Survivors

I have been experimenting with posts quite a bit recently, and this one is no exception, since this blog post is about a show that I really don’t get on very well with. I have some thoughts and will just launch myself into them and see what happens.

Survivors (1975-7) is a post-apocalyptic drama created by Terry Nation and broadcast across three series. In this case the apocalypse in question is a plague pandemic accidentally released by a scientist, which kills 4,999 out of every 5,000 people on earth. From the point of view of the classic television fan, its two main points of gossip are the absolutely massive stars who guested on it and the fact that Brian Clemens (who needs no introduction to my readership) and Terry Nation took their dispute over the ownership of the idea for the series to the High Court, albeit had to abandon the case because of escalating costs. Anyway, Nation is credited online as the creator although Clemens claimed he gave him the idea.

The pandemic and deaths occur right at the beginning of the series and much of the rest of it is about the remaining humans’ life (in Britain) afterwards. The country is reduced to a pre-industrial state, the survivors of course have access to everything left by civilisation but no new technology, and have to start their lives afresh in their new situation. We see lots of human interactions and it seems like every episode has some major event happen for the cast.

I made a huge mistake with this show, which was that I used to have a couple of series on DVD and hadn’t watched them but thought I would give them a go in 2020. What a mistake that was, watching this show amidst people fighting over lavatory paper and one of many collapses of our government. The rather dry and responsible tenor of the show did not compare with the sheer selfishness and irresponsibility of humanity in a real pandemic. After lockdown ended, I sold the discs and only five years later have thought I would give it a go again. It strikes me quite differently. I have done something that I often do with shows that I’m finding difficult, namely to start the show in the middle, in this case at the start of series 2 and miss series 1 out completely. In the case of this show it has the advantage that you miss out the actual pandemic and deaths at the start of the first series and arrive in the show when life is already in a continuing state afterwards. The show gives quite a different impression to me this way, and is clearly not just a drama. Frankly it feels as if it has a much more didactic tone, almost as if it was a thinly dramatised Public Information Film about what to do if civilisation actually comes to an end and we are reduced to pre-industrial like with a reducing supply of existing technologies. For example, there is a scene where the characters mention that what would make all their lives much easier is if they had some electricity, and in fact have a generator but not enough petrol to run an engine for it. Then they come across a water mill and in the same breath are saying what a pity it’s only use would be to grind flour. This felt very much like a lesson to make me (and every other man) jump up and down on the sofa yelling ‘Use the water mill to power the generator!!!’. Of course they come to that realisation in the plot but this is an example of how the show felt much more an educational series than a drama. Another example would be a scene in which one of the characters is unwell and another characters goes through the symptoms of the various sorts of plague to decide which it is: another things which might well be useful information in an apocalypse.

There is a historical background to this, of course, given the 1975 start date. Did you know that our Green Party of England and Wales (and its sister party the Scottish Greens) are the oldest Green Parties in the world? They both descend from a political party called PEOPLE founded in Coventry in 1972. In 1974, the year of two general elections, they published their first manifesto, called A Manifesto for Survival. It has some things which have survived into current Green policy (like Universal Basic Income and no whip) but also has some quite startling things. Drawing on the environmental movement of the time, the party’s policy was to depopulate the country in preparation for a disaster which was believed to be imminent, allowing the country to become a post-industrial, steady state economy. This is the thing which feels like the plot for Survivors was in the zeitgeist of the time. In the PEOPLE manifesto contraception was to be universally free, immigration stopped and emigration encouraged. The Britain envisaged by the first manifesto of the world’s first environmental political party was getting ready for the world pictured in this TV series which broadcast the next year.

There was also the movement in the seventies towards self-sufficiency. I suspect people’s motivations were more mixed towards that, including getting out of the rat race, but still it was aimed at creating a small, barter economy.

I commented that Survivors strikes me more as an educational programme or Public Information Film this time, but I would also like to draw some parallels with another 1970s show, namely Living in the Past (1978). This is another show which I think is probably miscategorised, usually being considered a precursor of modern reality television. Living in the Past was the show about an experiment conducted in iron age living, in which fifteen volunteers agreed to live an iron age life for a year, gradually giving up everything modern as the year went on, ultimately only eating foods which grew in Britain in the iron age, and so on. I personally would see this show as also much more educational than necessarily related to modern reality television and is also set in the zeitgeist of the time: a yearning for peace and a desire to rethink humanity back to a time before the industrial revolution.

This rather stodgy, worthy, feel of these shows is very much what was being parodied in The Comic Strip Presents...Summer School (1983), which is also about an experiment in ancient living, undertaken as part of a university course. I have watched this again in preparation for this blog post and am convinced that much of the commentary online about Summer School misses this essential context for it and is so misguided. Summer School brings out the artifice of these experiments in period living, making it explicit by setting the fake camp in the middle of a university and also accentuating the bad behaviour that comes out through the participants’ mixed motives for joining in.

I have a criticism of Survivors (bearing in mind I still haven’t seen it all the way to the end) which is that it fails to depict the deterioration in our health and quality of life which would happen as time went on and the remaining humans lose access to medications and technology as the existing supply decays.

It sort of threatens it by depicting the terror of childbirth without the possibility of medical intervention, but in the show things like antiobiotics are still available. To be truly post-apocalyptic the characters would have to go back to a life without modern medicine, and the horror this would induce, along with rising illness and mental illness as a result.

I can’t believe I’m sitting here writing that a post-apocalyptic drama isn’t bleak enough, but I really don’t think it is.

Survivors is, however, still post-apocalyptic enough that I think you would question how it can possibly be entertainment. And in fact, I’ve mentioned it before, but if you want an account of a Britain after a disaster, in this case nuclear war, you can’t do better than the film The Bed-Sitting Room (1969), following the few population of Britain navigating their way through the strange landscape, with the occasional risk of turning into a wardrobe or bed-sitting room as a result of the fallout.

The trappings of civilisation are not completely absent, in fact, and the National Grid is powered by a man on a bicycle, and Mrs Ethel Shroake, of 393a High Leytonstone, although uncrowned, is monarch. Of the tiny remaining population she is next in line to the throne and the characters sing God Bless Mrs Ethel Shroake as they trudge through the surreal landscape.

Now the best thing about The Bed-Sitting Room is this. It’s old enough that you can tell which scenes are sets and which are real, and perhaps I should stress that the real scenes are actually real. It is recounted that the director actually became depressed at the way they set out to find scenes suitable for a nuclear apocalypse in Britain, and found places they could use with very little adaptation. For example the scene on a huge heap of broken crockery was filmed on a real heap of broken crockery which one family had made by breaking the rejects from their pottery over years.

On which note there’s something we have to do before we can end the post. Please stand up.

This blog is mirrored at

culttvblog.tumblr.com/archive (from September 2023) and culttvblog.substack.com (from January 2023 and where you can subscribe by email)

Archives from 2013 to September 2023 may be found at culttvblog.blogspot.com and there is an incomplete index to the tags used on the Tumblr version at https://www.tumblr.com/culttvblog/729194158177370112/this-blog

There is an index to posts on the Substack version here: https://culttvblog.substack.com/p/index-of-posts?r=1q6qo6&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&triedRedirect=true

About this blog: https://culttvblog.substack.com/about

Vote Green for real hope and real change! greenparty.org.uk