Watch a documentary on the making of Survivors

Back when literary science fiction was young, innocent and carefree, it liked to imagine utopias where ideal societies thrived and grew. These stories dominated the genre for years - pretty much from 1516, with Sir Thomas More’s Utopia, all the way up to 1656, with James Harrington’s The Commonwealth of Oceana. After that there was a bit of a lull, quite a long lull, in fact, until the Victorians got involved in the late 1800s with Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, William Morris’s News from Nowhere, Jules Verne’s Two Years’ Vacation and HG Wells’s A Modern Utopia.

Then, despite a tiny spurt in the 1930s, the sci-fi world changed its mind. The future was going to be awful. Really grim and vicious. Almost everyone would be dead, and those who weren’t would hate you. Of course, we loved it. The jury was out on the causes. Civilisation might be brought to its knees by a nuclear war or a plague, killer plants or zombies. We went back to mild optimism throughout the 1990s, but now, for obvious reasons (war, terror, environmental collapse, Sars and the concomitant paranoid dread), the destruction of everything is back at the heart of popular culture. If it’s not our old zombie pals chewing our throats out, then it’s asteroids, monsters, really, really cold weather, aliens or killer machines from the future.

This autumn’s “oh my God, everyone’s dead” drama is Survivors, a remake of the 1970s original, in which a rampaging virus spreads uncontrollably around the world, leaving, well, a few survivors. It’s a remake of an intensely loved drama created by Terry Nation, the Doctor Who scribe, that ran for three series from 1975 to 1977. Dogged by a series of internal disputes, walkouts and even a High Court case, the 1970s version still excites passions today. On the usually jovial website DigitalSpy you can find impassioned pleas like “Please, please, BBC, don’t mess this up for the original fans who rushed home from wherever or whatever just to tune in to a truly remarkable series”, as well as advance grumblings such as “As a fan of the original, I can sadly see that, based on present practice, this will be dreadful”.

There are some differences between 1975 and 2008: today’s filming constraints make for a tighter canvas (it was possible to film a silent London in the 1970s), and a plot to unpick the mystery of the virus offers some sort of salvation greater than mere survival. The effects are also far better than shonky old-school crisps-and-ketchup wounds. Although, for many fans, it’s the shonky they love. Still, 2008 also has a strong small-screen cast - at least initially - with Julie Graham, Max Beesley, Nikki Amuka-Bird and Paterson Joseph as well as a host of relative newbies.

It opens with the countdown to apocalypse, with lots of embattled government ministers trying to take control of the situation as the bodycount mounts. The writer Adrian Hodges, of Primeval fame, works some nice Spooks-style tricks by killing off big names just when you least expect it. He then sets everyone else at each other’s throats, adds in a subplot about the cause of the disease and then cranks up the tensions in the ensemble. “I had done lots of period drama before Primeval,” he explains. “But that show was such a gas, it reawakened that part of me that had grown up with series like these – the sort of genre show that had been parked by British TV for years until Doctor Who woke them back up. Then I wanted to bring some of the stuff I’d learnt from the genre – the excitement of series with serial hooks but in an adult slot. It is a fantasy, but very grounded. I even took my ideal disease to virologists, and they said, ‘That could easily happen tomorrow.’ I said: ‘Okay, I’d prefer not to hear that.’”

As the show zips through the initial panic, the experts out of their depth, the “necessary lies” told to quell fear and the terrified people clinging to each other desperately unsure what to do, but hoping it will all be okay, you are uncomfortably aware of the evening’s headlines. “It certainly doesn’t feel like a sci-fi show, it feels like current affairs,” says Zoë Tapper, who plays Anya, a stricken doctor. “We were filming in a house in the middle of the Peak District for a long time, Survivors is on BBC1 from tonight, 9pm feeling quite isolated from the world, butreading the papers, saying, my God, it really is happening.”

Hodges claims he didn’t have the credit crunch in mind when he started. “But even when I was plotting out the story, there were two major ‘we’re all going to die’ health scares from bird flu – it’s the fear of any civilisation.

“Clearly, if you are living in a society where getting by from day to day is survival, you don’t worry about everything collapsing. We somehow think the worst could happen at any moment, yet we’ve never had a greater degree of comfort in the prosperous West. They’re linked. Everything feels fragile for reasons we don’t really understand, and the credit crunch has made that fragility seem nakedly obvious. You think, jeez, if the banks went, what does happen? Is it really everybody for themselves? How much can governments control? If left to our own devices, do we tear ourselves apart or form some alternative system? That’s the big question: would we become Lord of the Flies?”

Hodges takes a cheerful view of the human spirit. Each character has their own personal road to redemption, and a group purpose underpins their tiny clan – although there are a number of very unpleasant events. “It’s about hope,” he insists. “It’s about what it takes for the best of us to endure.” As this is loosely within sci-fi, however, perhaps we should also hear from a scientist. Someone like, say, Albert Einstein. “Only two things are infinite,” the physicist, who discussed theories of human nature with Freud, wrote: “The universe and human stupidity, and I’m not sure about the former.”

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