‘It’s the bomb that will bring us together …’

Watching television over the past couple of weeks, it struck me that Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s commission for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern – TH.2058 – seems to be very much in step with the imaginations of TV and film producers at the moment. Gonzalez-Foerster’s installation imagines a kind of post-disaster cinematheque-cum-refugee camp for London: a cultural institute after a great deluge in the year 2058. Rows of steel beds line the floor, iconic modern sculptures by artists such as Louise Bourgeois and Henry Moore seem to have mutated and grown way out of proportion – like plants given massive doses of fertilized water – and apocalyptic sci-fi films are projected at the far end of the space.

The BBC’s most high-profile drama series this winter is ‘Survivors’, a remake of the 1970s cult TV show of the same name. The series imagines a deadly virus sweeping the world, swiftly killing off all humankind, save for a lucky few who are mysteriously immune to the disease. It follows a small, demographically wide-ranging gaggle of survivors – including a young, devout Muslim boy from Manchester, a convicted murderer just out of prison, and a suburban mother in search of a son she still believes to be alive – as they struggle to get by in a Britain without law, government, electricity, gas, communications, or any of the amenities of modern living – a country where cholera and looting is rife in the cities and the countryside seems to offer the only refuge, so long as you know how to live off the land.

Although the show’s message that we shouldn’t take the comforts of modern living for granted bangs its audience on the head with all the subtlety of a looter fighting for the last can of baked beans in a post-disaster supermarket, Survivors nonetheless makes for entertainingly chilling viewing. Like the 1970s original, the power of the show not only derives from playing out nightmare ‘what if…’ scenarios of post-apocalyptic life, but in showing image after image of emptied-out streets, deserted motorways, and televisions and mobile phones with no signal; of familiar landmarks haunted by nothing save for an uncanny silence and the odd rabid dog or pack of rats. Just as with recent films such as 28 Days Later and Children of Men, there is a distinctly perverse pleasure taken by directors and audience alike in dwelling on images that say: ‘this is what it could be like …’

Evidently in a fit of enthusiasm for what they believe to be a ‘really good idea’, the BBC has also just announced it is going to remake another of its vintage disaster series: ‘“The Day of the Triffids”: a brilliant adaptation,originally screened in the early 1980s, of John Wyndham’s novel of the same name. Meanwhile, Hollywood is turning Edge of Darkness, perhaps the most powerful eco-political-survivalist drama ever made for British television, into a feature film starring Mel Gibson, Ray Winstone and Danny Huston. How this will turn out is anyone’s guess. However, even today, Edge of Darkness – in which a detective, searching for the man responsible for murdering his daughter, stumbles into a world of shadowy nuclear industry lobbyists, militant eco-protestors, MI5 and renegade CIA agents – still stands as a testament to how politically outspoken and emotionally charged television was in Britain under Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government.

My favourite recent survivalist TV drama has to have been Dead Set on the digital E4 channel. Written by acerbic satirist Charlie Brooker, ‘Dead Set’ takes ‘reality TV’ to a new extreme. Like Survivors it envisions a plague raging across the globe, destroying all human life. Unlike ‘Survivors’, however, the victims become flesh-eating zombies, and the only survivors are the inhabitants of the Big Brother household. Cocooned inside their compound, isolated from all television, telephone and radio communications, the mostly average and unappealingly ego-maniacal stars of Big Brother are all that survives of un-zombified human life in Britain. Far funnier and more schlock-horror than Survivors, _Dead Set_’s misanthropy was perhaps its most chilling aspect: after all, whose to say that anyone left standing the day after Doomsday is necessarily going be intelligent, or even nice enough, to start things over again?

Last month, the National Archives published, for the first time, the scripts that the BBC would have broadcast to the nation in the 1970s in the event of nuclear attack. For something truly chilling you can listen to one of the pre-recorded broadcasts here. A real-life worst-case scenario.