ABSTRACT
From 1975 to 1977 the mainstream BBC1 television channel broadcast the series Survivors, which depicted the attempts to build a secure life following a plague which has wiped out most human life on Earth. The series was created by Terry Nation, who was already known as creator of the Daleks for Doctor Who (BBC, 1963–1989, 1996, 2005–) and who would go on to create Blake’s Seven (BBC, 1978–1981), as well as continuing to work successfully as a writer for hire. The significance of Nation as the creator of Survivors lies, as Bignell and O’Day discuss, initially in his previous success allowing for the development of the production in the first place, and then in the way that Nation’s science fiction work as a whole is concerned with emphasizing “the political organization of societies.” 1 In Survivors this focus is provided by the way that the post-apocalyptic setting allows the central characters to encounter and develop a number of different approaches to society. These different answers to the question of “how should civilization be constituted?” are usually shown to be flawed in some way, their micro-scale implementation in the post-apocalyptic world of scarcity emphasizing the problems with each of the approaches, be they authoritarian, communal, isolationist, religious, capitalist, anarchistic, or any other form of social organization.
