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Work on a job application and on the data editing this week has been interspersed with watching the first series of Survivors on DVD, which I received as a Christmas present last year but which I've only caught up with now. I watched several episodes of Survivors during the 1990s, when it was a regular fixture on UK Gold and off-air tapes circulated. I even ordered creator Terry Nation's novel (I'm hesitant to call it a novelization as it's an expression of Nation's view of the series central concept and characters as opposed to the interpretation of the Terence Dudley-led production team) from the Bodleian stack, and also bought John Eyles's (a pseudonym, I think - but for whom?) follow-up, Genesis of a Hero, from the Oxfam bookshop; a depressing book, full of militarism and suspicion.
Season one stands up very well indeed, especially the first seven episodes where Terry Nation either wrote the episodes or was acting as script consultant. (My critical evaluation is affected by my awareness of some of the backstage disputes.) There, there is what turns out to be (mostly) a happy juxtaposition of producer Terence Dudley's concern with domestic drama, and Nation's wish that Survivors fit into the action-adventure genre. It makes the brutality of characters such as Arthur Wormley, a trade union baron who views himself as the personification of the continuing British government (not a far-fetched proposition in 1975, when the series was made), and Knox, leader of the commune who have taken over the country house of Jimmy Garland (Nation's proposed romantic aristocratic male lead character, disliked by Dudley), the more shocking; but there are also a few stylised scenes of conflict which call out for 'action music' that might have been found in one of the ITC-made film series Nation was involved in during the 1970s like The Persuaders!
I've always been fond of Lucy Fleming's Jenny Richards - Fleming projects a quiet steeliness sometimes at odds with the dependent's lines which she is given. The original lead character is Abby Grant, played by Carolyn Seymour as a representative of the old officer class whose gender, until now, has restrained her from taking a leading role; as the series evolves she becomes someone whose leadership qualities are concentrated in inspiring other people rather than in developing strategy, and Seymour expresses both confidence and stress very well, particularly in the last episode of the series, A Beginning. Abby is a feminisation of one of Nation's stock characters, with some similarities to Blake in Blake's 7; likewise Greg Preston (Ian McCulloch, loudly and forcibly authoritative in contrast to Seymour's Abby) is another iteration of Terry Nation's 'engineer-cynic' figure, like Avon in B7, someone who professes that he is a loner, but in the event concedes his co-dependence with the group.The novel and its sequel suggest that Nation intended Tom Price to be a more permanent fixture than he becomes; and considering how episode eight makes him a focal point of the ethical compromise needed to keep the settlement led by Abby and Greg going, his dismissal two episodes later is abrupt, underplayed, and lets the entire series off a sharp hook.
From episode seven Terence Dudley is firmly in control as producer and script editor, and Survivors shifts from action series to a self-sufficiency variant on a more familiar BBC drama stereotype, the rural drama with a country house or houses. The location is Hampton Court, Herefordshire, once the seat of the late seventeenth-century whig politician, Thomas Coningsby; the house was used in-between occupants at the time. Its limitations are apparent; cultivation is talked about, but we see very little soil being dug, and animals tend to be seen when they are safely dead, at a distance so it's not apparent that they are props. The scale of Hampton Court is also unhelpful, emphasising space over the discomfort and compromise of communal living. This phase of the series is made entirely on outside broadcast video, adapting for drama a method devised for covering live news or sporting events, and while this lends a note of realism to events it leaves those scripts calling for heightened reality - such as episode twelve, Something of Value, which is one of the remaining Nation conflict dramas - flat and uninvolving.
Season one stands up very well indeed, especially the first seven episodes where Terry Nation either wrote the episodes or was acting as script consultant. (My critical evaluation is affected by my awareness of some of the backstage disputes.) There, there is what turns out to be (mostly) a happy juxtaposition of producer Terence Dudley's concern with domestic drama, and Nation's wish that Survivors fit into the action-adventure genre. It makes the brutality of characters such as Arthur Wormley, a trade union baron who views himself as the personification of the continuing British government (not a far-fetched proposition in 1975, when the series was made), and Knox, leader of the commune who have taken over the country house of Jimmy Garland (Nation's proposed romantic aristocratic male lead character, disliked by Dudley), the more shocking; but there are also a few stylised scenes of conflict which call out for 'action music' that might have been found in one of the ITC-made film series Nation was involved in during the 1970s like The Persuaders!
I've always been fond of Lucy Fleming's Jenny Richards - Fleming projects a quiet steeliness sometimes at odds with the dependent's lines which she is given. The original lead character is Abby Grant, played by Carolyn Seymour as a representative of the old officer class whose gender, until now, has restrained her from taking a leading role; as the series evolves she becomes someone whose leadership qualities are concentrated in inspiring other people rather than in developing strategy, and Seymour expresses both confidence and stress very well, particularly in the last episode of the series, A Beginning. Abby is a feminisation of one of Nation's stock characters, with some similarities to Blake in Blake's 7; likewise Greg Preston (Ian McCulloch, loudly and forcibly authoritative in contrast to Seymour's Abby) is another iteration of Terry Nation's 'engineer-cynic' figure, like Avon in B7, someone who professes that he is a loner, but in the event concedes his co-dependence with the group.The novel and its sequel suggest that Nation intended Tom Price to be a more permanent fixture than he becomes; and considering how episode eight makes him a focal point of the ethical compromise needed to keep the settlement led by Abby and Greg going, his dismissal two episodes later is abrupt, underplayed, and lets the entire series off a sharp hook.
From episode seven Terence Dudley is firmly in control as producer and script editor, and Survivors shifts from action series to a self-sufficiency variant on a more familiar BBC drama stereotype, the rural drama with a country house or houses. The location is Hampton Court, Herefordshire, once the seat of the late seventeenth-century whig politician, Thomas Coningsby; the house was used in-between occupants at the time. Its limitations are apparent; cultivation is talked about, but we see very little soil being dug, and animals tend to be seen when they are safely dead, at a distance so it's not apparent that they are props. The scale of Hampton Court is also unhelpful, emphasising space over the discomfort and compromise of communal living. This phase of the series is made entirely on outside broadcast video, adapting for drama a method devised for covering live news or sporting events, and while this lends a note of realism to events it leaves those scripts calling for heightened reality - such as episode twelve, Something of Value, which is one of the remaining Nation conflict dramas - flat and uninvolving.
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