05 December 2006

'Survivors' - or 'Life After H5N1' as the remake will no doubt be called

Barney may be the only one still alive...

Sorry for the rather reduced posting frequency in the last few weeks... I'm doing an impression of the Royal Mail.

But seriously... it's actually because work seems to be extending to about 12 hours a day at the moment and when I get home the last thing I want to do is power up the laptop and go right back into my Repetitive Strain Injury Development class.

I was inspired tonight though by BBC4's documentary on Survivors, the mid-1970s BBC sci-fi series about what happens after a mystery virus from China wipes out a huge proportion of the world's population. I've never seen Survivors, but from the excerpts shown on the documentary, it looks like an absolute classic. If the recurring annual panic over bird flu (which also seems to have originated in China, as far as I know?) proves to be well-founded, we could be looking at a real life 'Survivors' scenario. Which is a bit worrying, although at least we wouldn't have to worry about traffic congestion, or getting on the housing ladder. I think blogs would be OK too (provided that we could keep the electricity supply operational), as the internet was meant to be "a computer network that could withstand a nuclear war" (as the Rand Corporation once said to the US Defense Department) so a simple virus shouldn't be too much bother.

Anyway, I shouldn't be surprised if we see a remake of Survivors, or something along those lines, pretty soon. ITV already had a go with I'm a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here, which would be similar to Survivors if retitled I'm a Celebrity and So Are You 'Cos We're The Only People Still Alive. Meanwhile, round my neck of the woods we don't have to imagine what the UK would be like if the transport system had broken down completely; the ludicrously titled 'one' railway are showing us already, on a daily basis. But that's the subject for Seth's next post, which I'm reliably informed will be tomorrow... meanwhile I'm going all self-sufficient down the allotment.

No comments: