'in the beginning there were quite a few...'

 'in the beginning there were quite a few (and then not so many)' 

- survivors (1975), episode 3 series 1.

so remarks the tramp tom (for once not wishing to say too much). he's been captured by the middle classes (who will now start to order him about).  like a good soldier svejk of the apocalypse he will cheerfully surrender to whatever pack of gun-toting fools arrives, talk shit, eat their food, do as little work as possible, and then look for a chance to desert.  we are supposed to dislike him, he is dirty, unreliable, uneducated and clearly welsh (growing up in the valleys horsemouth noticed that people were clearly not impressed to be represented by such a character, it's not so much that he approaches the garrulous stereotype of taffy so much as he is its utter embodiment).

mind you charles is welsh also. he claims to have been an architect but later he claims to have been a headhunter,  a recruitment consultant (or is that another of the characters?). charles is a man with a plan, but he is also a flawed character, he has understood the problem too quickly and thus cannot be used to dramatise it. he is not our hero.  

against the masculinist construction of history the women characters struggle but cannot yet win. 

greg (the engineer) is our hero - decisive, smart, practical (hell he can even play guitar and sing you a folk song), but he is trapped in an existential desire to be free, not to be tied down. he is also trapped in the feudal ages with diminishing supplies of canned food and the need to do lots of tedious farming. the entire focus of the series will shift from the commuter belt to the welsh borders near the monmouthshire canal. 

eventually his character will leave the series and have to be replaced by replacement greg.  replacement greg will meet the miners (reckoning with the ghosts of industry, solidarity and economic sabotage), go up to scotland and turn the power back on short circuiting the entire original premise of the show (the long hard march out of hobbes). 

the end. 

survivors constitutes an imaginary refounding of britain, a reckoning with the forces of collapse written precisely during that collapse (its villains trade unionists invited into the government for beer and sandwiches, yobboes roaming the streets, people who don't have RP accents and are 'not like us'). later, in blake's seven, terry nation will forge a strange mixture of flash gordon and thatcher's britain (and then once again the BBC will take the toys off him). 

survivors is a particularly british apocalypse (it is not weekend - JLG has stared into the abyss of may 68  and said yes). wells, jefferies, wyndham, ballard, nation, a dream of wessex, farage - it all falls.  its concern not so much how will humanity survive but how will the class system survive. 

horsemouth watched it again during the pandemic. he did not learn much from it. there are a few mentions of of the 1918 spanish flu pandemic, some consideration of the effect of the pandemic upon hospital staffing, the need to bury the bodies but really its focus is on the refounding. it helps that the music is so good. that the title sequence is so brilliantly constructed. that the first episode is nearly perfect. 

quite why he is watching it again now horsemouth is uncertain. 

yesterday horsemouth did a zoom meeting for the decarbonisation consortium (he was just having a panic that it was today and then remembered that it was yesterday and worried that he had missed it and then remembered that he had done it, phew).  once again not that good an intervention by yours truly (he's much better in writing than he is on his feet). 

he washed some windows. he went for a walk on the common (narrowly missing the gaggle of OAPs in the socially prescribed walking group).