SURVIVORS UNSEEN

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

- STEVE O’BRIEN

I DON’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…