"Let's put it this way, if your character was feeling a little poorly on page ten then it was probably a good time to give your agent a call."
- Roger Monk talking about the actors anxiously reading each new script of Survivors to see if they still had a job next week. :D :D
I wish Terry Nation was alive so I could ask him about Survivors, a post-apocalypse scifi he created in 1975. It's unlike his dalek stories or his show Blakes 7
Interesting wrinkles to it. I don't know if I would call it feminist but it gives equal time to womens' experiences and all the villains are men trying to recreate patriarchal structures
I also think the female actors detected this and fleshed out these threads more than the scripts showed maybe?
Survivors (1975) peaks with this shot, I think. The horses, the snow, the countryside, the muted colours, the video-tape-blurriness. It's so beautiful.
The early video camera they were using was on its last legs in season 3 (the final season). Everything has a green tint and if you look at the left there are lines on the footage. But it allowed them to take advantage of the snow. They also took a risk and used radio mics.
I love this look for england, very hobbit-y.
This episode, "A Little Learning", is a new low for Survivors. It's so bad.
1. Classic "All the adults are dead and the kids have made their own society" fail.
2. Then they all get blown up by land mines?
3. But they're completely fine somehow?!
4. And then an elephant shows up for no reason?!? The end.
They say "the past is a foreign country" and I think this is shown to great effect in this unsettling scene from 1975's Survivors.
PS Some times it's pretty obvious who's going to die in each episode 😅
There's something dynamic about Survivors for such an old show (1975). It has unpredictable writing but even accounting for that it's got some other x-factor.
Looked into it and it's one of the first dramas ever to switch from film to video tape on location, allowing them to do a lot more outdoor work and also rehearsing on location.
So they got visual degradation from the early-gen video but they got better acting and way more verisimilitude(?)... an interesting trade off
The cliffhanger for this two part episode is they walk into town and get attacked by rats.
It's good but I can get that for free in Melbourne.
Watching ye olde post apocalyptic series Survivors (1975) and it is delightfully brutal. Imagine 99.99% of people dying from a virus and the remainers have the moral values of the 1970s.
There's a lot of men in thick woollen jumpers and tight jeans killing pigs to assert dominance in their newly formed hippy communes.
Luke Miller