Surviving......

Survival Instincts
By Barry Didcock

BBC’s post-apocalypse classic is back – and the timing is spot-on.

IF 1970S sitcom The Good Life had an evil twin it was Survivors, a post-apocalyptic tale from Dalek creator Terry Nation that ran for three series on BBC One between 1975 and 1977. Today, its cult status assures its place in the canon of British television's sci-fi greats, alongside Doctor Who and Blake's 7. If you're old enough to remember it, you will; if not, think yourself lucky. It was the stuff of nightmares.
The plot was simple: a plague has wiped out most of the world's population and the few survivors have to return to an agrarian way of life while avoiding the manifest perils of a now-lawless society. In this world, Felicity Kendal is toast and so is her goat.
The theme music was minimalist and menacing, the opening credits equally so, and the show's stencilled title gave it a brutal and immediate iconography. The first episode was called The Fourth Horseman, the second Genesis.

Moreover, in Terry Nation's writing and in the brittle performances of lead actors Carolyn Seymour (as the indomitable Abby Grant), Ian McCulloch (Greg Preston), Lucy Fleming (Jenny Richards) and Talfryn Thomas (Tom Price), there was a constant sense of panic and paranoia. This, after all, was the era of oil shortages, power cuts, strikes, inflation and nuclear stand-offs.
In fact, Nation didn't even accept that his show was science fiction. "Survivors has its roots in the future," he told the Radio Times in April 1975, "but it's not science fiction. It's not going into the realms of the impossible, it's skating very close to the possible."

How close to the possible it skated was illustrated in the same interview when Nation pointed to the headline on that week's Sunday Times. It was a story about the 200 people in London who had come into contact with a man killed by Lassa fever, a rare and lethal haemorrhagic virus.
Now, in the age of flu scares and jungle survival programmes like I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out Of Here, the BBC has re-made the cult series. Or, as writer and executive producer Adrian Hodges prefers, "re-imagined" it for the iPod generation. And, he thinks, it's even more relevant and shocking today than it was in the 1970s.

"Look around the living room - we all live on-line, we all have mobiles. We're further away from being able to look after ourselves than at any point in human history," he says. "More importantly, I think the theme of fear of pandemic is bigger and stronger than ever. Look at bird flu, look at Sars. These kinds of medical health scares always seem to be with us, but since the end of the cold war we seem more inclined than ever to believe something like this could happen."

Hodges has kept only some of the main characters from the original series. Scottish actress Julie Graham takes the role of Abby Grant, Paterson Joseph plays Greg Preston and Max Beesley is Tom Price, here a charming sociopath who has broken out of prison by murdering a guard.
But the character of Jenny Richards has been split into two - Jenny Collins (Doctor Who's Freema Agyeman) and her friend Dr Anya Raczynski (Zoe Tapper) - and Hodges has introduced two Muslim characters in the form of Al Sadiq, a well-heeled champagne-drinking playboy (Nip/Tuck's Phillip Rhys), and Najid (Chahak Patel), a devout 11-year-old who sports a football top under his traditional linen clothing.

One other difference from the original is that Hodges and director John Alexander now have computer-generated imagery at their disposal. So Abby Grant and Greg Preston can meet on a motorway that is quiet and still as far as the eye can see - only it wasn't: it was a small portion of test track that was extended using CGI.

The day-to-day task, as the title suggests, is continued survival. But how, with no electricity, no mobiles, no petrol?
"If you were one of the lucky ones who survived, what would you do?" asks Hodges. "How would you survive once you'd cleaned out the supermarket? Could you hunt and kill an animal? That's quite a shocking thing to contemplate."
But though Survivors is a multi-racial 2008 remake trading on the name of an illustrious 1970s predecessor, its central theme of an apocalyptic event almost wiping out humanity has a long and proud tradition in British literature.

It's in the King James Bible for a start. The book of Genesis tells us that Noah was saved from the deluge by God's instruction to build an ark. The Earth was "corrupt" and "filled with violence" so God sent a hard rain. Temporal wickedness was washed away, Noah and the animals were not.
Two-and-a-half centuries after the King James Bible was published, Mary Shelley produced her own take on the post-apocalyptic tradition. British science fiction writer Brian Aldiss has made the case for Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein being the first true example of the genre. He could have more easily claimed The Last Man, which she published eight years later. Set in a late 21st-century world decimated by plague and written as a memoir, it tells the story of the last human, one Lionel Verney.
Although deeply autobiographical - its central characters are based on Lord Byron and Shelley's husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley - its theme is a bleak one: personal isolation. The novel ends with Verney setting off in a boat from a deserted Rome in an attempt to find other survivors.
Other authors picked up this post-apocalyptic theme and moulded it to their own ends. In 1885 the nature writer Richard Jefferies published After London, set in a city devastated by an unspecified catastrophe. The survivors are essentially knocked back into mediaeval times, nature quickly gains the upper hand and - the important bit as far as Jefferies was concerned - the capital becomes a poisonous marshland. London, city of vice, is wiped away.
But while the post-apocalyptic vision is terrifying to some, it's strangely appealing to others. As well as co-opting Shelley to the side of sci-fi, Aldiss also coined the phrase "the cosy catastrophe", meaning the cataclysm which neatly activates a story of cleansing, of triumph over adversity.
Aldiss was referring to the work of John Wyndham, specifically his famous 1951 novel The Day Of The Triffids in which most of the Earth's population is blinded before being attacked by plant life. Again, London is a place which must be left at all costs and the novel ends in the unlikely environs of the Isle of Wight, where a few sighted survivors set up a colony and begin the reconquest. Wyndham, in the novel's closing passage, calls it "the great crusade to drive the triffids back and back with ceaseless destruction until we have wiped the last one of them from the face of the land that they have usurped".
Aldiss's own works were not generally so optimistic. His catastrophes were not cosy, just ragged, brutal and open-ended. There was often no prospect of a fight back.
Bleakest of the lot, perhaps, is Nevil Shute's On The Beach, written in 1957 - at the height of the cold war - and set in the aftermath of a nuclear war. Its survivors search in vain for proof that they are not alone, holding on to hope but finding that fate has tricked them cruelly. For them, suicide or death by radiation are the only ways out.
There's a Swiftian satire to be had in post-apocalyptic visions, too. Margaret Atwood's Booker-nominated 2003 novel Oryx And Crake takes the last man on Earth theme and uses it to examine everything from genetic engineering to child pornography. The idea for the book came to Atwood during a trip into Australia's tropical rainforests. It's sobering to learn, however, that as she sat in Toronto Airport in September 2001 mapping out her post-apocalyptic world, she learned her flight had been cancelled due to the attacks on the World Trade Centre. She stopped work immediately. "It's deeply unsettling when you're writing about a fictional catastrophe and then a real one happens," she later noted.
In Survivors, Hodges throws all this into the pot. Fear of disease and lawlessness drive his survivors out of London; there are hints of more sinister reasons for the outbreak of the virus; psychological journeys are undertaken and hard questions asked about morality, trust and co-operation. There is satire, up to a point.
But while his vision for Survivors is not utopian, neither is it dystopian. At one point in the first episode Abby Grant meets Callum Brown, an instructor on the outward-bound course her son Peter was attending when the virus struck. In a pivotal scene, Brown tells Abby he sees the virus as a chance for mankind to rediscover its humanity. It's what you might call the New Leaf school of post-apocalyptic thinking.
In that respect, Brown speaks for Hodges too. "There are many different views of the future after a situation like this," says the writer. "Mine is scary but affirmative and optimistic in the long run, though it may not seem that way at times. I don't take a fantastically pessimistic view of human nature. I don't think it would turn into Lord Of The Flies overnight."

THEY THINK IT'S ALL OVER...
Tea and toast with your apocalypse? How British filmmakers viewed the morning after the end of the world
The Changes Loosely based on Peter Dickinson's trilogy of novels for young adults - The Weathermonger, Heartsease and The Devil's Children - this BBC children's series screened in 1975 and was a counterpart to Survivors. Machines begin to emit an ear-splitting noise causing humans to destroy them, returning the world to a pre-technological society. Electricity pylons become "the bad wires" and are avoided. Even bicycles are smashed. The action is viewed through the eyes of a 10-year-old girl who sets out to uncover the mystery behind the changes. Unavailable on DVD and repeated only once, in 1976, its cult status is now assured.Threads Written by Kes author Barry Hines, set in Sheffield and screened on BBC Two in September 1984, Threads imagined what life would be like in the years following a nuclear war. Like Peter Watkins's The War Game 20 years earlier - commissioned by the BBC but still banned when Threads screened - Hines's dystopian essay mixed documentary-style facts with live action. A decade on from the war, his survivors are speaking broken English mixed with dialect words, dying from radiation poisoning and giving birth to mutant babies. There is no prospect of redemption here. The programme was given a second airing on BBC One in August 1985 to mark the 40th anniversary of the nuclear attacks on Japan.
28 Days Later In 2002, Trainspotting director Danny Boyle took the idea of a "rage" virus affecting the majority of the population and turned it into a post-apocalyptic British zombie flick. Cillian Murphy is the cycle courier who wakes up in a hospital bed only to find London deserted. Or is it? The script was written by Alex Garland, author of The Beach, and Boyle's original ending had Murphy's character dying. Test audiences thought it too bleak, however, and it was replaced with an ending in which Murphy survives, leaving the door open for the 2007 sequel, 28 Weeks Later.
Children Of Men Based on a 1992 novel by crime writer PD James, Children Of Men was filmed in 2006 and starred Clive Owen and Michael Caine. Set in 2027 and heavy on religious imagery, it shows a dystopian world whose inhabitants can no longer reproduce. The youngest person on the planet is 18 and mankind, apparently, is dying out. Theo, whose own son died in a flu pandemic, is given the job of escorting a young woman to the Human Project, a shadowy quasi-terrorist group. Her secret? She's pregnant. The message is one of hope and, ultimately, salvation.
Survivors starts tonight (BBC One, 9pm)
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An Appeal to Reason

An Appeal To Reason

John Tamny, 11.17.08, 12:00 AM EST

Has Al Gore read Nigel Lawson's book?

Nigel Lawson, chancellor of the Exchequer under Margaret Thatcher, and author of three books--including his essential account of the Thatcher years, The View from No. 11: Memoirs of a Tory Radical--had trouble finding a publisher for his most recent book, An Appeal to Reason, which casts a skeptical eye on global warming.


As he notes in the foreword, one rejection letter suggested that "it would be very difficult to find a wide market" for a book that "flies so much in the face of the prevailing orthodoxy." So while Lawson acknowledges that his contribution to the discussion won't "shake the faith" of global warming's true believers, he's written what is a very informative book for those not yet convinced that Armageddon is our future, absent massive worldwide government action.
Lawson acknowledges up front that while he is not a scientist, neither "are the vast majority of those who pronounce on the matter" of global warming "with far greater certainty." And throughout, he deliberately uses the term "global warming" rather than the "attractively alliterative weasel words, 'climate change,'" and he does so "because the climate changes all the time."

In discussing global warming, Lawson happily takes the road less traveled in making the basic point about the science of global warming being "far from settled," not to mention that scientific truth "is not established by counting heads," as so many advocates of all manner of popular causes would likely prefer. So while Lawson doesn't hide from the fact that the 20th century ended slightly warmer than it began, he reminds readers that there has been no further evidence of global warming since the turn of the century.

Furthermore, news accounts would have us believe that calculating temperature is a foolproof process. But in reality, these calculations include data taken from the former Soviet Union, along with records from less-developed parts of the world. When Lawson checked U.S. temperature records, records thought to be most reliable, he found that only three of the last 12 years are among the warmest on record; 1934 being the warmest year of all. And though the level of carbon dioxide did increase 30% during the 20th century amid a slight warming trend, it's also boomed this century amid a slight cooling.


When we consider the slight warming that materialized during the 20th century, Lawson notes that it's not certain that the majority of it has to do with human activity. In truth, clouds/water vapor are the biggest contributors to the much vaunted "greenhouse effect," but the science of clouds is "one of the least understood aspects of climate science." Importantly, the earth's climate has always been subject to variations unrelated to human industrial activity, the "medieval warm period" of 1,000 years ago having occurred well before industrialization.
Regarding actions we might take, Lawson reminds readers that we need to avoid the kind of panic that could lead to disastrous policies. Indeed, he makes plain that there "is something inherently absurd about the conceit that we can have any useful idea of what the world will look like in a hundred years time," not to mention the other projected calamities expected to occur over 1,000 years from now. If this is doubted, ask yourself how many times weather forecasts meant to predict the next day have proven to be massively incorrect.

Brown Haze.......

Mysterious brown haze covering world

A massive mile-thick brown pollution haze has settled over vast areas of the planet, changing weather patterns and threatening health and crops, according to the UN.

Vast areas of Asia, the Middle East, southern Africa and the Amazon Basin, are affected by the smog-like plumes, caused mainly by the burning of fossil fuels and firewood, are known as "atmospheric brown clouds".

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When mixed with emissions of carbon dioxide and other gases blamed for warming the earth's atmosphere like a greenhouse, they are the newest threat to the global environment, according to a report commissioned by the UN Environment Programme.

"All of this points to an even greater and urgent need to look at emissions across the planet," said Achim Steiner, head of the UNEP.

Brown clouds are caused by an unhealthy mix of particles, ozone and other chemicals that come from cars, coal-fired power plants, burning fields and wood-burning stoves. First identified by the report's lead researcher in 1990, the clouds were depicted in the report as being more widespread and causing more environmental damage than previously known.

Perhaps most widely recognised as the haze this past summer over Beijing's Olympics, the clouds have been found to be more than a mile thick around glaciers in the Himalaya and Hindu Kush mountain ranges. They hide the sun and absorb radiation, leading to new worries not only about global climate change but also about extreme weather conditions.

"All these have led to negative effects on water resources and crop yields," the report says.
Health problems associated with particulate pollution, such as cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, are linked to nearly 350,000 premature deaths in China and India every year, said Henning Rohde, a University of Stockholm scientist who worked on the study.

Soot levels in the air were reported to have risen alarmingly in 13 megacities: Bangkok, Beijing, Cairo, Dhaka, Karachi, Kolkata, Lagos, Mumbai, New Delhi, Seoul, Shanghai, Shenzhen and Tehran.

Brown clouds were also cited as dimming the light by as much as 25% in some places including Karachi, New Delhi, Shanghai and Beijing. The phenomenon complicates the climate change scenario, because the brown clouds also help cool the earth's surface and mask the impact of global warming by an average of 40%, according to the report.
Further reading
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