by Alwyn Turner
In ‘The Future Hour’ the trio, now settled down in a large manor house with various others they have collected on the way and trying to establish an agrarian community, encounter itinerant trader Bernard Huxley (his name conflating those of the protagonist and the author of Brave New World), played by Glyn Owen. Huxley leads a convoy that scavenges in towns for food, hardware and other household goods, which they then sell to the various scattered settlements, offering to take gold in exchange, in anticipation of society eventually settling down and needing to re-establish a currency. His obsession with collecting gold is roundly mocked (‘He’s a nutcase,’ says one character; ‘Bananas,’ agrees another), though the idea that a precious metal might one day become a useful symbol of exchange is as logical as Wormley’s wish to form a government. Others are also to express their opinions on what counts as currency in the new world. ‘Cartridges – the money of the future, you mark my words,’ says Tom Price, while elsewhere petrol becomes the most valuable commodity.
A more perceptive comment on Huxley’s values comes from Emma Cohen (Hana Maria Pravda), when she’s told that he won’t let a pregnant woman in his convoy keep her child, because he doesn’t want to be burdened with it. ‘Burdened with it?’ she exclaims. ‘Who does he think’s going to feed him in his old age?’ And when, following a dispute, the community faces an armed confrontation with Huxley’s men, its liberal values are made explicit in Greg’s instructions: ‘There’s to be no shooting. Not unless they start it.’
Even in ‘Something of Value’ there is room for discussion, though much of the episode is a siege story, with Greg trapped in a barn defending a tanker of petrol against three armed men. The situation is tense and exciting enough that it could have come straight from The Baron, except that here it’s preceded by a stranger arriving at the manor house with news of what’s going on elsewhere. ‘There seems to be a narrowing down of choices. Groups that have set up small communities, like you here, people grafting away to become self-supporting,’ he explains. There are still some wandering nomadically, but others have entrenched themselves with their stores in armed camps. ‘Things must get worse before they get better. Groups are setting up but they have different ideas and they’re becoming afraid of one another. That makes them insular.’ And Nation’s original thread – the frail interdependence of the modern world – is expressed by one of the men trying to steal the community’s petrol. ‘Have you any idea what this country used to spend on imported food?’ he asks rhetorically. ‘Billions, billions of pounds. There wasn’t a single day in your life when you didn’t eat something that was brought in from abroad: grain, chocolate, rice – the list goes on and on – sugar, coffee, yes and including that tea you’re swilling down.’ His comrade, who has been protesting all the way through this diatribe (‘Yes, yes, all right, don’t go on about it’), sums up his lack of interest in such philosophising as the first man walks away: ‘Know-all!’ In a different context, it could be Tony Hancock and Sid James bickering.
That conversation comes in the penultimate episode of the first season, and the second man’s dismissive attitude suggests that the argument has moved on; there has been a shift in the series away from the past – we are now nearly a year on from the epidemic – and towards practical preparations for the future. There is a form of evolution at work here, a struggle among ideas in which only the fittest will survive. And there’s a clear direction emerging. The initial pluralism of societies is resolving into a straightforward conflict between two opposed visions: the rule of force on the one side, and a rough and ready cooperative democracy on the other. To put it another way, the clash is between different concepts of leadership, a theme that preoccupied Nation throughout his work.
All his heroes, from the Doctor to the Saint and the Baron, are portrayed as natural leaders. ‘A man of forty, tough and rugged’, was Nation’s description in ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’ of the resistance fighter Tyler. ‘Very strong face. A determined man with the qualities of leadership.’ But so too are their opponents, the massed ranks of megalomaniacs and would-be dictators represented at their apex by Davros; there is never any question as to their leadership abilities, only the direction in which they are expressed. The key distinction is between those who actively seek power and those who will reluctantly accept it being passed to them, the gulf between Arthur Wormley’s faux-modest ‘it’s up to somebody to take the power to lead’ and Abby Grant’s honest self-appraisal: ‘I couldn’t be a leader. I can’t be responsible for other people’s lives. I couldn’t do it.’ Despite their different starting positions, both are accepted as the leaders of their groups. ‘Nobody doubted her authority, and no one even considered challenging it,’ Nation wrote of Abby in his novel of Survivors. ‘That she was their leader never occurred to her.’
But the nuances are more subtle here than in Doctor Who or the ITC shows. Wormley is evidently descended from the villains of popular fiction, surrounded by thugs acting as a private army, as was Squires (Bernard Lee), the baddie in ‘The Body Snatchers’ in The Champions, or Brigadier Brett in ‘Invasion of the Earthmen’ in The Avengers. And the name of his militia group – the National Unity Force, or NUF – carried associations not merely of the initials of contemporary trade unions (NUM, NUR, NUS, etc.), but also of Oswald Moseley’s British Union of Fascists. Yet his ideas are not dismissed out of hand. He may be a dictator, but he believes he’s acting in the best interests of his own community, and he’s a much more carefully shaded character. When he argues for the need to stop people hoarding supplies so that they might instead be distributed fairly, the scene comes immediately after we’ve seen Vic Thatcher and Anne Tranter stockpiling goods for purely selfish reasons. Given the extreme situation in which the survivors find themselves, the need for strong leadership is ever more apparent and urgent. And although Wormley’s expansionist ambitions are portrayed as morally objectionable, his core philosophy is not far removed from that of Jimmy Garland, a character portrayed far more sympathetically.
Played by Richard Heffer, Jimmy Garland, the 14th Earl of Waterhouse, is one of Terry Nation’s great creations, the ultimate embodiment of the boys’ adventure stories he read as a child. As a fourth son, Garland had no expectation of ever inheriting the earldom or the estate, Waterhouse, that went with it, but in the wake of the epidemic, he is the sole survivor and he feels that his hour has come at last. His only problem is that the ancestral home has been commandeered by a group of survivors led by a man named Knox (Peter Jeffrey), and he’s now engaged in a one-man war to reclaim what he considers his rightful inheritance – indeed the episode that introduces him is titled ‘Garland’s War’.
Before the plague, he tried to keep himself amused galloping around the globe, desperately seeking out expeditions to the Amazon, the Zaire river, the poles, anywhere that offered him the hope of excitement. Yet he was forever chafing at the bit. ‘Wherever white man had not trod before, I was there. But my kind were rather running out of world,’ he explains. ‘You’d scale some unconquered peak, get to the top and like as not find a television camera. Hack your way through darkest jungle and come face-to-face with a film crew shooting nature pictures. There just wasn’t much left.’
‘You should have been born two hundred years ago,’ remarks Abby Grant, and Garland puts her right: ‘Oh, no. Now’s the time to be alive, now’s the best time of all.’ His intention is to replace Knox and establish himself at the head of a neo-feudal society. ‘I am better equipped and trained to administer the running of an estate than any of them,’ he insists. ‘I suppose it might sound paternal, but it would always be benevolent. I’d put as much into that society as anyone else, and they’d all have a say in what went on.’ This is what his family has been doing for centuries and he sees no reason to stop now. ‘Wouldn’t it be better just to join them?’ Abby asks. ‘Do you have to be the leader?’ He simply looks at her, raising his left eyebrow as though he were Simon Templar. She laughs: ‘Yes, I suppose you do.’
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nbsp; For Abby has fallen under the spell of this impossibly good-looking hero, living in a secret den in the woods, revelling in his booby-traps and ambushes, staying always one step ahead of Knox’s men. He hunts his own food, keeps a decent drinks cabinet and is romantic enough to light two cigarettes at once and then pass one to her, in the time-honoured manner popularised by Paul Henreid in the 1942 film Now, Voyager. (In the novel of Survivors, Knox lights his own cigarette before offering one to her, a basic breach of etiquette that – in the lexicon of a smoker like Nation – signals he is not to be trusted.) While aristocratic pedigree ought perhaps to mean nothing in this fearful new world, it takes more than a global epidemic to wipe out generations of breeding, and anyway Garland’s vision of Waterhouse as ‘a self-supporting estate’ is perfectly in tune with Abby’s own thoughts for the future. Quite rightly, he’s also a man of honour. When Abby negotiates a ceasefire so that the two rivals might attempt to negotiate a settlement, Knox is confident that Garland will come unarmed: ‘He’s given his word. That’s one thing we can depend on.’ Which naturally allows Knox to break his own word and have Garland seized, despite Abby’s protests. ‘Oh, to hell with promises!’ he says. ‘Those are old standards: a man’s word being his bond, contracts, treaties. Things like that don’t apply anymore, we just do or say whatever is expedient. There are no Queensbury Rules for survival.’ As the Doctor before him has found out, and Roj Blake will later discover, decency is often the weak point in the armour of a hero.
The episode ends with Abby asking Garland to come away with her. But he refuses, because ‘Nothing’s settled yet, the war’s not over.’ He clearly understands the convention observed by the old 1920s thriller heroes, the likes of Richard Hannay or Bulldog Drummond, that a real man doesn’t win his woman with words, but with deeds. ‘Shall I see you again?’ she asks. He promises, ‘I’ll find you.’
And of course he does. In ‘A Beginning’, the final episode of the first season, he returns, literally riding in on a white charger (it’s named Jasper, even if that is the name of the archetypal Victorian villain), to whisk Abby off to a picture-postcard country cottage on his estate, which he keeps for those times when he needs some privacy. While we’ve been away, following events with Abby and the others, Knox has broken his neck in an accident and the people at Waterhouse have come to Garland asking for his guidance, thereby allowing him to emerge as the rightful moral leader he was destined to be. Wearing riding boots and a burgundy blouson, unbuttoned to reveal a manly chest and a medallion, he shows Abby what she’s been missing. ‘You need looking after,’ he tells her. ‘What do you fancy? There’s rabbit – I expect you’re rather fed up with that. Venison, but it’s a bit high. What I can offer you is my speciality: oxtail with haricot beans.’ When we cut back to them, they’re sharing a post-coital glass of champagne (he’s wearing a silk dressing-gown now) and he’s trying to persuade her to stay with him, using a neat line in post-apocalyptic pillow talk: ‘The world’s a marvellous place. It always was, it was the people that turned it sour. We could help to sweeten it.’ He’s also good at a kind of existential romanticism: ‘I know how to face facts. We must be what we are, do what we must do.’ When Abby wonders whether they can just leave their communities behind, he replies: ‘They can do without me, just as your people can do without you. All that’s indispensable is what we’ve got: you and me.’
Abby can hardly fail to be tempted by such a fabulous offer, but at the very end of the episode, it’s swept into irrelevance by the news that there has been a sighting of her son, Peter, for whom she spent much of the first half of the series looking, and for whose survival she has never quite given up hope. Hopes have been raised and dashed throughout the story – Abby went to Waterhouse in the first place because she’d heard there were boys there of Peter’s age – but this time it seems the news is both positive and genuine.
It was a surprisingly cheerful note on which to end a series that had been dark and downbeat for the majority of its run. The show had been a moderate success, attracting an audience big enough to warrant the commissioning of a second season, though the critics were for the most part lukewarm. Praise came from Shaun Usher in the Daily Mail – ‘At times, Nation mastered the H.G. Wells format, so effective in War of the Worlds, by which extraordinary events are set in actual, small-scale landscapes’ – but the Guardian was ambivalent (‘impressive, creepy, but a bit comic-strippy’), with its reviewer Nancy Banks-Smith, a normally reliable guide, distinctly underwhelmed: ‘a perfectly passable pastime,’ she concluded, ‘but you wouldn’t accuse it of being ambitious.’ And Stanley Reynolds in The Times was disappointed: ‘It has slowed down considerably since the initial episode,’ he wrote, five shows in. ‘I had hoped for some perhaps classic SF from Terry Nation, and it has just not been forthcoming.’
Perhaps Reynolds’s mistake was expecting science fiction at all, for the show didn’t fall comfortably into that bracket. The title sequence showed a scientist dropping a flask, presumably containing the virus, followed by a montage of air travel shots and passport stamps, to indicate the rapid spread of the contagion around the world, before a bloodstain seeps over the image to fill the screen. The imagery is thus drawn from the thriller genre rather than from science fiction, and even then it applies only to the opening; the tone for the remainder is more akin to an historical drama, albeit one set in a future history of deindustrialisation. Survivors makes absolutely no attempt to explore the science fiction potential of the story.
Instead the world we encounter, once we have left London behind in the first episode, is an entirely recognisable contemporary Britain. Much of the series was filmed on location, and the shots of deserted English countryside gave it a beautiful if slightly unsettling feel, the emptiness emphasised by the absence of incidental music (omitted because a strike at the BBC meant the production schedule was absurdly tight). The scale may have been small – ‘the Four Shetland-Pony Riders of the Apocalypse’, as Shaun Usher described it – but it was entirely effective. And the low budget meant that, as with all the best BBC dramas of the era, the focus was entirely upon the script and the actors. Many of these latter, incidentally, had already appeared in Nation’s work, perhaps inevitably given the diversity of his career thus far: Talfryn Thomas was making his fourth appearance, but there were also Lucy Fleming from ‘Invasion of the Earthmen’, Glyn Owen from ‘Imposter’, Hana Maria Pravda from And Soon the Darkness, George Baker from ‘Chain of Events’, and Peter Copley and Peter Jeffrey from an episode each of The Saint (‘The Sign of the Claw’ and ‘The Crime of the Century’ respectively). The landscape, and the people within it, were familiar, but the texture was deeply disquieting.
The distance that Nation had come as a writer over the last fifteen years was highlighted when the episode ‘The Future Hour’ was scheduled immediately after a rare television screening of What a Whopper (‘written by Terry Nation,’ noted the Guardian, ‘who’s seen to better effect in the next programme’), but the overall tone of pessimism was not unprecedented. Ever since he had encouraged his most famous monsters to run rampant through the streets of swinging London in ‘The Dalek Invasion of Earth’, Nation had been exploring ever darker material and, left to himself, Survivors too would have been even more bleak. He wrote seven episodes and helped create the shape of the overall series, but four episodes were also contributed by another writer, Jack Ronder, and two by Nation’s old friend Clive Exton, writing here under the pseudonym M.K. Jeeves.
There was no problem with the latter – Exton was a great television writer and one of his scripts, ‘Law and Order’, is among the most celebrated of the Survivors episodes – but Ronder’s work seemed to go against the grain of Nation’s vision. It was not simply that he wrote the episodes that saw the community established, giving a more domestic focus to the story, but that the emphasis was a little wayward. In his story ‘Revenge’, Vic Thatcher and Anne Tranter meet again for the first time since she left him for dead in their quarry hideawa
y (his legs had been crushed under a tractor), and the episode rapidly descends into melodrama with Anne, a character full of interesting potential, now cast in the simple role of soap opera bitch. The wheelchair-bound Vic, meanwhile, has been given the job of teaching the children in the community, and there is the beginning of a discussion about what should constitute education in these circumstances – whether learning sums is necessary, for example, or the history of ancient Rome – but such concerns are soon forgotten when Anne tries to murder him before he can exact his revenge on her.
It was a long way from the harsh reality that Nation heard about from his cousin, a paratrooper captured by the Germans at the 1944 Battle of Arnhem and marched off to the east. ‘One night, many years afterwards when he was drunk, he told me about it,’ remembered Nation. ‘This was survival’, he said, ‘when your best friends, the people you care for, became your enemy. If they had a potato in their pocket, you’d want to steal it because that was survival. I knew the drive to live was very powerful and that’s what I wanted to investigate.’ In 1972 he had talked about his ambitions for his own work, suggesting a certain impatience with the restrictions he felt under and a desire to move away from escapism: ‘I’d like to be able to write a show that made people turn off on occasions, to feel some emotion, either hate or loathing or fear or disgust or something. But really to feel something again. I would just like to outrage and shock and horrify and make people know they’re watching something on television, to know at least that they’re alive.’
Survivors was a starker piece of work even than ‘Genesis of the Daleks’, but it never lived up to his aspirations, and was never likely to, given its time slot of 8.10 p.m. on a Wednesday evening, before the 9 p.m. watershed that was intended to demarcate family viewing from more adult themes. There wasn’t much appetite at the BBC for such an extreme tone anyway. Even as Nation was writing the pilot in 1973, the corporation pulled the plug on Nigel Kneale’s fourth and final Quatermass story, which had already started preliminary filming, ostensibly for budgetary reasons but also, as Kneale saw it, because the depiction of a near-future Britain torn apart by rival gangs of thugs, vigilantes and security forces was too much for the BBC to take; it ‘didn’t suit their image at the time; it was too gloomy’. Nation was aware that he had created a great series and couldn’t help but be disappointed with its realisation: ‘This one was, I thought, important, and I’d like to have done it better, I’d like it to have been a better show.’
