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thoughts on watching it after almost 20 years....

posted 12 years ago by ib011f9545i
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I was 14 when this was first on tv (1975)and I loved it.
The idea was scary but exciting,CAROLYN SEYMOUR was just my dream women,so sexy and posh.
The plot is good,putting aside my next comments,but the view of society is odd,there is a mixed group of characters surviving but ABBY GRANT is the lead character,she is quite posh,she has a cleaning lady,lives in a big house and her kid is at public school,her husband,who seems to be a bit older than her? seems to be rich.

Watching it all again on dvd (have seen the odd episode)I stll like it but having read a lot about World War 3,civil defence,government emergency planning I think it is unrealistic.
There are no poilce or army in it,not one person under government control.
In the second episode "GENESIS" we here of the collapse of government plans but it seems unrealisitc to me,I know it is a drama.

Even with a quick spread of a killer disease,even more possible now than in 1975 with so many people travelling around the world,the government would have gone underground with regiional centres of government with experts on all sorts of stuff and control of the armed forces and police.
Of course the government people would get the illness but not the ones who were sent underground at the start.
The recent BBC remake takes account of the fact that governments do plan for emergencies and there would be some sort of government infrastructure after the collapde of regular society.

[–] reiver_97 12 years ago

"After almost 20 years"? Is this 1995? Try closer to 40 years.

For what it is worth, I think it still stands up as a solid drama and compares well to the remake. Some pretty major plot holes and character flaws, but nothing that really spoils it (after watching S1 for the first time).

[–] ib011f9545i 12 years ago

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

Yes of course I mean after 40 years.
I had forgotten how ABBY is soon seen as a potential leader,due to her ideas adopted from the old man at the school.
I had also forgotten that the people they meet are usually rough working class types.

[–] hawkluvbeer 12 years ago

i think society would adapt better than our gov't. We now how way too many people prepared. gov't simply has a few more holes in the ground so our politicians can hide.

[–] hugh1971 12 years ago

LOL, the government could even cope with the riots of 2011 and ordinary citizens had to defend their own homes. It turned out that the only water cannon in the UK were in Northern Ireland and it would take 24 hours to get them to London! So I really don't have much faith in much-vaunted government preparedness for emergencies.

I think Survivors covered it well - we see one character, Wormley, with government links, who explained that although an emergency government was formed, everybody died before the emergency planning could take effect.

[–] Mustapha_P 11 years ago

I had never seen it before but i bought the dvd boxset because of the good reviews i read both here and at Amazon U.K
After watching the first episode earlier this evening i can only say that i hope it gets better as i amost fell asleep 3/4 of the way through.

[–] paultapner 11 years ago

I saw it on tv when it was first on. I've always had a taste for post apocalyptic fiction, and I think it's because this fired my imagination for such a thing at an impressioable age. I well remember daydreaming on walks home from school about being the only survivor in the area, and which house I would move into.

I didn't see it again till the first season came out on vhs in 1993. But the second and third years never got vhs releases.

Ever since the dvd release I've been waiting for people to stop charging silly prices for it online, and only earlier this year did season two finally come down in price enough on amazon for me to get it. So I'm two episodea into it at the moment.

Thus it has been twenty years for me! Since the vhs, that is.

[–] erinoco 8 years ago

ven with a quick spread of a killer disease,even more possible now than in 1975 with so many people travelling around the world,the government would have gone underground with regiional centres of government with experts on all sorts of stuff and control of the armed forces and police.
Of course the government people would get the illness but not the ones who were sent underground at the start.

I mulled over this. I think the key difficulty would be the sheer extent of the disease. The RSGs and the emergency structure might be able to survive with as little as 10% of the population surviving in a nuclear war. But, with the plague, at least 99% of the population have died, and the death rate seems to be indiscriminate. Even if the bunkers are fully manned, people on the ground are needed to secure food stocks, maintain the basic of law and order and so forth - and there would be so much disruption that, even where suitable people survive, they would not be necessarily able to organise and communicate with the bunkers. They would be generals without an army.

The disease seems so virulent, moreover, that it's not clear that putting people in bunkers would be enough to stop it spreading there.