SURVIVORS
What was planned for the unmade third series of the global pandemic drama.
TEN YEARS ON FROM ITS FINAL EPISODE, CREATOR ADRIAN HODGES LOOKS BACK AT HIS TIME ON THE REBOOT OF SURVIVORS, AND REVEALS WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED IN THE SEASON WE NEVER GOT TO SEE
IDON’T TEND TO LOOK BACK, as a writer,” says Adrian Hodges. “If you do that, you can get very upset.”
Looking back is, though, something that even a reluctant nostalgist like Hodges has been doing recently. When the Covid-19 pandemic began to ravage the world, it would have been hard not to, given the unsettling similarities the current crisis has to his late-noughties reimagining of Terry Nation’s Survivors – a stark, post-apocalyptic classic that originally ran from 1975 to 1977.
Centring on a small group of people who survived a rampaging virus that, almost overnight, killed 99% of the world’s population, this revved-up remake lasted two seasons before it was cancelled. On 23 February 2010, viewers witnessed Abby Grant (Julie Graham) reunited with her son, Peter (Jack Richardson), and found out that medical research company PSJ Industries was responsible, albeit accidentally, for the humanity-obliterating virus. We saw a plane jetting off with PSJ honcho Michael Landry (Patrick Malahide) onboard, vaccine in hand, en route to a secret quarantined island where thousands of “leaders, thinkers and planners” were waiting to, in Landry’s words, “rebuild society when the time comes”. Then in those final seconds the camera panned to the door of the cargo hold to reveal that the plane has a stowaway: Tom Price (Max Beesley), a gun clasped to his bloodied chest…
As cliffhangers go, it was a doozy. But we never got to find out what happened to Tom or how exactly PSJ planned to build up the world again. We never saw Abby in mother mode, or explored Al’s grief over losing his beloved Sarah. Survivors had, somewhat ironically, died, and it wasn’t coming back.
“With the benefit of hindsight, I perhaps should have given it a slightly more rounded ending,” Hodges reflects, 10 years on from that final gut-punch of an episode. “Then again, at that time we were very optimistic – the second season had an average of about four and a half million [viewers]. I felt we had reasonable grounds to be confident, and the reviews were getting better and better. I felt like people had cottoned on to what we were trying to do a lot more.”
As SFX talks to Adrian Hodges over the phone, it’s week four of the UK’s lockdown and he’s in isolation sweating away on a “sci-fi period piece” for Working Title. The 63-yearold BAFTA winner is, in his own words, “a slightly unusual writer, in that I’m very vocal about writing genre,” which is likely one of the reasons why the BBC approached him sometime in 2006 about re-engineering one of its past successes.
Survivors premiered on 23 November 2008. Looking back at that first series now, it seems eerily prescient. But of course, even then scientists were warning of the dangers of a Covid-19-like threat to humanity.
A few years before, over 8,000 people worldwide had been infected by the SARS outbreak, while the swine flu pandemic of 2009 (estimated cases 1.6 million) put a real-life strain on the production of series two. “Every virologist we spoke to said exactly the
same thing,” Hodges says. “That if there was an outbreak, China is where it would start. A few people recently have said, ‘Oh my god, that was so brilliant that you thought it would be China,’ and I just said, ‘No, that wasn’t me!’”
That first series climaxed with Greg (Paterson Joseph) being shot through the shoulder by gun-toting headcase Dexter (Anthony Flanagan). Off the back of solid ratings and glowing reviews, a second series was swiftly commissioned, which would dive deeper into the origins of the virus and put its cast of characters through ever more brutal and devastating situations. More serialised this time, it was a much bleaker watch, as viewers saw Greg and Tom working as slaves for the sadistic Henry Smithson (Christopher Fulford) and Abby experimented on by the hard-hearted Dr James Whitaker (Nicholas Gleaves), and witnessed the first death of a front-line character when
Sarah succumbed to a mutant strain of the virus.
Hopes were high that
Survivors would return for a third season, but the departure of Jane Tranter, who’d commissioned the show in the first place, from the post of
Controller of BBC Drama appeared to seal its fate. “Ben Stephenson took over, and I think he wanted to make his own imprint,” Hodges shrugs. “The show had probably not managed to get the kind of numbers the BBC wanted, and although it was very well liked among key groups, it certainly wasn’t a show that had a massive audience. I think they thought it had run its course.”
THE THIRD WAY
Hodges explains that the third series hadn’t really been planned out as such, but says that he “had some strong ideas for it”. “What would have happened next in Survivors?” is the question he’s asked the most as a writer, he claims. Just before lockdown he’d been
Every virologist we spoke to said that if there was an outbreak, it would start in China
doing a talk on a feature film he scripted, when a 13-year-old boy put his hand up and said, “The Go-Between is fine, but what would have happened in the third season of Survivors?”
So what would have happened? Firstly, we would have found out the location of that mysterious island that PSJ was squirreling people away to, although Hodges hadn’t sketched out the specifics. “Our thinking at the time was that it would be one of the cluster of relatively modestly inhabited islands off the coast of Scandinavia,” he reveals.
“The other option was the Med, probably Greece, but I think I preferred the Scandi alternative. We would have seen life on the island as a fully functioning but pretty authoritarian version of the old pre-virus way of life, in contrast to the new self-supporting independent communities springing up all over England, one of which would have been the valley where Abby and the others found themselves at the end of the last series.”
Despite the idyllic nature of the commune, Peter Grant, now reunited with his mum, wouldn’t have found it easy to adapt to his new life. “Peter would be going through PTSD,” says Hodges, “and was going to be very troublesome. In the end he was going to be told he’d have to leave the commune because he was so disruptive. Abby and Greg would have gone with him, and although Greg and Abby would never have been a couple, they would have become a de facto family.”
And what of Tom, the kill-happy ex-jailbird who emerged as the series’ most compelling antihero? The last we saw of him was in the cargo hold, nursing a wound inflicted by Peter in that white-knuckle season finale.
“Tom would have made a deal with the island and would have come back by air as the head of a commando-style armed task force charged with restarting society and preparing the ground for the islanders’ return,” reveals Hodges. “His first port of call would have been former MP Samantha Willis [Nikki AmukaBird], who was the only serious threat to island power in the new England.
Tom would have made a deal with the island and would have come back by air
“My idea was that Tom would have come back with a vaccine and offered it as the price of ‘civilisation’: that is, accept the new administration or die. Tom would have been charged eventually with killing Abby, Anya and Greg, but would have had a change of heart and ultimately joined with the forces of resistance and Anya – accepting her friendship, knowing she could never love him and ultimately sacrificing his life in the final battle between the Island and the new Englanders. Who won? I hadn’t quite decided but put it this way: I wanted to end the show on a positive note, not a sour one…”
When the axe fell, Hodges decided that he needed to dust himself down and “crack on with something else”. After Survivors there was still the odd episode of Primeval, the dinosaurs-in-the-modernday SF thrill-ride he’d created for ITV, as well as BBC One hit The
Musketeers, which ran from 2014-2016. He recently embarked on a rewatch of series two, and says he was surprised “quite how dark it was”.
Sadly, Survivors isn’t available to stream for free, and the BBC’s iPlayer hasn’t added it to its own box sets collection. Virus-themed blockbusters like Contagion and Outbreak have won impressive viewing figures during the lockdown period, but Hodges believes it might have looked “opportunistic” had the BBC promoted Survivors at a time when real people were dying.
“I’d like to think it’s a matter of taste, and if so it’s a decision I support,” he says. “The one thing I do find odd is when BBC news uses clips from Contagion and other movies of that kind, but don’t appear to know they have a directly relevant show of their own they could refer to – either mine or Terry Nation’s.”
What does he think these characters would be doing, and where would that world be, 10 years on? “It’s interesting,” he muses. “I think we’d probably be beginning to rebuild society as we now know it. I’d like to think we’d build a better world than we have at the moment!”
Survivors is available to buy on Amazon Prime.