James Delingpole James Delingpole

Apocalypse now

The TV programmes you watched as a child are like acid flashbacks.

issue 29 November 2008

The TV programmes you watched as a child are like acid flashbacks. You never fully understood them at the time and you understand them even less now that you’ve forgotten most of the context and detail. But by golly, don’t they half haunt the imagination ever after?

Terry Nation’s late Seventies series Survivors had just this effect on me. It was about the aftermath of a killer virus which wipes out virtually the entire human species leaving just a handful of survivors to roam the earth, scrape by without TV or electric lights or hot showers, and generally rediscover the old agrarian ways before we became so dependent on technology. The ultimate fantasy of the modern green movement, in other words.

Not having seen the series in 30 years, I can’t vouch for how crap it was. But I would suspect not crap at all. Terry Nation was a scriptwriter of some genius.

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