Survivors: The TV Series 1975-1977

Here follows my first part in my mini-Survivors retrospective.

Part 2, covering the novel, can be found here and part 3, commparing the new show to this the original, can be found here.

First broadcast in 1975 on BBC television Survivors tells the story of a small group of predominately middle class ’survivors,’ who by some natural immunity, have manage to pull through a mysterious man-made virus that has wiped out 99% of the world’s population. Pretty lucky for them! The brain child of Terry Nation, cult scriptwriter and inventor of the perennial Dr. Who baddies Daleks and Blake 7, Survivors was a brave attempt to show how helplessly dependent modern British had become upon pre-manufactured technology and how disconnected we had become from the natural world. Very much jumping on the self-sufficiency Zeitgeist of the times, Survivors in many ways echoes the lighter message of the British sit-com The Good Life, which was also first broadcast in the same year. Survivors’ philosophy is very much a spiritual predecessor to the modern Green-movement.

Its poignancy doesn’t end there: the classic opening title sequence (see below) shows an unnamed Chinese man collapsing in an airport and a succession of visa stamps in a passport, which seem to foreshadow the 2003 SARS outbreak and, coincidentally,  the current Swine Flu pandemic scare! Honestly, this isn’t just a piece of shallow opportunism on my part, I had decided to cover Survivors on here over a month ago.

A message often repeated in the show is this: could you make something a simple as a candle from scratch? Or a table? Could you fell the tree, find the ore, smelt the ore, to forge the ore, to make the tools, to fell the tree, to make the table? With the modern worlds complex division of labour Terry Nation argues that no one person has the knowledge to do all these things and without that knowledge, if you remove us from our technology and society, we will become less capable than stone-age man.

Terry Nation’s concept for Survivors was to produce an adventure series that would deal with these issues as motivations for the action; however clashes with series producer Terence Dudley who was more interested in producing a more pastoral series of agrarian rebirth meant that ultimately the series failed to tackle its mission objective, instead it becomes guilty of meandering into terribly earnest pseudo-philosophical debates and too many scenes of rural domesticity.

The original Survivors: (L-R) Greg, Jenny and Abby

But forgetting these ultimate failing for a moment, Survivors starts of amazingly strongly. The first couple of episodes sets the scene of a society rapidly collapsing under the grip of the plague and the immediate aftermath of the catastrophe as we follow separate stories of the series protagonists: Abby, Greg and Jenny, until they eventually met and join forces. The main ’story-arch’ of the first series is Abby’s search for her missing son; despite the statistical unlikelyness of him surviving as well (as no hereditary link with immunity is evident in the show at this stage). However the search is a great plot-device and helps give the show much needed direction. All three of the characters are well conceived and appealing, and the cast is strong. The three leads, played by Carolyn Seymour, Ian McCulloch and Lucy Fleming are all compelling and likeable – despite their toffyness! All helped by a strong supporting cast, including: Peter Bowles, George Baker and Talfryn Thomas – among others.

Of course Survivors is very much of its age and that’s part of its charm. The good guys are terribly middle-class, while the working-classes are, at best, lazy idiots and, at worst, murderous and/or power crazed scum-bags. Survivors is also hideously ‘cosy.’ If Brian Aldiss finds The Day of the Triffids too cosy* (see below) for his tastes then I can’t imagine what he would make of this. Of course elements of the show are dated – some badly. The script at times is far too wordy, over-written and preachy, but compared to today’s’ comic-book-like scripts, the dialogue feels incredibly naturalistic. Survivors is not alone in this regard, as one of the defining aspects of pre-90s TV is the naturalistic pace and relative wordiness of the scripts which gives so much of retro-TV a greater theatrical feel and made the TV experience back then distinct from the filmic one: being more like telly-plays than mini-movies.

The low budget also plays its part in the look of the show. Apart from a few bodies in Abby’s village and one or two in the outskirts of London, I don’t think we see any direct signs of the plague in the first series. Instead Survivors depicts the new post-plague world by a growing sense of stillness, loneliness and isolation. Jenny’s relief when she finally meets Greg near the end of the second episode is evident. The show neatly avoids having to deal with the scenes of bodies in the streets by setting the action entirely in a rural setting, which presumably was a decision partial driven by budget constraints, although this obviously detaches the characters and us, the viewers, from the true horror of the situation.

However, when watched today, the lack of attention to detail does hurt the show and is less forgiveable. Throughout the first two series the characters all have immaculate hair and clean new clothes. A situation only remedied by series 3 when it finally clicked with someone that these guys should be starting to hum at least a little bit by now. Still even then the hedgerow and gardens are mysteriously immaculate. There are no Hieronymus Boschesque landscapes from our primal Id here to haunt our dreams, I’m afraid.

The first six episodes of series 1 were recorded in the standard way of the time, i.e. a mix of video shot studio set work and 16 mm location work, which is eventually changed to 100% outdoor broadcast video location work. The change allowed faster filming, although sadly this also heralded an uglier aesthetic,  probably due to the faster work rate. However despite the poorer video quality, I find myself liking the crunchier saturated pallet of early video. It’s a pity that they didn’t try to shoot the show in a more handy-cam mockumentary mode to accompany the outside broadcast unit technology that, at that time, was almost exclusively used for news and sports coverage on British TV.

Episode six and seven also heralds another disappointing milestone in the first series: a splitting off from Terry Nations initial eco-adventure premise to Terrance Dudley’s agrarian soap-opera vision of Survivors. Although the first six episodes aren’t all written by Terry Nation, they all stayed true to his vision and the characters remain constant. The remaining seven shows lack that consistency, with character motivations being thrown out for heavy-handed moralising storyline and the total abandonment of the Abby’s son storyline. The blame can’t be entirely lain at the door of the two supporting script writers, Jack Ronda and Clive Exton, who both had to contend with Terrance Dudley’s constant script amendments. The interference was so bad that  Clive Exton changes his screen credit to M.K. Jeeves in order to distance himself from the series.

That is not to say that the second half of the series isn’t without its moments: episode 9: ‘Law & Order’ shows their embryonic community deliberating over the fate of a murder suspect and is a perennial favourite of fans of the show. However for me the crime and punishment issues raised in this episode is still handled far too heavily, and the behaviour of the characters is frankly bizarre and inconsistent. After contending with feuds, thieves and internal strife the series kind of peters out and the queen of Survivors, Abby, or more pertinently Caroline Seymour, got written out of the show by the time of series 2, which is also the point that Terry Nation left the series in Terrance Dudley’s agrarian hands: chnages from which the show never recovers.

Should I stay or should I go now? Sorry Abbey, you'll be going, I'll be staying...

Series 2 must be held up as some of the most boring 12 hours of television ever broadcast in Britain. Highlights include copious arguments on who will do the washing up for fuck’s sake! In fairness the double ‘Lights of London’ episodes are pretty good, which for the first time gives us a glimpse at the urban aftermath and the dystopia that has filled the gap left by the pre-plague society. Also the Ian McCulloch’s scripted episode ‘The Last Laugh’ is also okay. But little can compensate for the lose of the character Abby and series creator Terry Nation, although the return of actor Charles Lill from a one-off early episode  from the first series to one of the main characters in series two works well.

Jenny looking surprisingly clean considering the situation, wearing her famous blue coat

Series 3 is a partial return to form of the first series and a much needed return of more adventurous storylines. Still the series seems to meander too much and ultimately Survivors failed to deliver all it promised too. Still there are few post-apocalypses that cover the aftermath in such detail and despite its inconstancies, it compares favourably to much to be found in genre TV over the years. Despite its faults (of which there are many) Survivors is a fine example of the potential of television to discuss ambitious and topical issues in a populist and accessible way. A potential that, alas, TV rarely achieves nor even aspires to do, and remains a fascinating example of how creative differences in a production team can ruin what would have been one of the finest pieces of British television.

Fashions change: by Series 3 Jenny finally gets tough

If you want to buy Survivors on DVD today then you’ve got a problem. Originally Survivors was released in three DVD box-sets: one for each series, which sensibly were available separately. Meaning that you could just buy the first series and forget the rest unless your are a fanatic or have no critical faculties. However since last year those individual box-sets are no longer available and all three series have been made into one huge box-set: not the most convenient of ways to attract new fans and obviously quite expensive. Of course there is still the second-hand market, but – as always happens – greedy sellers used the ‘deleted’ status of the individual box-sets to crank up the prices. I’m glad to say that the prices seem to be setling again to more realistic levels and careful browsing of eBay and amazon MarketPlace should yeild reasonable results for the Series 1 box-set. Series 2 is still expensive, which isn’t a problem because its rubbish, and Series 3 is comming down in rice. Alternatively you could just suck-it-up and buy the Series 1-3 box-set and be done with it.

Some useful links:

• Survivors website with lots of information, interviews and discussion
• The episode from the third series ‘Mad Dog’ has its own site, which is quite good too

*: By ‘cosy’ I’m basically quoting Brian Aldiss’ ‘cosy-catastrophe’ a term/insult he uses to describe those pre-new wave classic British post-apocalypses, especially Day of the Triffids, where almost all of the population is effectively wiped out (by dying of plague in Survivors or through mass blindness in Triffids) leaving the protagonists largely untouched in an increasingly empty world. By wiping out 99% of the population the survivors lot is relatively idyllic, compared to those in the Death of Grass, where the whole pre-catastrophe population is fighting for its piece of pie. Also the psychology of the protagonists in these so-called ‘cosy-catastrophes’ remains largely untouched and the new society that replaces the old is basically a reproduction of the pre-catastrophe society, complete with bourgeois norms and values.

However the cosy-catastrophe shouldn’t be mistaken for the ‘last-man’ sub-genre, which I think its fair to say explores slightly different themes.

Now there are many who disagree with B. Aldiss’ view on Triffids, saying that there is too much , death, violence and social disruption in it for it to be fairly labelled ‘cosy.’ Personally I do think B. Aldiss is being a little harsh (or should I say that I think he’s being deliberately provocative in order to create a debate), but at the same time I know what he’s getting at. While I found the old 1980s BBC production of Day of the Triffids excellent, the novel failed to excite me as much as I hoped. I’m not saying that it isn’t very good or that I didn’t enjoy it, but I did feel slightly frustrated by the conservatism of its aftermath. Still a massively important and enjoyable book, if a little underwhelming at times IMO.

Anyway, while there are many who might rush to defend Triffids from this ‘cosy’ charge, I doubt many but the most hardcore of Survivors fans would ever consider it worthwhile doing so with Survivors, which is about as hard-hitting as The Waltons!