If television is the idiot's lantern then the subjective opinions of someone unqualified to write about television must surely be the idiot's lectern.

Survivors

1975, BBC

I know what you’re thinking – you’re thinking I was going to at least try and achieve some kind of topicality to this column. I could have my little Teachers diversion but 1975? Some of us (including me) weren’t even born then. And this is true. I hadn’t planned this to be a column exploring the vaults and archives of television but the news that the BBC are planning to remake Survivors spurred me to get a DVD or two out and give the original show another airing.

My soft spot for Survivors has nothing to do with the show itself. Back in the late 90s I happened across the complete first series on VHS. Six tapes for 99p each in the world’s first Music Zone (RIP) store. Think about that for a moment – one series, thirteen episodes, six cassettes. Welcome to the past. I can remember the days when we’d happily pay £10.99 for two episodes of a series (three episodes if it was a half hour sit com) and thought nothing of it. The end-of-season tape with an extra episode was a luxurious bonus. "It has three episodes on it?" we’d gasp as though confronted with a cure for religion. "Behold." Ok, so we paid £12.99 for the three-episode tape but it was still a miracle. Anyway, back to Survivors, I paid the princely sum of 99p each for them and carried them home (on the bus) in an enormous carrier bag. I think I got half way through the series before giving it up as basically preachy and a bit dull. The only reason I’m fond of this story is that I would sell those tapes for nearly £20 each on the internet in a glorious few weeks before news of the DVD release became widespread.

The first episode of Survivors is a terrifying masterpiece. The rest of the series had no chance of following it. The opening titles show a sinister oriental scientist dropping a flask. He then gets on a plane and implicitly infects everyone on board. Then, through a series of stock shots and passport stamping, we see the disease travel the globe in a matter of hours. The first episode is seen through the eyes of Abby – a middle class lady who lives in the country, tends to her hair and is married to Peter Bowles – and Jenny – a more down to earth young woman (but still with perfect diction which I think is a good thing – all these accents on modern TV don’t make television a better place, just one which sounds more like the sort of dreadful pub you wouldn’t want to go into). We see Jenny living with another girl – one who dies of the fever – and of course there is a certain amount of head stroking and general affection from healthy girl to ill girl. To avoid any accusations of lesbianism they crowbar in a reference to the ill girl having had a long affair with a man and design the set so there is a second single bed a respectable distance away but always in shot.

The public believe there is a bit of a flu epidemic about. People are ill, society is on hold for a while, the hospitals are overrun and the lights keep going out. No one realises the scale of what is going on. We – the modern audience – know of course because its thirty years old and has a reputation but for those on the ground it is something that will be overcome in a week or two using antibiotics and good old British grit.

But it isn’t overcome. Timescales become a little confused with "days" and "weeks" used interchangeably over the first two episodes but the result is the same – millions have died. Maybe 95% of the population which is incomprehensible even with thirty years notice. The streets are empty. Those few that have survived haven’t done so because of heroism or because they are the strongest or because they were lucky enough to get a miracle cure which was discovered just that bit too late. It was sheer dumb chance. Either the disease didn’t take in them or it did and their immune systems were able to overcome it.

Once all this has hit our two leads they independently decide (after a couple of men have explained it to them) to go off aimlessly into the country in search of something. Abby symbolically cuts her hair off – presumably because she doesn’t know how many men have survived and therefore has to consider the possibility that she’ll have to look elsewhere for sex – and sets fire to her house. You see, she got up one morning and found her husband dead and rather than move him she burned their large country house down. A good plan except for the waste of resources. But it isn’t as if resources are scarce – go mad, burn things down.

Actually, that’s the point (even if the above wasn’t done to make this point) – resources aren’t scarce, skills are. In episode one a teacher gives Abby a lecture on how we can’t make anything any more and even a simple item like a stainless steel knife is the product of dozens of separate jobs, all of which we will have to learn if the human race is to survive. It sounds dull on paper and is seven times duller on screen. Eight times duller when Abby repeats the speech to George Baker in episode two. So the survivors of this plague have tonnes of tinned food, thousands of barrels of fuel and more buildings than they can comfortably burn down in a year. But what of future generations? What will they do when the last stainless steel knife is lost in the last dishwasher in Britain?

Which is the point at which Survivors becomes like the Good Life without laughs.

What changes will be made for a twenty first century version? Firstly, the disease can’t be caused by accident. Instead of a clumsy oriental scientist we’ll have an Islamic terrorist starting the plague deliberately. That’s a given. Secondly, there are bound to be some non-white survivors. I’m guessing we’ll have a bit of a Noah’s Ark scenario with at least one person from each of the major demographic groups surviving quite by chance. Some of whom will bring non-RP accents into the fold. Thirdly, the group of survivors will have a rather more defined aim than simply learning "the old crafts". There will be a secret government survival bunker someone beneath the Home Counties which our band of lucky healthy people will be looking for. Like "The Lost Train" but without anyone as indefinably cute as Nicola Walker. Fourthly, the survivors will all be under thirty five, familiar faces from soap operas and will be having sex before the test tube has even hit the floor. And they’ll go on having sex. Or rather having "dramatic" scenes about who has had sex with whom. Et cetera.

The new series might at least deal with the one big problem I have with the first episodes of Survivors. Where are the bodies? Our heroes wander around town centres and find abandoned shops, abandoned cars, stuff everywhere. But no bodes. There are some fifty million corpses about and yet the town centres aren’t stinking, rat infested, disease ridden sewers. I don’t know much about decaying corpses but I’ve heard it isn’t a barrel of roses. Even if they didn’t drop dead in the streets, that many bodies would make any populated area a no-go zone for months. I can’t remember which post-apocalyptic drama made that point (that they couldn’t just take what they wanted because the towns weren’t safe) but it is a good one.

Survivors starts out unbelievably grim. It is about as realistic a portrayal of an unprecedented epidemic as you’re going to find. The heroes were the anonymous doctors who knew what was happening and stayed behind to help people who were suffering rather than trying to save their own skins. The Survivors are ordinary people who just didn’t die. The themes of the series are starting again, the greed of people who want power over others through control of supplies or weapons and how our society has become so dependent on technology that we can’t survive without it. A theme that is even more true a generation on. I hope a new Survivors keeps what was good and injects it with a little more oomph. This time around the Survivors will be people who are lost without mobiles, iPods and the internet and whose idea of cooking is to text their local Chinese takeaway. It should be an interesting series.

A final trivia fact - Jenny is played by Lucy Fleming, Ian Fleming's niece and co-owner of all the Ian Fleming books, copyrights and franchises.