"NARRATOR:" "In 1975, when Britain was a nation seemingly grinding to a halt with political upheaval, strikes, and all things grubby and grim, what did the BBC think we wanted to watch on a gloomy Wednesday night in April?" "Apiece of shiny, science fiction escapism ?" "No." "It was the end of the world." "With mud." "And we loved it." "The public were very interested in it." "It made people think." "It was so believable." "It could happen anywhere." "I think it's highly topical today." "It's as topical now as it was then." "I mean, this just seemed fact, rather than fiction." "What would happen if only one person survived to every ten thousand?" "NARRATOR:" "Survivors was a landmark series, with an incredible audience grabbing premise." "Nearly everyone in the world dies, and only a few of us are left." "How do we survive?" "Come on, take this." "It might bring the fever down a bit." "A mysterious illness sweeps the world, killing millions." "Slashing the population of the UK down to under 10,000." "The remaining individuals struggle to survive in a world where nothing works any more and the finite stockpiles of resources are slowly depleting." "If you have an apocalypse where no one survives, then that's an easy story to tell." "The more difficult one is where you have a number of people having to contend with an apocalyptic situation." "Where, what has then been perceived as being something taken for granted, can no longer be taken for granted." "That is, I think, the strength of the Survivors series." "In that it presented that challenge again to the viewer." "And the viewer could say, "But I don't know how to make a loaf of bread."" "Or, "What would I do with a car if I couldn't get petrol?"" "And all those what ifs then became very much dramatised for them by the way that our various characters responded in different ways." "What about..." "NARRATOR:" "The newly de-populated Great Britain is a country torn by lawlessness and anarchy." "The three series of Survivors followed a key group of characters as they not only get to grips with the tricky business of survival, but also their struggle to re-establish and structure a new society ." "Themes of self-sufficient and commune living, hot topics for the 70s, are explored." "That's the whole of the crop gone, all our spring cabbage." "As well as hard-hitting sociological and philosophical issues relating to law and order and the nature of political ambition." "Mrs Grant, we will never get back to any law and order while men like him are allowed to grab power." "(GUN FIRES)" "STEVE O'BRIEN:" "What it was doing was a very interesting, fresh look at society ." "In terms of if you start from scratch, how do we re-convene?" "Do we need leaders?" "Are we gonna have a kind of libertarian society?" "It talks and looks at these issues in an interesting way that I don't think could be done now." "It's a fascinating year zero approach." "For so long, we actually accept that there is a judiciary." "That there is a police force." "That there are other..." "There's an army." "(GUN FIRES)" "In Survivors, then the individuals had to be their own police force, their own judiciary, their own army." "NARRATOR:" "With Terry Nation as its deviser," "Survivors could hardly fail to become a cult hit." "His pedigree was already secured by creating Doctor Who's most endearing baddies." "The Daleks." "Survivors brought together the considerable talents of writer Terry Nation with producer Terence Dudley." "Terence Dudley had produced Doomwatch, the early 70s series that peddled the complete range of apocalyptic scenarios." "And had just finished directing on the 70s classic series, Colditz." "A kind of World War II Prison Break, with moustaches and not so many tattoos." "That series featured cult favourite David McCallum in the lead role." "Oh, we got a tough one here." "But left Terence Dudley free to cast certain key parts ." "TV newcomer Ian McCulloch landed one such role." "248719, Pilot Officer Page." "And I was asked to go and do an interview with Terry Dudley for an episode of Colditz." "So, I did that." "And I'll admit, it was a very , very good episode." "You answer my question... (SCREAMING IN PAIN)" "And then suddenly I got a phone call saying Terry Dudley wants to see you." "He's doing a new series, it's called Survivors." "And along I went and that was how this all started." "NARRATOR:" "Ian McCulloch played Greg Preston." "The brooding industrial engineer turned brooding farmer-cum-cowboy." "I mean, Ian was so solid." "Thank God for Ian." "He had a sort of anger in him." "Which, I think, was really good." "She'll never believe that." "She'll damn well have to." "You know the odds against him being alive?" "Millions to one." "Millions!" "Because, inevitably, if you've got a lot of grief and destruction and death and panic and not knowing what is going to happen to the future, there must be anger because it's so uncertain." "McCULLOCH:" "But to say, we were also told at the beginning, that it was going to be more a sort of female orientated series rather than a male one." "NARRATOR:" "And that was certainly the case." "Lucy Fleming, actress daughter of Celia Johnson of Brief Encounter fame, and niece of Bond and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang creator Ian Fleming, played the naive ex-secretary turned happy-self-sufficiency survivor," "Jenny Richards." "It did feel exceptional." "It felt exceptional that the women were the, sort of, the leaders of the drama." "Which, I think, in those days, was quite unusual." "NARRATOR:" "Survivors plucky heroine, Abby Grant, a housewife turned post-apocalyptic ass kicker, was played by Carolyn Seymour." "SEYMOUR:" "In Take Three Girls," "I had done a rather hard-hitting sort of journalist." "I'm going to send back that typewriter, and the vase, and the bracelet." "But I'd also played strippers." "I played a stripper in the film Steptoe and Son." "The stripper was also a strong woman." "So, obviously, everybody saw me as a strong woman." "And I knew that that was me and I knew that I have the strength to do it." "Well, does anyone disagree with the rules that I have suggested?" "NARRATOR:" "Abby Grant was a standout role that set the tone for the entire series." "I love the idea of her, because she was so dynamic and she was so strong." "And there were very few women lead characters who were that strong at the time." "And she was written beautifully." "I mean, I loved Terry's writing." "She's very much a leader and she was playing a leader." "So, that worked well." "She has a sort of hard side..." "The character, I mean, has a hard side to her, which I think Carolyn brought out beautifully." "NARRATOR:" "Directing at the helm of the opening episode, and others across the series, was Pennant Roberts." "Pennant had worked with Terence Dudley on both Doomwatch and Colditz, and took on the challenge of Survivors." "I could see this as being potentially an extremely exciting project, because of the central premise." "ROBERTS:" "The essence of the opening title sequence of Survivors was really to compress into, what was it, 30 seconds, a short storyboard of the catastrophe which had confronted the world, with the virus spreading out from China very fast" "and attacking all the Western civilisations." "Not only did it act then as a trigger for the first episode of the series, but a reminder then in subsequent episodes as to what it was all about." "Accompanied by, I thought, a very fine piece of title music." "Which was full of ominous overtones." "So that you were left in no doubt that things were going to get worse before they were gonna get better." "NARRATOR:" "The first episode, entitled "The Fourth Horseman", features a guest-star role for Peter Bowles." "If things really get as bad as all that," "I'm sure they'll declare a state of emergency or something." "And sets up the beginning of the end of civilisation." "Anyway, we're all right, living in the country." "And Carolyn Seymour playing tennis with all the aplomb you would expect from a young British hopeful." "No, she wasn't very good at all." "I don't play tennis." "I never played tennis." "I loathe tennis." "I hated it." "And suddenly I was dressed in these white clothes in the middle of winter, playing with this ghastly tennis ball machine." "We didn't do, like, ten minutes of this." "We ended up doing about an hour and a half." "And I hadn't lifted anything heavier than a wineglass for about four years." "So..." "Oh, well, a baby, I suppose." "But this was..." "No way, I couldn't do it!" "And I was so sore the next two days, I could not actually walk." "I mean, I was crippled." "I could do with a cold drink, Mrs Transon." "I start off by looking like this completely, sort of, middle-class housewife, suburban housewife, whose son's at school and dad goes off to the station, and I putter about with my housekeeper." "And within halfway through that episode," "I'm realising that devastation is all around me, that people are dying, that I have no choice but to get out of there." "And so we had to go through a lot of..." "I had long hair which I had to cut, I had..." "A really good shower scene where I'm very clearly nude and having a shower, which, I think, was probably quite interesting for the BBC at that time." "And then I go from being completely sort of happy and content with my tiny little life, to suddenly being a very aggressive warrior." "The first episode doesn't go into the actual sort of what happens when people die." "It just shows that people are dying very rapidly and there's nothing anybody can do." "There's a very good doctor in it who just realises the whole thing is hopeless and tries to give everybody flu jabs, but, of course, too late by then." "They'll find something, won't they?" "They'll find a cure." "They're not gonna let millions of people die!" "It is a mutant virus, Jenny." "And not yet identified." "And with the speed this thing is travelling, we have no way of stopping it." "In a few days, the cities will be like open cesspits." "My character, Jenny, is a secretary and she has a friend who is very ill in her flat, somebody she shares a flat with, goes to a hospital to try and get help and her friend, who's the doctor, says..." "Jenny, you've got to get out of here." "Not just the flat, I mean London." "She's dead?" "Into the country if you can." "Just take a few things." "You might have to walk." "ROBERTS:" "I think the whole thinking behind episode one was that it should set out very clearly for the viewer the scale of the catastrophe confronting civilisation." "And so that's why it took..." "It takes the viewer from a very comfortable home counties lifestyle to the confrontation that Abby Grant meets right at the end when she's purged herself of her old life and has prepared herself for a life which she doesn't know what will entail." "And just, "Please God, I hope I'm not the only one."" "Oh, God, please don't let me be the only one." "It was an extremely good start to the series." "And I think "The Fourth Horseman" was..." "Expressed the main themes of Survivors very acutely." "NARRATOR:" "Terry Nation's script deals with the virus itself pretty darn swiftly." "And with a remarkably low body-count considering." "And the story line concentrates quickly on those who are left." "The survivors." "McCULLOCH:" "He had a bright idea." "It hit the audience at exactly the right time." "I think they were hooked because of this," "I think, very special first episode." "Hey!" "Hey!" "NARRATOR:" "Nation devised the series, but where had his inspiration come from for this particular apocalyptic tale?" "MARTIN WORTH:" "The general feeling at that time, there was a big thing about self-sufficiency." "There was a book published called Self-Sufficiency." "But the most critical book, that was the "in" thing at the time, was Schumacher's book, Small is Beautiful." "This was an international bestseller." "The whole point about this thing was that the prosperity of society didn't depend on big business and the big things, but what you could do yourself." "And it was such an "in" thing that it led to being sent up brilliantly, in that television comedy series, The Good Life." "NARRATOR:" "Both series shared their basic ideology." "Oh, and that Volvo!" "Yes, it's the same one." "WORTH:" "And you don't come up with satirical series like that, and make it work, unless you are satirising something which everyone's already talking about." "And it was in that climate that we were taking seriously the idea of whether you could live that and grow your own things, and certainly you could." "NARRATOR:" "Self-sufficiency, with its Aran-jumper-wearing heartiness, wasn't just a middle-class fad." "Much of it had become a necessity with the industrial and political turmoil of mid-70s Britain leading to shortages of bread, petrol rationing and power cuts ." "FLEMING:" "Maybe all these things percolated in Terry Nation's mind to think, "Okay, well, let's take it a bit further. "" "Supposing there aren't any buses, there isn't any electricity, you can't get from A to B." "Nobody can supply you with food or services." "How do you cope?" "NARRATOR:" "The culture of strike action and the loss of subsequent services may well have inspired the premise for Survivors." "But it also had a direct effect on the production itself." "Industrial action taken by the BBC staff in 1974, meant that filming and transmission dates had to be put back by a crucial four months." "Turning the filming of the first series from an easy summer of location filming to a winter of teeth chattering discontent." "It was muddy." "That's what I..." "I particularly remember the locations being very muddy." "The hours were brutal." "The locations were always brutal." "Quite often very cold." "We filmed from, sort of, early in the year through till, I suppose, April, beginning of early May." "I mean, I remember standing in the river Wye." "I remember running across snow." "And running across ploughed fields that were rigid with ice and..." "Oh, urgh!" "Horrible!" "NARRATOR:" "But tough conditions made for tough performances." "Abby, you're the figurehead here." "And whether you like it or not, people are always gonna look up to you for a lead." "But I'm the manager." "I run things." "I was always the bossy one." "I was always the leader." "And I think that that came because of my position." "You know, my privilege sort of thing." "And Ian was the guy." "I mean, he was the go-to guy, he was the guy who fixed everything." "He came up with solutions." "Go on!" "Shoo!" "Shoo!" "Out!" "Out!" "There was a scene, quite early on in the series, when we went to a supermarket to pick up some provisions" "and there at the end, was a man hanging dead." "With "Looter" written across him." "FLEMING:" "It was once we'd discovered this looter's body hanging up saying, this is what happens to looters, that Greg said," ""We shouldn't go in here, we shouldn't go in here." "Look what happens."" "No." "We'll get what we came for." "Look, we can get what we want somewhere else." "Everything we want is here." "You just can't ignore that." "That's a pretty calculated way to warn people off." "You'd be just damn stupid to ignore it." "It'll only take me ten minutes to get what we need." "Abby would always challenge every decision." "She never just blindly followed things and I think Lucy's character ended up learning how to do that, too." "You all right?" "Mmm." "Just made me feel a bit sick, that's all." "McCULLOCH:" "Lucy was a softer, rather more timid, very sort of backward about coming forward." "And she adapted to the situation that sort of faced all of us." "Get down there!" "Go on!" "SEYMOUR:" "The whole thrust of the series was on a different level than most series that were running at the time." "And I think that what was refreshing about it was that it incorporated political viewpoints." "It incorporated..." "It was bashing some of the standards that we were all living by, which was essential at that time." "Seems to me that we have no choice." "ABBY:" "What?" "Capital punishment." "My favourite episode, only because of the ghastliness of it, was the capital punishment one." "The absurd law and order was..." "A girl was murdered, one of the community was murdered, and there was a slightly mentally deficient chap in the series who, through misunderstanding, admitted his guilt." "Although he hadn't done it." "Why did you say "I didn't do it"" "when Greg and Mr Russell caught you this morning?" "(STAMMERS) I didn't." "Ho did you know Wendy was dead?" "And the community as a whole had to decide how to cope with it because he was obviously a danger to the community." "And in the end, people had very strong views either way, and in the end, we had a vote and we had to decide between banishment or death." "GREG: ...which leaves you with the casting vote." "FLEMING:" "Carolyn's character had the deciding vote 'cause it was four against four." "And she went for the death." "Then the chaps had to draw straws on who would shoot him." "So it was quite heavy." "I am so anti capital punishment." "I still am and always will be." "And I don't see the point of it and I didn't see the point then." "And it was one of those moments that I really fought everybody on it." "I wanted him to go off on his own and have to pay the price by being alone and ostracised." "I did not want to have to kill him." "And it caused me sleepless nights and anguish and nobody..." "They were determined." "I mean, in retrospect, it was a good idea." "I mean, one had to do it that way but I hated being part of it." "The sort of twist, if you like it, well, not even a twist at the end, was that he hadn't in fact done the murder." "And when Abby and Greg discovered that, they decided not to tell the community." "GREG:" "I'm fighting for survival, not principles." "They have a right to know." "And I'm warning you that if you insist on telling them, then I'm gonna challenge you." "And if that happens, then what we've got here is just gonna fall apart." "FLEMING:" "And that, I think, was extraordinary." "Sort of said a lot about their characters, about the series, about the whole situation." "But it was a great piece of writing, actually, and acting, but that was quite special." "NARRATOR:" "The series' loftier ambitions met popular praise." "But churlishly, many only remember where it didn't get it quite right." "ANNOUNCER:" "On BBC1, Survivors." "Is there anything I can get for you or the old woman?" "Food." "We're very hungry." "ANNOUNCER:" "The survivors face starvation on BBC1, tomorrow night at 8:10." "My first episode on location, I think, with the OB unit had a dog pack." "And I thought, "Well, now what do we call a dog pack?"" "Twenty-five to thirty scruffy looking dogs who have been foraging for themselves for a number of months." "They came back to me and said," ""Look, top whack, we fancy you'll only be able to afford 15 dogs."" "So I said, "If we've only got 15, for goodness sake" ""be sure that they looked ferocious."" "They may be rabid." "Rabies?" "Yeah." "Just look." "ROBERTS:" "And when the dogs turned up, they'd got them from, I don't know, from Croft's I think, 'cause they were all a very mixed bag of lanky poodles and very far from my initial concept of what a dog pack should appear like!" "So I don't think that was a great success." "(GUN FIRING)" "NARRATOR:" "It wasn't just live animals that caused the problems." "With the likes of turkey twizzlers permanently off the survivors' menu, the props department had to provide the cast with a steady supply of dead rabbits." "# Rabbits and cabbage... #" "All these dead rabbits were hanging up in the props truck and it was quite sunny the day that we were putting our make-up on." "We were outside and suddenly we just hear these muffled explosions." "And the props guy, we suddenly realise it's coming from the prop truck, and he opens the prop truck and there's just this mass of exploded rabbits." "I mean, blood and guts everywhere 'cause he'd forgotten to pouch them." "But there were moments like that which were fun." "Well done, boy." "Well done." "A marvel, that's what you are, a marvel." "NARRATOR:" "They might not have had washing machines, washing powder or hot water, but then , why let the end of civilisation get in the way of a good look?" "FLEMING:" "I think sometimes we looked a bit too clean, actually." "Sort of clean hair, well washed and all that sort of thing." "And we still seemed to have white shirts and clean jerseys and nice jeans, not all the time, but quite a lot of the time." "If you're a costume designer, then what you need to preserve as much as anything is continuity." "Therefore, the best continuity is clean." "If you've got to work fast, it's very difficult to actually have unclean as continuity." "So consequently, the wardrobe staff were probably up all night laundering the clothes for the shoot the next day." "People said that it looked too clean and wonderful but it was impossible to do anything about it." "And in the same way, the other criticism was, "Too middle class."" "This is very iffy ground talking about the class issues in that series." "I can't get used to not having a newspaper at breakfast." "It's kind of weird that because it was so ahead of its time, in terms of giving really strong roles to women, that it's so sort of slightly backwards in terms of its attitude to class." "The crooks tended to be Northern or Cockney or..." "Not middle class." "Listen to him talking." "He's too good for this world, he is." "He won't demean himself by eating with us." "He doesn't want to mix with the common herd." "It's the only area that we didn't break the standard." "When you look at the three of us who were the leads." "Was it awful, London?" "Yeah, must have been bad in all the cities." "It's true, I mean, the middle classes were the ones that ruled and then everybody else..." "And that was appalling 'cause we didn't pull on the vast resource." "We didn't pull on the courage that was there." "We didn't focus on character, we focused on position." "He did it!" "What do you mean, he did it?" "I told you to do it." "Well, I told him." "You got no damn right to." "It's chain of command." "Delegating responsibility." "Yeah, passing the buck, you mean." "The class system had to go, it had to go, but we didn't get rid of it in Survivors, that's for sure." "A lot of the working class characters, they are slightly conniving and untrustworthy, and it's sort of clear that if we're going to find a way out of this mess, you gotta speak with a RP accent." "But I think it's unfair to criticise Survivors too much for that because that was the make-up of television at the time." "It was a very middle class world, you know?" "NARRATOR:" "Terry Nation stopped writing for Survivors after series one." "In series two, the storylines explored a more ecological, commune style approach to the Survivors theme." "Taking on the technical challenges of producing methane gas from manure, for example." "I learnt to hate methane, and anything to do with making gas." "NARRATOR:" "By the third and final season, things start to get on the move again and we see our survivors well on their way to re-establishing something closer to order." "And in the final episode..." "JENNY:" "Think what electricity means." "I want the children to have everything that I had once." "NARRATOR:" "Electric power is restored and the real struggle to survive, well, it's over." "Of Survivors initial trio of key actors, only Lucy Fleming was there to the bitter end." "Ian McCulloch's character was written out in an episode he penned himself in series three." "I wasn't happy with the scripts in the second series." "And I thought the whole idea, it got right away from whatever Terry Nation's original view on it had been and it lacked pace, it lacked drama, it lacked confrontation, and I honestly thought they were rather boring." "So I wrote an episode for the second series and then left the series." "And to cover up for my exit, I was asked to write my death episode." "NARRATOR:" "In "The Last Laugh", Greg Preston contracts small-pox and sacrifices his life to save the community." "When I say "stay away", I mean stay away." "So, goodbye." "NARRATOR:" "But Survivors most surprising cut came way back at the end of the very first series." "I got fired." "It's very simple, I got fired." "I think it was just a mistake of Terry Dudley's." "The producer, Terence Dudley, just didn't like me." "He plain didn't like me." "I think it was his decision and I think that having built Carolyn up into this sort of strong character," "I mean, she was that strong character, and I think he found that a little difficult to take." "And I think that probably Terry Dudley thought" ""No, I can't cope with this very much longer."" "And decided that he had the power to write her out, which I think was a grave mistake." "They wanted a strong woman to play Abby Grant." "I met them, I was strong, and Terence Dudley hated it." "I just thought it was a pity." "A, because the dynamics between the three of us was good." "And she was very successful in the character." "I couldn't see how it could go on without the three of us." "We created the perfect triad." "I mean, I was the sort of fire and Lucy and Ian were the strength." "It was really hard but I could be abrasive." "And I could be, which is more to the point, even more abrasive if I'd had a drink or two." "And one of the things that became really clear, patently clear to me by the end of that series, is that I had a lot of trouble with alcohol." "And I was in fact an alcoholic." "And I think that he was terrified that I was going to become a liability ." "So, in one respect, he was absolutely right to fire me." "But I may well have appreciated the opportunity to do something about it." "It's too bloody late." "NARRATOR:" "Waving goodbye to Abby Grant, relocating to Hollywood and knocking the booze on the head led to, surprise, surprise, strong woman, most-likely-to-be- the-murderer roles in everything from Hart to Hart to Quantum Leap." "SEYMOUR:" "I have murdered everybody in every way imaginable on every single show that's ever been on, episodic TV show, that's been in this country," "I think, until, you know, the year 2000." "Or I was a Romulan commander or two and, you know, science fiction." "Strong women, all of them." "Lean, mean machines who'll stop at nothing to get what they want." "And that was me." "NARRATOR:" "Lucy continued acting in theatre roles and popped up on our screens in MI5 series, Cold Warrior." "I say we're in executive head-hunting." "And Ian, well..." "Got a phone call from my agent saying there's an Italian film company that want you to star in a film and it's about zombies." "And it was April 1st." "NARRATOR:" "He went on to star in the notorious zombie slasher movie," "Zombie Flesh Eaters." "I thought they were little sort of Hammer House of Horror type things, sort of fun to do and silly to watch." "And they've all been banned as video nasties." "NARRATOR:" "Thirty years later, the central premise of Survivors still seems to capture people's imagination." "Well, we still see, don't we, there is always a danger of pandemics." "And we've had bird flu in the last couple of years as being a pandemic threatening to break out." "It's still topical." "There's still stuff in that series that you can relate to now and that can change people's thinking." "The fan base now is extraordinary." "Because it's out on DVD, a lot of the younger people are watching it and so there's a whole new generation who are working out what they would do and, of course, today even more dependent on technology, computers," "mobile phones, communications." "How would it work?"