On the BBC site’s Writer’s Room the guest is Adrian Hodges, who has worked on Primeval among a number of other productions but will probably pop more onto science fiction fan’s radars for writing the 21st century re-working of Terry Nation’s cult 70s show Survivors, which starts this evening on the BBC.
BBC: “With Survivors, how difficult was it to update a show that’s more than thirty years old?”
Adrian: “Certain things were easy. We have a lot more technology now than then and it’s easy to imagine how much chaos we’d face now if our mobiles and computers went down. In a way society is even more fragile now than it was in 1974.”
“Another factor was that the original was perceived to be very middle class – a little unfair but there is some truth in it. So it was important that a new version had a cultural and class mix that really represented the country as it is now, which I hope it does.
But the essential elements of the story: What kind of world do we live in? What kind of society would we build if everything we knew was gone? remain pretty much the same. It’s just a question of exploring them in a dynamic way. Some of that is inspired by the original, and some of it comes from me.”
(link via Matthew Badham)
November 24th, 2008 at 12:01 pm
Tee hee! I just saw the first episode and this quote kept coming back to me:
“Another factor was that the original was perceived to be very middle class [...] So it was important that a new version had a cultural and class mix that really represented the country as it is now …”
Well, it certainly had an ethnic mix (white, black, Asian, Middle Eastern) and even featured a passing snapshot of a housing estate at one point but it was all very superficial. As is typical with so much British-made drama, every character spoke with the same RADA-trained middle class accent. Not a missed “t” or “h” or “th” among them and, oh, those perfectly rounded vowels! (Okay, Julie Graham excepted. She still had faint traces of her middle-class Scottish accent!)
I guess if a flu virus IS going to wipe out 90% of the population, it’s of some comfort to know that the few survivors will at least be able to speak nicely!