Monday 13 March 2017

1998: ZENITH, THE BLAKE'S SEVEN FANZINE ISSUE 1

From 1998: the first - and I believe only - issue of ZENITH, a glossy black & white BLAKE'S SEVEN fanzine which was sold through branches of Forbidden Planet.

I don't know much about the history of this one but I always assumed that this had somehow spun out of HORIZON, the B7 Fan Club, because the contents were similar to what had been appearing for years in their hefty newsletters.

I never spotted any more issues at the time and although copies of this issue occasionally surface in secondhand outlets (presumably because more copies were distributed originally) I've never seen any others.

It reminds me that circa the year 2000 I was working at a well-known London University.  My office PC screen saver or desk top had something SF-TV related which caught the eye of one of the visiting lecturers.  We'd chatted before but - as is so often the case - I'd never caught her name.  She asked me about what was on the screen... and then she revealed that she'd previously been a BBC Make-up artist who had worked on the show... As soon as she told me her name the penny dropped because she was still active in fandom!  I name no names here but it just goes to show that it's a small world after all.

BTW: Does anyone remember THE STRANGERERS?  The long-forgotten Sky One foray into telefantasy which generated some buzz at the time (particularly because the cast included some British genre vets) and then promptly vanished without trace from the collective race memory.


3 comments:

  1. Apparently, DARKSIDE magazine have a spin-off title on the way called INFINITY as seen here:




    https://www.facebook.com/DarkSidemag/photos/a.441254589342630.1073741828.441239129344176/994554010679349/?type=3&theater



    it remains to be seen just how widely available this will be.

    ReplyDelete
  2. wow that was quite a fortunate chance meeting you had there !


    I'm afraid I don't remember that show at all.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Being a fan of Red Dwarf, I remember The Strangerers, as it was penned by Rob Grant. It was one of many series exclusive to Sky that were seemingly shown once and never repeated. Paramount comedy had a lot of these too, like Asylum, etc.

    It wasn't a classic, but it's frustrating that series like The Strangerers have been effectively buried by their original broadcasters and production companies. It's instances like this that I'm thankful for Youtube and torrent sites, since no one is even trying to monetise such series.

    ReplyDelete

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