by Alwyn Turner
If this was the starting point for Survivors, Nation also discovered during the writing process that he was revisiting a key theme that had run through much of his previous work. ‘It is only since I started work on this new series,’ he said, ‘that I have realised my writing has previously been dominated by the business of survival: the people in those other series survived because of their extreme cleverness, wit or ability.’ In an interview with the Daily Express, promoting the show, he stressed the same point: ‘I’ve been thinking about this for twenty years. I’ve written The Saint and The Persuaders! – people always against the odds.’
Perhaps these weren’t the best examples that Nation could have chosen from his previous work, for the ITC series featured resourcefulness in very specific situations; when John Mannering or Simon Templar improvise their way out of danger, it demonstrates quick thinking in a moment of high stress, not the long-term methodical planning required in a society that has collapsed completely. But there were certainly precedents in his work, starting with the title of the show itself. It harked back to the original storyline for ‘The Daleks’, which had been called ‘The Survivors’ (as broadcast, the second episode of the serial bore that title), and had also been set in the aftermath of an apocalypse that destroyed almost all civilisation on the planet. Indeed the theme of a largely depopulated planet was a regular one, from the neutron bomb in ‘The Daleks’ to the solium radiation device yet to come in the Blake’s 7 episode ‘Countdown’. And there are perhaps echoes of other plagues in ‘Planet of the Daleks’ and ‘Death to the Daleks’.
More directly, the original script for ‘The Daleks’ Master Plan’ had included discussion of ‘sending planets back in time to a primitive past.’ ‘The Earth can start again,’ Mavic Chen was to have reflected, ‘but without the shackles of infantile philosophies like democracy. It will be a new and virgin land which can be shaped.’ Similarly in the original scripts for ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’, one of the characters recounts how the invasion was prefaced by the dropping of bacteria bombs, killing most of humanity with a deadly virus; when there were insufficient numbers of humans left to carry the disease, it faded away, and those who were left grouped themselves into small communities, working the land and fighting off attacks from marauding gangs. The arrival of the Daleks has interrupted this process, but as the possibility of defeating the invaders becomes a reality, attention turns again to the rebuilding of society. David, one of the resistance fighters, emphasises that agriculture is the way forward: ‘It’s the land that matters, isn’t it? The world’s saturated itself with science.’ He later talks of soil as ‘The most valuable thing we have, the basis of all life.’ Little of this made it into the televised version of the serial, but there were definite resonances to be heard in Survivors. Even in the minor details of ‘Invasion’ there were elements that would recur in the later series; we were to be told of radio hams linking some of the groups of survivors together, while Susan’s response when she learns that humans are fighting each other for food and supplies tersely summarises one of Nation’s chief concerns: ‘Survival at all costs.’ The timing was not far removed either; the first draft of ‘Invasion’ set the action in 2041, with the Doctor calculating that Earth must have succumbed to the Daleks in the 1970s.
But if Nation drew on elements of his earlier work for Survivors, they were to be transformed into something much more convincing here. Perhaps buoyed by the new-found critical respectability of the Daleks and the unusually good notices for The House in Nightmare Park, Nation began to enjoy something of a purple patch, writing – in addition to ‘Genesis of the Daleks’ – seven episodes of what turned out to be the thirteen-week series of Survivors, among them some of his best work. In particular the opening three episodes, which link together into a continuous narrative, are hugely effective, a sustained two-and-a-half-hour tale that for the first time allowed him the leisure to develop character, as well as to explore his favourite concerns in some depth. In the absence of the cliff-hanger endings that were demanded every twenty minutes or so in Doctor Who, the pacing is less forced, and the moments of action and high drama emerge more naturally from the narrative. This was new territory for a writer who had come from comedy into children’s science fiction and action adventure stories, and there was nothing in his list of credits to guarantee that it would work, but it was a challenge to which Nation proved himself more than capable of responding.
He did so largely by changing his writing style. In reference to a scene in ‘Planet of the Daleks’, Terrance Dicks once pointed out: ‘The thing about Terry Nation scripts is that he had this technique where he puts the characters into a bad situation, and almost immediately makes things worse. So you’re climbing up the tunnel and then the ice is coming up behind you. And when you reach the top, the doors start closing.’ The same approach was evident in The Baron and The Persuaders! as well as – allowing for genre differences – in his early comedy writing; incidents were heaped one on top of another for dramatic effect, not always as a logical consequence of one another. In Survivors, however, he abandoned his familiar structure in favour of a more straightforward linear tale.
The story opens in the familiar television world of a village full of half-timbered, thatched cottages, almost a parody of an Agatha Christie community in the Home Counties. There are already signs that an epidemic is disrupting normal life as a wealthy housewife, Abby Grant (Carolyn Seymour), waits for her husband David (Peter Bowles) to come home on a commuter train that doesn’t arrive. When he does finally appear, having completed his journey from London by bus, the implication is that this is typical of the situation one expects in modern Britain. It could be ‘a bad snow fall or a rail strike’, comments Abby, though David is still furious at the lack of service: ‘I’ve never seen anything like it. It’ll take them literally days to get things sorted out. Not that I saw anybody doing anything about it.’ Intercut with this portrayal of near-normal frustration is the story of Jenny Richards (Lucy Fleming), a young woman living in London whose flatmate has come down with the mystery virus. It is largely through her experiences that we get a glimpse of how bad the situation really is, as she goes to a hospital seeking help for her friend, only to be shocked at the number of patients seeking admission. ‘The home secretary has ordered us to keep up the fiction,’ she’s told by a doctor. ‘With the speed this thing is travelling, we have no way of stopping it. In a few days the dead will outnumber the living, the cities will be like open cess-pits.’
This theme of the dangers of the city is reinforced by Abby’s own reflections as she fixes a belated supper for her husband. ‘You know, I never thought what happens to a city. If it all breaks down, all at the same time. There’s no power, there’s no lighting or cooking, and food, even if you get it into the city, you can’t distribute it. Then there’s water, sewage – yeuch! – things like that.’ She concludes: ‘The city’s like a great big, pampered baby, with thousands of people feeding it and cleaning it and making sure it’s all right.’ The echoes of The Caves of Steel, with its analysis of urban insecurity, are unmistakable. ‘New York must spend every ounce of effort getting water in and waste out,’ a character had observed in Asimov’s novel. ‘The balance is a very delicate one in a hundred directions, and growing more delicate every year.’ The consequence is that humanity has become dependent on the city itself: ‘Earthmen are so coddled, so enwombed in their imprisoning caves of steel, that they are caught forever.’ It was a theme that had surfaced elsewhere in Nation’s work, most notably in the sentient city of ‘Death to the Daleks’. Here, however, it’s not a science fiction projection into the future, but a simple recognition of the situation that modern humanity has already created for itself.
By this stage the gloom is gathering. As the lights go out, it descends even into the cosy kitchen that should be Abby and David’s refuge from the world. And we know that bad times are coming. In ‘Planet of the Daleks’ Nation had employed a basic device of dramatic irony
, showing the Doctor being treated by the Thals for a fungal infection received when one of the plants spat at him; without treatment, the fungus will grow and spread over his body to engulf him completely. We then cut to Jo who notices fungal growth on her hand, though she doesn’t know what it is or that she needs immediate treatment. The same technique is used here: we learn from the depiction of Jenny’s flatmate that the symptoms of the disease include sweating and swellings under the arms, and that the prognosis is certain death, so when Abby pads perspiration from her face and feels gingerly under her arm, we recognise – even though she doesn’t – that she has been infected. Sure enough, she soon falls into unconsciousness.
Five days later she wakes up – one of the very few to recover from the plague – to find that she is alone in what seems like a dead world. Her husband’s corpse is in the living room and when she goes out into the village, there is no one left alive, just a church with, it is suggested, the pews full of the dead. As she leaves the church, she looks up to the heavens and prays, ‘Oh God, please don’t let me be the only one.’
With her husband and neighbours gone, she drives to the boarding school where her son, Peter, was a pupil. Again she finds initially nothing but death and silence, though there is also a faint glimmering of hope; Peter’s bed is the only one in the dormitory not occupied by a corpse. Eventually she finds a single survivor, Dr Bronson (Peter Copley), a teacher who initiates the discussion that will dominate the series: how do the few members of humanity who have come through this deadly epidemic begin to build a new world? Abby’s suggestion that there’s plenty of stuff lying around just waiting to be used is dismissed as mere ‘scavenging’, and Bronson goes on to explain how difficult it’s going to be to survive the aftermath of the epidemic, learning from scratch how to make everything. Electric lighting isn’t simply about generating power, he points out, but about extracting metal from the earth and refining it to make wires, as well as blowing glass to make a light bulb; in reality, most of us couldn’t even make a candle.
This is the argument that Abby takes with her as the focus of the story widens in the second episode, ‘Genesis’, to show others beginning to make plans for the future. She makes contact with a small group led by Arthur Wormley (George Baker), a trade union leader in the old world who’s looking now to the future. ‘There’s odd people moving around all over the country, aimless, lost. They’ll make contact with each other, start forming into groups. Somebody’s got to unite those groups, bring them under central control. They’ll want leadership, guidance, they’ll want somebody in authority.’ It’s a role he clearly relishes: ‘I think God might have spared me to help those of us that are left. That’s my skill, that’s my talent: organisation.’ When challenged by Abby about his practical abilities, he says modestly that he has the skills to knock up a simple table, but she queries the claim: ‘Right from scratch? You’d fell the timber? With what? An axe or a saw. The steel for the saw has been made in a foundry, the iron ore has been dug from the ground, and the fuel to smelt it with has been mined. Now, what happens when the last axe-head cracks and the last saw breaks?’ She then restates Dr Bronson’s analysis: ‘Our civilisation had the technology to land a man on the moon, but as individuals we don’t even have the skill to make an iron spearhead. We are less practical than Iron Age man.’ But still he remains more concerned with establishing ‘the rudiments of government’ as the first objective. When he responds to an attack on the house he has commandeered by having one of the intruders shot dead, Abby makes her excuses and leaves.
The episode ends as she joins forces with the other two central figures in the first season, Jenny and an engineer named Greg Preston (Ian McCulloch), the former eager for human contact, the latter revelling in the freedom of having no responsibilities for anyone else. They have also, separately, encountered other variations on the theme of survival. On the one hand there is a Welsh tramp, Tom Price (Talfryn Thomas), who has a naïve faith that salvation will come from America: ‘The Yanks’ll have something, don’t worry. In the war, they give us the stuff then. The Yanks’ll fix us up, don’t worry.’ On the other hand there are Anne Tranter (Myra Frances) and Vic Thatcher (Terry Scully), who have holed up in a quarry, accumulating vast quantities of stores from nearby towns to use as security. ‘I don’t think we’re going to be too badly off,’ reflects Anne. ‘You see, from now on money isn’t going to mean anything. The rich will be the ones who’ve got things.’ In her past life she had servants and she sees no reason why she can’t buy the labour of others now: the essential law of property relations will surely continue.
These conflicting ideas of how society should be rebuilt dominate the early stages of the series, generating much of the action. When Abby, Jenny and Greg go to a supermarket for supplies, they are interrupted by an armed gang of Wormley’s men. ‘There was a state of martial law declared,’ one of them explains. ‘Looters can be shot on sight.’ Our trio win this encounter, but later find that the sanctuary they have established in a church has been smashed up by Wormley’s thugs. Abby is deeply shocked by the violence: ‘I thought that those of us who were left would come together, I mean really come together. There wouldn’t be national interests, nor political, just a total unity and a sense of purpose. And that one thing we have in common – that we are survivors – should have been enough.’
These episodes were being written in highly charged political times – Edward Heath’s government had just fallen, following its confrontation with the miners – and the overtones are unavoidable. Abby accuses Wormley of acting like a feudal baron, using the familiar title then accorded to trade union leaders, and when one of his henchmen brags, ‘We are the authorities now,’ it has the resonance of a quote attributed to Hartley Shawcross, the attorney general in the post-war Labour government: ‘We are the masters now.’ Given his background and Kate’s parentage, Nation’s sympathies were with the miners in their dispute with the government, but the political position of his central character – her belief that in a time of absolute crisis there should be a coming together – resonated with a current more often heard on the centre-right at this period.
The Labour home secretary, Roy Jenkins, believed at the start of 1975 that the situation in Britain had become bad enough that it was time for a government of national unity and that the nation was ready for it. ‘He wants a coalition government and expects to see one in the first half of this year,’ it was reported, with Jenkins making clear that whoever led this alliance, he expected to take over very swiftly. Other politicians, mostly in the Conservative and Liberal parties, were coming to the same conclusion, and even the Queen seemed to share the feeling. ‘Different people have different views about our problems and how they should be solved,’ read the text of her 1973 Christmas broadcast. ‘Let us remember, however, that what we have in common is more important than what divides us.’ That passage was deleted at the request of Heath, attempting to keep the monarch out of the political debate, but he himself had some sympathy with the concept of coalition.
The motivation behind this desire was the hope that a coalition government might provide a unified voice in opposition to precisely the kind of union leader represented by Arthur Wormley and, in real life, by Jack Jones, the general secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union, who was identified in an opinion poll as being the most powerful man in the country. At a time when trade union power was the most contentious issue in British politics – it had brought down successive governments in 1970 and 1974 and was to do so again in 1979 – Wormley’s previous occupation was a very deliberate choice. His name also suggested a cross between Arthur Scargill and Joe Gormley, the two most prominent figures in the National Union of Mineworkers.
There was too, in the depiction of Wormley’s militia, a nod towards certain right-wing figures of the era, the likes of General Sir Walter Walker and Colonel David Stirling, who were calling for the formation of private armies of ‘volunteers on call to the government in the event
of a crisis’. They may have been fantasists, but the state of the nation was sufficiently chaotic to lend some credence to their vision. ‘Two years ago we could have easily faced a coup in Britain,’ said Jack Jones in 1977, looking back on the period when the first season of Survivors was being broadcast. ‘There was talk of private armies being assembled. There was talk of the end of democracy.’
The fact that Abby, Jenny and Greg spent time discussing the future direction of the community they wished to establish, and the society they wanted to see emerge, annoyed some critics. ‘Just as Doctor Who, when chased by marauding Daleks, will gather his witless assistants around him for a time-wasting conversation,’ wrote Clive James in the Observer, ‘so the Survivors, while being pursued by a ravening carload of hooligans with guns, pause for a metaphysical interchange rivalling The Symposium in duration.’ But, as so often, James’s comments missed the essence of the drama: the arguments over the nature of society arise from, and comment upon, the action. And, as the cornerstone of the series, the debate was continued in later episodes written by Nation.
