Watching 'Survivors' in quarantine 2020, that vigorous TV series and the 'terror' of the 70s
by Maurizio Cavaliere
The seventies are a smoky memory for one who was born 'only' in 1972. A few clear stories, many frames, mostly dark atmospheres, the news that opens with the Red Brigades and Lotta continua. All this I remember, of course, just as I relive the days when not even the color TV lifted the gray patina from the vile attacks of the mafia and via Fani.
Greg, Jenny and Abby in the first series
They will be forever the years of lead or those of cold War. Heavy metal and frost in the minds and bodies are perfect metaphors of those times, essential components of human relationships and political skirmishes of the time. Ideals spotted with blood or neurasthenic utopias, this went on, time will tell later.
However, the gloom of this memory is still missing something, in my opinion. There is an element missing for a sensitive child, the one that makes a difference: fear.
I don't know if you have ever seen the intro music of the Ligabue series (1977) starring Flavio Bucci. Music by the brilliant Armando Trovajoli, fantastic for that, scary, frightening, obsessive, hangover of terror for a child who spends his days dressed as a romantic swordsman: Zorro and D’Artagnan every other day.
And there was something even more dark. In 1976 another scary thriller for a child was broadcast on TV. Its title was 'Albert and the black man' with music by another great master of soundtracks': Franco Micalizzi. Let's face the plot: the little one Albert, nine, suddenly remains alone at night in one spooky villa of Ravenna where he receives the visit of a dressed man in black and face covered. Following sinister intrigues to freeze the wrists. I will find it out later, reading here and there online. Everything unfolds in the twilight and tension of Micalizzi's splendid music.
Fortunately, I don't remember anything else, because my parents must have taken me by force in front of the 20 inch Grundig screen and put me to sleep near to my yellow light with painted clowns. I was too young and the frame is so faded that only the feeling of anxiety remains dark, a large dark spot indeed. Albert and the black man... I'll have perennial chills.
I don't think such a series would pass in prime time today, like then, or maybe yes. In fact, in the Seventies, this and other dramas were part of the schedule of a common existence. If you didn't do it underneath fear, if you didn't put the monster on the front page, if not you hired the best musician of the genre, you weren't in the game.
How can we have overcome those traumas (admitted to never being there succeeded) only God and our colored lampshade know.
I owed you the premise not only because it was the years of TV undisputed queen and metronome of habits and certainties, domestic hearth, megaphone of shocking events. I had to because I'm going to tell you about another creepy page of those heavy years for tv stories and consciences. Others frames, another matter, same twilight pressure.
But here it is a little different, because Terry Nation's 'Survivors' (he was the mind of Dr Who's Daleks), is a returned series precipitously current. It anticipated the tragedies of these days: dead in series, pandemic, quarantine and fear that the killer virus was mistakenly released by a Chinese laboratory, just like revealed the theme song of the BBC1 series (based on Anthony Isaac's great composition) first transmission in 1975. The phrase is emblematic and prophetic of a protagonist of the first episode (The Fourth horseman): “The Chinese government has put a limit on the news, but rumors are circulating of millions of dead there". We seem to know something about it, don't we?
Abby Grant during her short illness
'Survivors' is a very interesting work, which I have seen entirely 41 years later. Thirty-eight episodes, not all broadcasted in Italy in 1979. The third series, the last one, did not arrive on Rai. However, in the era of the 'here and now', Youtube came to save me, allowing me to understand what that precious work was, from the beginning to the end, or vice versa, what it meant in those years and today: tell me about the frames that wandered in my 'backroom' brain.
I started from those tarnished images, recirculated by the coronavirus. I wanted to understand that series at any cost, even if, a few nights, I confess, I experienced the tension of the 2020 pandemic amplified by the events of the Survivors. And it was tough. But it's here that the magic of 'Survivors' emerged, not taken for granted or loaded of useless post apocalyptic additives typical of certain films.
I remembered a few scenes: a man rummaging in a white house, two individuals search for food in a supermarket and a car they drove on an anonymous English country. That's all. Too little.
In fact, I had a wrong idea of Survivors. I perceived it as unbridled, unreal, mere science fiction, exclusively functional to peremptory title and not the other way around. Instead there were feelings, truth, good interpreters. There were effective screenplays, above all in the first series, which is priceless for quality, unpredictability and that slow rhythm, inconceivable today, which, however, I like, then in full quarantine 2020, I 'went to the wedding', really.
Ian McCulloch, namesake of the singer of the legendary Echo & the Bunnymen (like him an idol of the late seventies) immediately became a feeder.
Excellent actor, perfect in the role of handsome Greg Preston, blonde engineer who personifies the pragmatic and instinctive response of man in the struggle for survival. It is him who dominates the scene in first series. Together with the iconic Carolyn Seymour. She plays Abby Grant, mysterious, beautiful, calm, charismatic leader of the few pained souls who, one after the other, gather out of necessity in the days of the pandemic.
Here it comes the story of Survivors that tells of a disease from unheard virulence that erase 95 percent of mankind. In a dozen of days. And here, fortunately, it does not go as it is today in the era of coronavirus. Everything originates from a glass ampoule, containing the deadly virus, which escapes from the hands of a researcher of a probably Chinese laboratory and spreads rapidly to each latitude of the globe. Just a flash, in the theme song. It is not important, though not for us today, given the rather widespread doubts about what happened in Wuhan.
In England, not far from London, the story of the group takes place of survivors going through the disease and trying to leave while everything exlodes: electricity, order, affections. In the new world there is nothing material, apart from petrol and food that 'ours heroes' take away from empty distributors and supermarkets (and here I relive the emotion of the scene I remembered) or from the houses abandoned (another frame refocused in my Ram).
The clash in the supermarket
Then they are forced to learn again to hunt animals, pull out the good from the earth, to produce methane, giving itself a precise organization, that seems to work, because everyone does what he does best. They cultivate plots, not always suitable for the purpose, among a thousand misfortunes and fortuitous encounters that introduce new elements into the communities, situations in which the individual confronts the aggregate. It is an interesting journey into pre and post catastrophe anthropology. A survival path, not a manual for that. What remains and what changes in the head and habits.
The feeling of love does not emerge, if not that of Abby for the lost son whom she will continue to seek and perhaps meet. There's no honey. There's no salt. Even the deaths, which occur for various reasons, even a capital execution of a poor young man with slight mental disease ('Law & Order' episode I recommend) that is actually not guilty of the murder that is being challenged, they are inevitable events such as time passing. He is the 'solver' Greg Preston to pull the trigger. He will say, like half plus one of adventure companions, that the death of the young man was the best solution right for the community project, while the conscience of others for a few moments it will cry out to summary and primitive justicialism.
The crossroads are the biggest pitfall for the little one social core. Authority or authoritativeness? Democracy or terror? Pioneering or progress? Reason or feeling?
I asked myself several times, looking at my Survivor friends (yeah, because they accompanied me by the hand during the 55 days of quarantine), what would become of us today, in 2020, if a bomb really blew up so powerful. We would probably be like them: strong-willed, immune to memories, instinctive like hungry wolves in the jungle ('Law of the jungle 'and' Mad dog 'in the third series). Or enigmatic like Greg Preston which in the long run will offer a compendium of heroic abilities to which not corresponds the empathy of Charles Vaughan (played by Danis Lill, second and third series) who dreams of repopulating the world and create a confederation between the various groups scattered throughout the United Kingdom.
Vaughan has the presence for leadership that sometimes takes him off the rails. He is capable and pragmatic but more human than Preston, at times fallible to the limit of the grotesque.
The figure that comes out best (but unfortunately she will come out in the true sense of the word after the first series, due to contrasts with the production of Terence Dudley) is the one of the beautiful Abby Grant who balances the muscular vision if not properly a male chauvinist of the entire production.
Abby and Greg in the Hampton Court location
Her only real clash with Greg Preston is memorable ('A beginning' last episode first series) for the permanence or not in the community of poor Ruth, seriously ill and perhaps contagious. Man and woman face each other dialectically, both in denim shirt. High tones, accusations, he squeezes her wrist, but he succumbs to her bomb proof consciousness.
The other angel face Jenny Richards (Lucy Fleming) who enters everyone the episodes, never emerges as a character. It is the woman who immolates herself for the first birth in support of the great project to restore life in the world. Procreation and impulses of freedom: Jenny will be more often far from his baby than with him, because in the post world apocalyptic there's no place for affections and misfortunes. Her lovestory with Preston keeps the plot up and sometimes it weighs, but it is extraordinary to note that they exchange just a couple of hugs and nothing else. Just as with the disease, that can only be glimpsed in the first few episodes, even classic love is latent and that's what surprised me the most. Not in a negative way. Even the cure of the children Lizzie and John, saved and adopted ('Gone to the angels' episode five) accompanies the group's venture as a note from background. The two kids are an integral part of a new world which assigns precise responsibilities. They witness tragedies, they breathe the plague, cooperate, disappear and return without suffering the penalties of the hell they just faced. Little John will find the mother ('Reunion' third series) in a tormented encounter that didn't it moves much, confirming the tendency of production to clear the weapon of emotions.
Pet, Hubert and Charles in the second series
Nobody clutters the scene. Applies to all characters, including the Welsh Tom Price (Talfryn Thomas) and Hubert Goss (John Abineri). They are important figures, at the antipodes: false and ruthless the first, outspoken to the excess but incredibly reliable the second. The rehearsals of the two actors at different moments of the long adventure are convincing.
Tom Price's confession in 'Law and order'
From one series to another, it changes a lot in terms of writing. The frugal and socialist scenario of the restart, in the first series, leaves then free field to the animal fight to survive and prevail with the force or other gimmicks. The total exhaustion of energy and fuel drive our protagonists back, more and more isolated, never adventurers, rather victims of adventures.
In the middle there is the double episode 'Lights of London' (recommended, second series) written by the other writer Jack Ronder. Greg e Charles reach London to bring back the doctor (in fact) Ruth Anderson (Celia Gregory) to their community of farmers and craftsmen. The woman had been deceived by a man and a woman whose motives will emerge later. The skills of Ruth in health care will serve the surviving community of London, about 500 people, perhaps more, to save the salvable. The capital is infested with mice and corpses. The community is commanded by a doctor and another man of power, who plan to bring everyone to the island of White where, according to most, the pandemic would not have taken root with the same destructive power and there would be the possibility of repopulate the human species. This will prove to be a utopia, fruit of another of the sinister and authoritarian organizations that 'ours' Survivors will face dialectically first, and then with a winning mix of strength and cunning. Interesting episodes, these too, which occur when the old group of Survivors it was partially broken up between a catastrophic fire and an echo ever dormant pandemic.
Maybe that's why the first episodes (which I recommend you all) are the best, to me, but also those set in the solemn location of Hampton Court, in decadent version. We become more attached to characters, while later they will be the material implications of the restart, and the individual stories, to mark the canvas, especially the struggle for power, the search for Greg Preston who becomes an invisible catalyst, because he will be almost completely out of the third series, apart from 'The last laugh' written by McCulloch himself (I recommend this too).
Over time, the Survivors enter and leave the scene. The feeling is that there is little to say about relationships, always more impersonal. The story picks up momentum in the finale when the project to reactivate hydroelectric industries, railways and also the trade through improbable 'promissory notes' undergoes constant landslides and it seems to waver, until the epilogue ('Power') full of tension in the clash between the hope of not wasting the human abilities and the desire of others to form a new generation, that pioneers, able to wipe out the worst of the old world, the divisions and clashes for political power. To prevail instinct for reason.
Charles and Jenny happy in 'Power' epilogue of the series
The weight of history and good intentions will win. Energy wins of a frantic rush that ends peremptorily at the last sprint. The desire to rewind the knowledge that feeds civilization it wins too. And it wasn't obvious how it got in travel on the axis England, Scotland, Norway (not to be missed the episode of the hot-air ballooning of the imperturbable Agnes Carlsson (Sally Osborn) in the 'New World' last episode second series.
It will be the Norwegian blonde who will flank Preston (struck by smallpox, dead, and buried by her) in the reorganization of a social and administrative system that closely resembles that of a reborn State with a new government.
Agnes in the last episodes
Petrol will go back to being gold and hydroelectric industries will restart the engine of the main process. It's a titanic feat for 'our' heroes 'Survivors'. As a matter of fact the all of them didn't surveve at all, unlike the civilization that resists in assumptions, in the collective effort, and, perhaps, this is mine vision, in the logical hopes of the spectator.
The end. La fine. End of quarantine in Italy. The curious and slightly anxious boy who is still in me, left to intercept any affinity between the 1975 of science fiction and 2020 of true psychosis, found the time to recompose those childhood fragments. Between past and present, Phase 2 can start.
Commenti
Posta un commento