Survivors

So we agree that this sort of thing is the expression of a wish, not a fear, right?

I quite enjoyed it. But yeah, it was sort of ‘cosy’, even if that sounds a strange thing to say. ‘Sanitised’, at any rate. People didn’t die in horrific contorting pain, they just kinda went to sleep in dramatically useful poses, and their corpses lay around nicely for the survivors to push/fall over, but failed to start decomposing and being vomit-making and disgusting. Somebody got round to mentioning cholera and typhoid… but what about nuclear power plants going into meltdown? The ‘virus’ (flu? plague?) is clearly just a vehicle for a drama about people and relationships in extreme crisis (ooh, and a bit of conspiracy thriller thrown in? What fun). If they do it well, it’ll be my weekly dose of willing-suspension-of-disbelief TV drama for the autumn (now that Heroes has completely lost the plot).

The Prime Minister died. Now that probably was somebody’s wish fulfilment.

On that note, hasn’t Doctor Who now earned the distinction of killing off more UK Prime Ministers than any other TV show in history? I’m counting at least three (one former at the time of extermination).

The British post-apocalyptic narratives tended to be a form of wish-fulfilment (hence the term “cosy catastrophe”), yes.

I always thought “cosy catastrophe” was a reference to scale; all the big events happened off-screen (or outside the scope of the book) and all you really saw was the effect on one small part of England (or Australia, in the case of ‘On the Beach’). You could trace this back to “War of the Worlds” if you wanted, which is basically “The Martian Invasion as seen from Woking”.

sharon: I suspect that the corpses didn’t look ‘realistic’* because of limits on the BBC makeup budget rather than any artistic choice…

*’realistic’ corpses are something that most people have great difficulty with. About the only prominent film director who actually depicts realistic trauma is Paul Verhoeven, possibly because he and Oliver Stone are about the only ones who’ve ever seen any; and every film he makes gets criticised for being over-the-top in terms of blood, gore, dismemberment etc.

“About the only prominent film director who actually depicts realistic trauma is Paul Verhoeven, possibly because he and Oliver Stone are about the only ones who’ve ever seen any; and every film he makes gets criticised for being over-the-top in terms of blood, gore, dismemberment etc.”

I don’t remember that in Showgirls. Maybe I should have watched it all the way to the end after all?

The Outward Edge? Whoops. The Outward Urge.

Sharon: If civilisation stopped functioning tomorrow then, according the watchable ‘Life After People’ special this year, nuclear power plants would automatically go into safe mode, preventing meltdown. A bit less dramatic perhaps than the alternative, but more reassuring. A bigger problem might be uncontrolled fires spreading through desolate city-scapes… hmmm… there is something uniquely compelling about the post-apocalyptic aesthetic, isn’t there?

How about New York? “Escape from New York”, “Independence Day”, “The Day After Tomorrow”, “A.I.”, all spring to mind, and I have vague recalls of a lot of 1950s/60s SF in which New York got nuked, plus of course Godzilla was apparently so determined to destroy the place he apparently swam thousands of miles to do so.
I think we also need a Japanese-speaking SF fan to tote up the number of times Tokyo has been destroyed.
Perhaps there’s a general rule that artists want to destroy the centre of their country’s artistic life? I suppose enough rejection letters from publishers could explain the emotion.

Yeah, Tokyo’s got to be number one simply by sheer volume of manga/anime, let alone live action films. Akira, Evangelion, Neo-Tokyo, X, Fist of the North Star – the list is pretty much endless. And do films like Grave of the Fireflies count?

London’s probably number one in the West, with New York a close second.

Well, the reports of the first episode are interesting — the original starts out much more disturbing than this one is reported as being, and although it calms down into a post-holocaust soap opera (well scripted and acted), it continues to shock every now and then. There’s a particularly disturbing, but realistic, rape about half way through the first series, with, again, realistically distrubing consequences. More John Christopher (in Death of Grass/No Blade of Grass) than John Wyndham.

I remembered Survivors quite vividly from “way back when.” So I ordered the DVDs from amazon (.co.uk) and was pleasantly surprised that my amazon.com id worked just fine. By today’s standards, it is extremely non-violent. And the hair, omg! the hair!

I saw episode 1 on Sunday night. It was ok, without being great. Production values and general look-and-feel and level were similar to Spooks rather than, say, something great like Edge of Darkness. Entertaining then, but hard to care very much about the characters. I only have very dim memories of the original, which I didn’t see all the way through, but I remember it as grittier and edgier than the remake.

actually i rather suspect i was the one accusing everyone else of being hitler

if it’s the ep i think you’re referring to, a woman is raped, a man of subnormal intelligence is suspected and executed after voluble discussion but without tanything resembling a trial (by which i mean, he never knows he’s suspected); then it turns out it wasn’t him, but the people who executed him argue that, given the perilous social circumstance, they were right to take the action they did

my friend argued the execution was justified, and i accused him of being worse than hitler (we would have been about 16; i think others were chipping in, but the intense moral face-off was him and me) (he wasn’t a bit like hitler, but he did enjoy taking the “Realist” position, probably largely to wind me up, which he was reliably successful at)

the actual perp was a somewhat weedy man who had some talent or resource that was necessary to their general survival; whereas the subnormal fellow was considered a bit of a drain on resources, a “luxury” who some of them had been waiting for an excuse to remove

i don’t recall other episodes really; this particular one made a huge impression on me — probably because of the debate, tho i think partly because it was somewhat like pertwee-era doctor who in setting, with actual real grown-up issues (but doctor who would of course have resolved matters the way *i* was arguing for)

hmmm spoilers yes — but this was broadcast 33 years ago!

“About the only prominent film director who actually depicts realistic trauma is Paul Verhoeven, possibly because he and Oliver Stone are about the only ones who’ve ever seen any; and every film he makes gets criticised for being over-the-top in terms of blood, gore, dismemberment etc.”

“I don’t remember that in Showgirls. Maybe I should have watched it all the way to the end after all?”

Showgirls was widely criticised for being over-the-top in terms of etcetera. Verhoeven argued that all the etcetera shots were artistically justified.

Not just scale—though you’re right to point out that it’s a component—it’s typically the nice middle class protagonist who wakes up to a world with fewer inconvenient working-class people, after all.

Yeah! Yeah! And what about the miners, eh?

>Yeah! Yeah! And what about the miners, eh?

I recall there were undisguised allusions to nasty flying-picket types. The Dave Spartists wanted to ruin the new Jersualem by setting up dark satanic mills, and forcing the sloans to do a proper day’s work.

Growing up in Attercliffe, they all seemed posh to me. I need to watch the thing again though, Harry–to see how embourgoised I have become.

yes, i grew up in the (very) rural agricultural west midlands, so at that point i was probably over-reading rural class politics into it and missing any hints (or indeed massive giant nudges) of much else

prescient? uh-oh

#29: “every detail is correct”, up to a point; the crime was murder.

belle le triste:

I must have read Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids (1951) as a young teen in 1952.

Try to imagine the impact of the narrative on readers then, years before satellites, let alone communications and military satellites, and many decades before GM crops.

Wyndham was prescient.

Belle – Wyndham was doing something significant which we ought to do but tend not to. He was envisaging not just credible innovative technologies but the potential consequences if such technologies malfunction in unexpected ways.

A news item of a few weeks back related to a man in France who dropped his mobile down a loo on one of the fast TGV express trains. He reached down to retrieve the dropped phone and got sucked down the loo – I joke not. The train was held up for several hours while they tried to rescue the man. Eventually, they cut away the loo from the train and took it away with the man still attached.

This following is a sad but true story about the introduction of industrialised personal healthcare into our National Health Service at new local health centres where the doctor a patient sees will likely be someone they have never met before and probably won’t see again.

To make this new practice at health centres feasible, the doctors there need to have easy access to the medical records of attending patients on computer screens. In a recent case of an elderly patient, his wife who went with him advised the doctor at the local health centre that her husband was allergic to penicillin. But the record on the computer screen made no mention of this allergy so the doctor prescribed penicillin. On the admiistration of the penicillin, the patient swelled up – a standard allergic reaction – and died.

Now I know my GP and asked him where my medical record which he had on his computer screen was stored. He said he had no idea.

See this recent news item from the FT:

“Progress on the £12bn computer programme designed to give doctors instant access to patients’ records across the country has virtually ground to a halt, raising questions about whether the world’s biggest civil information technology project will ever be finished.”
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/50b13312-a48f-11dd-8104-000077b07658.html?nclick_check=1

He was envisaging not just credible innovative technologies but the potential consequences if such technologies malfunction in unexpected ways.

“If we continue to seek greater crop production through careful cross-breeding of existing species of plant, there is the potential for creating eight-foot-tall ambulatory plants that talk to each other by rattling their stems and use their giant, poisonous whiplash tendrils to blind, kill and eat people.”

Good job he blew the whistle on that one.

I always wondered exactly what the discussions in the (I believe, Soviet) agricultural lab that created the first triffid were like.

“Well, Comrade Director, these are our latest cultivars. This one, cultivar 151A, has a yield of 2250 kilograms of high-quality vegetable oil per hectare, and can survive night time temperatures down to minus 5C. Cultivar 159A, on the other hand, has a lower yield – 2000 kilograms – but I think that could be outweighed by its greater resistance to disease. Also, it doesn’t require additional fertiliser.”

“Hmmm. That’s good.”

“Thank you, Comrade.”

“What about this one?”

“Ah, yes. Cultivar 231K. This one has a slightly higher yield of 2400 kilograms per hectare, but it does tend to, well, hunt, kill and eat the farm workers.”

“Really? Oh well, plenty more where they came from. I’ll authorise it for full-scale production!”

belle – do try this recent news report about research into what is called: epigenetics:

“Malnourishment in the womb causes genetic changes that can still be seen when people reach middle and old age, according to new research that shows how strongly environmental influences can interact with the human genome to shape health.

“A study of children born during the Dutch ‘Hunger Winter’, a famine that struck at the end of the Second World War, has found that some still bear its lasting genetic legacy more than six decades on. . .”
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/health/article5029679.ece

Lysenko may have had no valid scientific reasons at the time for the theories he espoused but on recent research findings he may not have been talking complete nonsense.

1990 was certainly from the political loony-right, with Britain having turned into a police state run by the trades unions.

There was one episode (series two episode six, I looked it up some time ago) which I seem to recall featured a world chess championship match in which the English player – England turning into Russia, geddit – broke off from the game in order to address the TV camera and tell the world it was “like a prison here”.

@50: I read it all the way through, and couldn’t find any mention of anything supporting the hypothesis that changes to somatic DNA of individuals in the womb would be conserved in the germ-line – which is what is necessary for ‘Lysenkoist’ modification to work. Many things can alter somatic DNA – the blueprint of the individual between conception and final adult development. Some are random mutations, like those causing forms of dwarfism and phocomelia; others are external factors – thalidomide, heavy metals, etc. As Alison Lapper shows admirably, someone born with almost no limbs can subsequently bear a fully-developed quote-unquote ‘normal’ child.

Unless and until you can ‘get at’ the germ-line DNA buried in the sperm and ova, Lysenkoism is still a dead letter.

54: I concur – though I haven’t seen the original paper, there is no mention in the article of lower degrees of IGF2 methylation in the offspring of famine babies; and not surprising that if your parents “are at high risk of a wide variety of health problems, including diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular disease” then you are more likely to be born underweight – no genetic influence necessary. Lysenkoism implies inheritance of acquired characteristics. Not happening here.

1985 was a particularly poor effort, though of the same kind: the paranoid right who couldn’t tell a strike from a conspiracy. Not sure why the trade union movement is somehow responsible for 1990 being comissioned: the reputation of the writer, the highly successful Wilfred Greatorex, may have been of greater importance than the series’ politics.

Oh, quite possibly. (Or you might be mixing it up with An Englishman’s Castle, which ran at much the same time, or so my fallible memory tells me.)

Oh no, it was definitely 1990. Edward Woodward!

Hot news update:

“A new television adaptation of classic sci-fi story The Day of The Triffids is being made by the BBC. The drama, about menacing plants taking over the world, will be shown in two feature-length episodes next year.”
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/7753322.stm

Hooray!

I can remember the original Survvors pretty well but I’m drawing a complete blank on 1990 which is odd because we did’t watch commercial television in our house and lapped up pretty much everything the beeb put out in those days – as long as it was on before 10pm or so.

On the other hand I still have very vivid memories of a lot of Play For Today although I’m sure that if they were re-run now I’d find plenty of faults with them