Apocalypse now

Wednesday, 26th November 2008

The TV programmes you watched as a child are like acid flashbacks.

What annoys me is that it’s such a waste of a perfect premise. The post-apocalypse scenario raises so many interesting questions: what would you do with all the dead bodies (or how long would it be before they decomposed into harmlessness)? How much of the old technology would still be operable? How quickly would everyone get their act together and start growing new food? Would there not be a massive surge of frenzied breeding?

Survivors touches these issues, but only very cursorily. In the Radio Times the screenwriter Adrian Hodges says that, though we think that there’d be lots of petrol to go round there actually wouldn’t, first because the petrol pumps in garages need electricity in order to operate, second because in most modern cars it’s very hard to siphon out the petrol.

But I’m not sure I buy this. In the original series one of the characters estimates that one out of 15,000 people have survived the apocalypse. Today, that would give Britain a post-virus population of what, maybe 40,000? Think of all the cars there must be with full and half-full tanks to be borrowed at their leisure.

Similar rules apply to food. One of Survivors’ main premises — as it was in the original, though much less clunkily done — was that instead of banding together in co-operative groups, Britain would start resembling Somalia, with lots of savage, greedy gun-toting groups vying for supremacy, all trying to take control of the main food depots.

Is that really our way? Would it really be anyone’s way after such a traumatic event? I reckon, once you’d seen every single person you know — all your family, all your friends — wiped out over the space of a weekend, you’d frankly be grateful for all the company you could get. You’d want to find a mate so you could repopulate the planet; you’d spend an awful lot of time involved in conversations which began, ‘Bloody hell. Who’d have thought it?’; you’d be particularly on the lookout for someone who knew how to work a generator or could make cheese.

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Ray Daniels

November 27th, 2008 12:40pm Report this comment

I still remember the scene where Abby hacked her hair off, so yes, I guess those old series do stick in the mind. Well done, Terry Nation.

ian skidmore

November 28th, 2008 11:28am Report this comment

cannot wait for a TV programme that deals with getting rid of decomposing bodies. Surely though that should come under"Garden Remakes"
My gardener's brother in law was buried in his garden and I am told thy resultant tomatoes are delicious