THE LATEST EDITION of the UK political weekly The Spectator (21 August 2021) includes a feature reflecting on the availability of Survivors on the Britbox platform.
The inclusion of all three series of Survivors on Britbox has led to renewed media interest in the show, of which The Spectator‘s TV review is one of the latest examples.
Reviewer James Delingpole relies on many of the familiar ‘isn’t old TV funny, and wasn’t everything gentle and innocent in the old days’ tropes that afflict many contemporary press reflections on Survivors and other shows from the same decade.
He misrepresents Brian Aldiss’ conception of the ‘cosy catastrophe’. Whilst skimming through series one, he’s clearly skipped Corn Dolly (and he has not ventured beyond A Beginning at all). His understanding of 1970s’ Outside Broadcast production techniques is also pretty limited.
However, he does resist the temptation to use any of the tedious comparisons between Survivors and other shows that many of his contemporaries sucuumb to. He also concludes that, from his observations so far, he’d “much rather live in post-apocalyptic 1970s Britain than the much uglier and more freedom-deprived modern one.”
James Delingpole. 2021. ‘Apocalypse, Seventies-style: BritBox Survivors reviewed’, The Spectator, 21 August. https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/apocalypse-seventies-style-britboxs-survivors-reviewed
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