Survivors - 1975 and 2008
On Wednesday night I was lucky enough to attend a screening of the first episode of , a new version of the classic apocalyptic drama. The of the same name was written by the creator of the Daleks, , and made quite an impact. Broadcast in 1975, it went out in an era of fuel shortages, three-day weeks and terrorist bombings, all of which probably encouraged people to wonder how they would cope if the electricity went off and didn't come on again. Survivors probed that scenario to chilling effect by showing an outbreak of a plague that kills most of the world's population. The small numbers of people who live through the crisis have not only lost their friends and family but also need to find out how to get food out of the ground rather than from a shop. Is it just me or does this series feel like it's harnessing the zeitgeist, as food and fuel prices rise, and environmental catastrophe is never far from the news agenda?
I've only seen the first episode of the original series, so any comparison is based on a first impression, but there are already some interesting divergences between the two. While many of the original characters appear in some form or other in the 2008 Survivors, they are obviously part of a very different society: Abby Grant, an upper-middle class lady who lunches, has been transformed into a version played by Julie Graham, who works and doesn't have a live-in housekeeper; while shifty working class Welshman Tom Price has morphed into the more charismatic (and ambiguous) Max Beasley.
Ian McCulloch as Greg Preston and Carolyn Seymour as Abby Grant in Survivors (1975)
If this makes the original series sound like a hideous parade of stereotypes it absolutely isn't. On the strength of the first episode, the seventies version of Survivors was bleak and brilliantly written; it was simply a product of its time. The first image we see is Abby Grant playing tennis (on her own court, naturally) and the camera pans back to show that she is playing against a machine. The point isn't laboured, but in this single image we see the extent to which everyday interactions are dependent on machines and electricity. I now have the first series of the 1975 Survivors on DVD (courtesy of my friend, and all-round television expert, Paul) and am looking forward to its dark delights and ethical dilemmas over the coming weeks.
The first episode of the new Survivors feels more dynamic and less dark than the original - there's a lot more action and the budget is clearly that of a big ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ One drama. There's no attempt to shy away from the starkness of the situation, but there are already faint notes of optimism which just weren't there in the original. An initial episode always introduces a number of characters, but the casting is good, and I was particularly pleased to see Zoe Tapper, who was so good in ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Four's . I'll be watching with interest when the series starts later this autumn (no dates yet).
I'm interested, however, to see what route the programme takes in its interpretation of how people would remake society after the population has been decimated. The original Survivors was over the extent to which the series should be optimistic or not, in fact Terry Nation left the programme at the end of the first series - unhappy that those remaining alive should put things right so quickly. I don't think that I'm a pessimistic person, but I do tend to incline towards the bleaker view, in fact one of my favourite novels of the last couple of years was Cormac McCarthy's - a very stark vision of how humanity would cope in the wake of just such a catastrophe. The Road is being made into a film with Viggo Mortensen and will be in cinemas at the beginning of next year. I also really admired , a 2007 film based on a short story by Stephen King, that really didn't get the attention it deserved. Again, it was a very dark imagining of how people would react to this sort of crisis. Where does the balance lie? I'd be interested to hear whether you are also on the dark side, or if you think that such dramas revel in a sort of self-indulgent pessimism.
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