End of the world is nigh

Films and drama series based around the end of the world as we know it always spark in me two concerns.

Typically, warfare, meteor strike or some other catastrophe causes the end of the world as we know it, and the few surviving stragglers fight the odds to re-start the human race.

But two things are never properly considered:

Thing one: The survivors never seem to take full advantage of the free access they have to things once everyone else is dead: things in hardware stores, things in stationery shops, other people's cars ... the possibilities are endless.

Thing two: The survivors never bother to sit down and think about whether re-starting the human race is actually a good idea.

Let's face it, the whole experience hasn't been exactly a ripping success so far, and has just ended in unimaginable tragedy.

In Survivors, the first episode anyway, the few stragglers, to be fair, don't get time to consider these matters, as the end of the world as we know it is happening at quite a rapid rate.

Starting Thursday, July 29, 8.30pm on Prime, Survivors is what is now described as a "re-imagining" of a show by the same name that hit television screens in 1975, and which I actually vaguely remember as being quite exciting by the standards of the time.

The original was based on a novel by a man who did much for popular culture.

Terry Nation was a Welsh novelist and screenwriter, who, God bless him, invented the Daleks in Doctor Who, the series Blake's 7 and the original Survivors.

The new version, based on episode one at least, seems quite excellent.

We meet our lead characters: Abby, who begins a desperate search for her son; Greg, who is apparently "good, but private"; Anya, usefully, a doctor; Al, a handsome playboy; Najid, from a Muslim family, and Tom.

Tom, (Max Beesley, who stars as Charlie Edwards in Hotel Babylon) managed to escape from what was to have been his term in prison for some unspeakable crime, is a nasty piece of work all round, and his presence would not seem to bode well.

Not at all.

To top this whole appalling situation off, we are presented in the final minutes of the show with a group of men in bio-suits who work in a laboratory of some sort, and appear to know far too much about the flu that has wiped out 90% or more of the world's population.

"Well Sammy, I think it's time to begin," the head scientist says, in an utterance that also does not appear to bode well.

Survivors follows our new friends as they attempt to negotiate a world without power, water, and worst of all, mobile phones.

Well worth a look.

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