised how good he was, but also the BBC costume people, Terry Nation, the various producers and directors, and to a certain extent also Paul's lovely wife, Janet Lees Price (whom I knew a lot better than I knew Paul).

The rumours of Avon's death... have been greatly exaggerated!

Footnote: to this day I still write B7 fanfic, so if anyone's up for a bit of nostalgia you can find some of it at the links below. It's mostly Avon-centric. Well, he was after all the best character... but I do have a soft spot for Vila.

Wedding Bells (Vila gets engaged while drunk, so someone has to get him out of it!)
The Bride of Thaunas (longer tale about the crew's adventures on a backwater planet where Zen detects a very strange religious ceremony, and the subsequent consequences)
Song of the Nagas (novella; the crew tracks down the criminal who killed Jenna's sister, and finds him on a planet inhabited both by humans and an intelligent sub-aquatic race)
The Way It Should Have Been (Vila escapes from Gauda Prime with Orac in a stolen Federation scout ship and has a lot of stuff to process)

In Wedding Bells I actually put Avon in white, for once. With a hat. Well, it was a very hot planet. But, since I can't draw that, you'll just have to imagine it, I'm afraid.