Survivors
IT MAY not seem like the sanest of viewing choices in the midst of a full blown global pandemic but this week I've decided to re-watch Survivors. Just for clarity, I'm referring here to the original 1975 TV series – not the truncated attempt at a re-boot the BBC made in 2008.
Told across three series, Survivors was the story of a small group of disparate humans who remain when 95 per cent of the world's population is wiped out by a weird, flu type virus. They must grapple with their situation and try to learn the skills they'll need to survive in a world changed forever, where traditional power structures have crumbled into dirt and mankind is grabbing everything it can before it's too late.
Sound ominously familiar yet? To say Survivors is prescient is an understatement of almost apocalyptic enormity. Yet, the truth is, this is a series that reflects the 1970s as much as it predicts our current state of global limbo.
Legendary TV writer Terry Nation (who most famously gifted the Daleks to the watching world) penned this dystopian vision to show how, by the mid-70s, we'd lost touch with the natural world and how we'd struggle in a pandemic to do the simplest of things, from making an axe to baking a loaf of bread.
"We've landed men on the moon," he said at the time, "but we're actually more primitive than Stone Age man."
Those hoping for a big budget SFX laced adventure series will, I hasten to add, be sorely disappointed. Survivors is a prime example of 1970s BBC tightfistedness. That means we never see the devastation this plague has wreaked on the inner cities, but instead focus in on a handful of individuals as they traipse across the muddy fields of rural Britain looking for safety.
We meet all sorts of societal stereotypes, from the upper class housewife Abby Grant (Carolyn Seymour), whose privileged life now means nothing as she searches frantically for her lost son, to Welsh poacher and general chancer Tom (played with a weasel-like charm by Talfryn Thomas) and no-nonsense engineer Greg Preston (Ian McCullough), who looks like he can't wait to clear off and star in some seriously dodgy European zombie flicks. McCullough probably considered this training for the likes of Zombie Flesh Eaters.
Watching these mostly middle-class types bicker away as provisions dwindle and fear takes hold does start to grind a little by the time the troubled second and third series roll around, but the early episodes are great.
Right from its terrifying opening sequence, where we see a scientist drop a test tube to the floor before a montage of airports and passport stamps make it clear how quickly the virus is spreading (again, the echoes of 2021 are hard to shift), this is a grindingly serious study of society in free-fall.
I'm currently half way through the first series (all episodes are available on BBC DVD) but whether I make it to the end this time is anyone's guess. I suppose if it all gets too gruesome, I could always turn over and watch the news.
Oh, hang on….
