by Alwyn Turner
Even if the production didn’t quite live up to his concept, however, Nation did have the satisfaction of having finally brought to the screen an original series of his own. After nearly two decades of false starts, dating back to The Fixers on radio, and fifteen years after the BBC passed up on Uncle Selwyn as a pilot for a proposed television series, Survivors was unequivocally his creation, and it had been commissioned for a second season. As it turned out, however, he was to have no further involvement with the show, having fallen out with the producer, Terence Dudley, who was, he declared, ‘thick as a board’. Perhaps even worse, he had also fallen out with an old friend and colleague, Brian Clemens, over claims that he had stolen the idea for Survivors in the first place.
Chapter Thirteen
Surviving
Terry Nation’s problems on Survivors started with the selection of a producer for the series. The Incredible Robert Baldick had been produced by Anthony Coburn, and Nation discussed the new project with him, since it too was originally intended for the Drama Playhouse slot. As it turned out, however, that strand didn’t come back for a fourth season, and anyway Survivors rapidly progressed beyond the level of a pilot into a fully fledged series. Coburn left for other shows, and in his place came Terence Dudley, who had earlier produced series such as Cluff and The Men from Room Thirteen, though his most recent and relevant success had been Doomwatch, several episodes of which he also wrote.
Perhaps it was Dudley’s aspirations to writing that helped sour the relationship with Nation, for he came to the series with very definite ideas about how it should be shaped, and few of them matched the original vision. ‘I fell out instantly with the producer, Terence Dudley,’ remembered Nation. ‘He didn’t see it at all. Not at all.’ The problems, he said, began very early on, and he used to cite a pre-production meeting at which Dudley insisted that, in the event of such a massive disaster, the BBC would continue to broadcast. This argument was, in Nation’s view, indicative of the man’s inability to grasp the concept of the series fully, though one might feel that he exaggerated the level of what he viewed as naivety. Dudley’s point was not entirely fanciful, as Nation, to whom the radio had been so important during the war, might perhaps have recognised. A couple of years after Survivors, the government and the BBC began working together on plans for how to respond to a nuclear attack, and even got as far as scripting the initial announcements: ‘This is the Wartime Broadcasting Service,’ it was to begin. ‘This country has been attacked with nuclear weapons ...’ It was not unreasonable to assume that, faced with civil disorder following a deadly pandemic, the government would see broadcasting as being among its highest priorities, an essential part of keeping alive at least the illusion of authority.
Nation evidently won the argument, for the BBC is conspicuous by its absence in the series, but it didn’t set the two men off on a good footing. And others involved in the series noticed that Dudley was not a man who easily forgot disputes. Carolyn Seymour, around whose character of Abby the entire first season revolved, ran into problems with the producer even at the stage of contract negotiations. ‘It was a tortuous affair, because I was pushing the envelope a little bit and we were asking for a little bit more money than they were used to paying,’ she recalled. ‘That was one of the problems, that he lost ground, and he had to give up some things he didn’t want to give up.’ Others too fell foul of Dudley, including Clive Exton and the writer Michael J. Bird, who had been commissioned to write three scripts but left the project after the first episode he submitted was rejected.
From Nation’s point of view, a large part of the problem was that there was no script editor to act as a buffer between himself and the producer. Officially he himself was being retained as script consultant, but – isolated in Lynsted Park, with a heavy writing schedule – his ability to shape the continuing storylines was extremely limited. And while Dudley might have conceded the point about the BBC, much of what emerged on screen was determined by him. It was significant, for example, that the discovery at the end of ‘A Beginning’ that Abby Grant’s son Peter is probably still alive was not in Nation’s original script for the episode. Its late addition allowed the season to end on an optimistic note, as well as preparing the ground for Abby’s departure from the series altogether, a development which Carolyn Seymour believed was already in Dudley’s mind long before she learnt of it.
The disputes with Dudley meant that for Nation the creation of Survivors was not a particularly happy experience, and the bitterness was evident in interviews given years later. ‘He wanted to get the electricity turned back on. That was their main aim by the third episode. I could have fought him, and I could have won on every possible occasion, but I was trying to write the episodes, and it gets so exhausting to fight every inch of the way.’ Nation was probably overstating his ability to emerge victorious from any conflicts, but the note of weariness was genuine enough. Pennant Roberts, who directed five episodes of the first season, remembered him chiefly for his absence: ‘He was basically quite a shy man, who kept himself very much to himself down in Kent.’
Nation’s enthusiasm for the series was not increased when Brian Clemens initiated a court case against him for allegedly stealing his idea in the first instance. While the two men were working together on The Avengers and And Soon the Darkness, said Clemens, ‘I came up with this idea called The Survivors, about a holocaust that destroyed the world and what the people did. I couldn’t get it off the ground with London Weekend Television, but then I should think a year later, suddenly I read in the papers that the BBC is doing a series called The Survivors, and it was absolutely my idea. What pissed me off – I didn’t mind him stealing the idea – was that he was so lazy he didn’t even change the title!’ To make matters worse, he thought the series that emerged did no justice to the concept at all: ‘They did it ever so badly. It became a sort of tract on how to survive. Oh, it was awful.’
The lawsuit was brought in the spring of 1975 and dragged on for nearly a year before, in May 1976, Clemens decided that the only beneficiaries were going to be the lawyers and he abandoned the case. ‘After I spent a few thousand pounds, I realised it was a bottomless pit,’ he said. ‘I pulled away.’ Since it never reached a full court hearing, it is impossible to know what Nation’s defence against the accusation of plagiarism would have been, but one can perhaps assume that he would have been able to cite large parts of his own previous writing to demonstrate that Survivors fell clearly into that body of work, from the title onwards. (Though it should be noted that there is no copyright in titles.)
Nor was the idea itself particularly original. Many post-apocalyptic fictions had concerned themselves with the fate of human society in the wake of near-extinction, from Jack London’s The Scarlet Plague (1912) through George R. Stewart’s award-winning Earth Abides (1949) to John Christopher’s The Death of Grass (1956) and John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids and The Chrysalids, traces of all of which can be seen over the course of the series, whether deliberately or not. Indeed the estate of John Wyndham might have had cause to look quizzically at the series, for there are some very obvious nods to The Day of the Triffids, which also featured the proliferation of small communities in the wake of an apocalyptic event, an attempt to impose martial law by the Emergency Council for the South-Eastern Region of Britain, and a widespread belief that help would come from across the Atlantic: a ‘Micawber fixation on American fairy godmothers’. Much of the thinking articulated by Nation is foreshadowed in the same book. ‘There won’t always be these stores,’ a character explains, arguing that the survivors must go ‘back and back and back until we can – if we can – make good all that we wear out’. Wyndham’s novel ends with a colony of survivors on the triffid-free Isle of Wight looking across the Solent at a land under enemy occupation. Similarly the suggestions of empty streets in Survivors are familiar from H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, while the 1953 film version of that book featured a church full of the dead, an image that re
curred in Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Poison Belt: ‘The church was crammed from end to end with kneeling figures,’ notes Malone the narrator, one of only five people to have survived the end of humanity (as it seems). ‘It was a nightmare, the grey, dusty church, the rows of agonised figures, the dimness and silence of it all.’
Given the literary precedents, alongside Clemens’s feeling that ‘I didn’t think they made the series I wanted to do,’ it’s not easy to see how a charge of copyright infringement could have been made to stick, even if he were correct that Nation was inspired by his concept. But the episode ruptured the friendship between the two men, and they remained estranged for nearly two decades until Clemens brought the dispute to an end in the mid 1990s. ‘I wrote to Terry and said: Look, I want to bury the hatchet; we were always good friends before. And he wrote back and said: God, I wish I’d written this letter to you.’ They continued to correspond for the last couple of years of Nation’s life.
Combined with the disputes with Terence Dudley, this distressing affair did little to endear Nation to the idea of further work on Survivors. Even before the first season ended in July 1975, a second had been commissioned and Dudley was writing to Nation, discussing which actors should be retained: ‘All the regulars are available with the exception of Carolyn Seymour. Her availability in future is very much in doubt and I think we should forget about her.’ The final plot twist of ‘A Beginning’ had suggested that Abby wouldn’t be making a reappearance, but the decision still came as a kick to Seymour: ‘It was a shock, it was a blow, I certainly was horrified.’ Abby was not the only casualty of Dudley’s new approach to the series. ‘Thinking hard about Garland,’ he wrote to Nation, ‘I feel that the character has limitations and that he will counter audience identification. I think the “Roger Moore” cardboard is ideal for the hokum series with the stylish tongue in cheek approach. Audiences for this sort of thing escape in fantasy and are voyeurs of the antics of superman.’ Arguing that the bulk of the correspondence he received from viewers was about how they identified with the everyman normality of the characters, Dudley dumped Garland and began to shape the future direction of the series so that it depicted a more settled farming community.
At this stage, in late 1975, Nation was still officially part of the team. He withdrew from the role of script consultant, but was pencilled in to write four episodes in the forthcoming season, and was even commissioned to write two of them, with half-fees being paid upfront. And the letters from Dudley continued to arrive, all of them perfectly friendly and courteous, though they remained unanswered. It wasn’t until January 1976, when the delivery dates for the two scripts had passed with no sign of anything having been written, that Dudley allowed himself to express his true feelings in an internal memo. ‘In my judgement Terry Nation can’t give the programme the sort of scripts it needs at present. He is unhappy writing “character” and “atmosphere” which is the requirement,’ he claimed, adding a hint of his own frustrations from their previous collaborations: ‘I don’t want, as in Series One to commission scripts from him that have to be drastically rewritten by me.’ There is little to support such a claim – save that infelicitous resolution to Abby’s quest tacked on to the end of the first season – but it was an indication of how strained the relationship had become. The commissioned episodes were cancelled, with an agreement that the advances already paid were to be recovered from the royalties due to Nation over the coming season.
A further twenty-five episodes of Survivors were made over the course of two seasons in 1976 and 1977. Nation had no involvement at all, though he was, of course, still being paid his format fees. (Roger Hancock’s negotiating was paying dividends; when the BBC suggested a payment of £175 per episode for the third season, Hancock held out for and won £200 – even allowing for inflation, this represented an increase of nearly 40 per cent on the first contract.) With both Nation and Clive Exton having left, the only writer to survive was Jack Ronder, his scripts augmented by contributions from Don Shaw, Martin Worth and Roger Parkes – all of whom had worked on Doomwatch – as well as an episode apiece from Roger Marshall, a veteran of The Avengers, and from Terence Dudley himself, who was unquestionably the most influential figure in the series, the one constant factor running through all three seasons. There were also three scripts by the actor Ian McCulloch, whose character, Greg Preston, emerged as the most powerful figure in the absence of Abby. ‘I was happier with the same format and the same style that Terry Nation did,’ he was later to say. ‘It was an action adventure as far as I was concerned, and when it got into what I consider the feebler plots, the more philosophical plots, I found them drawn out, boring, banal.’ Convinced that the show had lost its way, he was reluctant to return for the third season at all, and only agreed to appear in the two episodes that he scripted, though his presence looms large throughout.
The post-Nation Survivors had a very different feel to the original. It opened with a fire that wrote out some of the peripheral characters, and saw Greg and the now-pregnant Jenny set up a new community with Charles Vaughan (Dennis Lill), a former architect who had appeared in one of Jack Ronder’s episodes the previous year. Much of this second season was concerned with the maintenance of their settlement, the practical difficulties of establishing a sustainable technology, and there was noticeably less action than in Nation’s work. But certain episodes, such as ‘The Chosen’ and ‘New Arrivals’, both written by Roger Parkes, continued to explore alternative social structures and the nature of leadership. There was also Ronder’s excellent two-part story ‘Lights of London’, depicting a rat-infested city, where five hundred survivors huddle in the Oval cricket ground and – following the example of The Day of the Triffids – plan their escape to the Isle of Wight. They are ruled over by yet another power-hungry leader, Manny (Sydney Tafler), and the blackouts and the scenes set in Tube tunnels evoke the Blitz in a way that even Nation should have appreciated. Manny ends his broadcasts to his people with the catchphrase ‘TTFN’, the sign-off popularised by the charlady Mrs Mopp in Tommy Handley’s ITMA, even though his authoritarianism clearly places him on the wrong side of such imagery.
The third season took another turn again. Greg had departed for Norway in a hot air balloon at the end of the previous year, promising to return, and the survivors moved on from the settlement they had so painstakingly established, spending most of the twelve episodes on the road. Again there were some strong and celebrated episodes: Don Shaw’s ‘Mad Dog’ and Ian McCulloch’s ‘The Last Laugh’, in the latter of which Greg becomes infected with smallpox and acts as a kind of suicide bomber, harbouring within himself a biological weapon as he inveigles his way into the camp of yet another warlord. But there was also a certain lack of focus, as well as a not entirely convincing restoration of elements of pre-plague civilisation: steam trains are put back in action, it is discovered that the Scottish Highlands have been largely unaffected by the infection and, in the final episode, the National Grid is switched back on to provide power.
The series did, however, end on a suitably intriguing note as the laird, McAlister (Iain Cuthbertson), sits down to a romantic candlelit dinner with his housekeeper, candles now being once again an optional extra rather than a necessity. The implication is that, after all the discussions on social organisation and all the different structures we have encountered, it is the quasi-feudal society of the pre-plague Highlands that has survived best of all. It was an image not far removed from Nation’s evident attraction to Jimmy Garland’s hereditary claim, but if he recognised it as such, it did nothing to assuage his scorn at the restoration of power with the switching on of the hydro-electric plant. ‘They seemed to think that if you get the electrical systems turned back on, everything would be just hunky,’ he mocked. ‘Which was silly.’
By now the series had departed entirely from Nation’s original vision. Despite his comments about the need to relearn basic technologies, the truth was that he wasn’t much interested in the practicalities of
how that would work, but rather in the psychology and human drama of surviving the collapse of civilisation. He toyed with the principles of self-sufficiency without being committed to exploring the implications. Beyond that, his concerns lay in humanity’s instinctive drive to ensure the continuation of the species, as opposed to the survival of individuals. The idea of getting the lights switched back on had no appeal to him, however symbolic it seemed in the mid 1970s, with the power cuts of the Heath years still fresh in the country’s memory. Nation’s model was essentially that of the western, the struggle against nature and the attempt to establish a morality in a lawless land.
His conception of how the story might have developed was hinted at in the novel he wrote based on the first season, which was published in 1976. Not strictly a novelisation, since Nation had no access to the episodes written by Ronder and Exton or to the characters developed therein, it opens with an extended treatment of the first three instalments, before diverging sharply from the television narrative. The core of the book, however, remains the tale of Abby Grant. In this context it should be acknowledged that having Abby as the central figure was an unusual development at the time, a fact of which Nation was justifiably proud. ‘I’m one of the few people who had an adventure show with a woman as the lead,’ he noted in retrospect, ‘because I saw she was mother, she was the future, she was all of those things.’ At the time, perhaps reflecting on his own limited experience of self-sufficiency at Lynsted Park, he argued that the choice of a female protagonist was a simple recognition of reality: ‘Women are better survivors than men. They are tougher than men physically and psychologically.’ Carolyn Seymour shared much the same perspective. ‘I become a matriarch because I’m the only one with a sense of purpose,’ she told the press. ‘It’s very good propaganda for Women’s Lib, and I’m all for that – in a gentle way.’
