Mobile phones debated in the dullest TV

Anyone watching BBC1 last night would’ve seen an apocalyptic drama unfold in their new series, Survivors. Well, I say new series, it’s a remake of the original series, first broadcast in 1975, and created by Terry Nation (aka/ the man what created the Daleks). The original Survivors is regarded as a classic. Which just makes it all the more disappointing that the new version is really not very good at all.

And unusually, mobile phones can be used as an indicator of how interminably dull the whole thing was…

The whole world is ravaged by a super-flu virus, right, and surely that must lead to some kind of exciting shenanigans, with rioting and looting and all kinds of the dark side of humanity on display, until the ones who were immune (the ‘Survivors’ of the title) get their act together, and repopulate the planet. or something.

No.

What we get is 1 minute and 44 seconds of someone with an increasingly impenetrable Irish accent reading dull dialogue about how the world we knew is over and mobile phones are now useless, in a really wooden way. And then the battery dies, on the woman he’s talking at’s mobile phone, conveniently, 30 seconds after he said it would.

That was annoying. It wasn’t even as if it was a brand new, recent mobile phone, either, it’s a Nokia N82. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a gorgeous phone, but it’s not the newest kid on the block. I’m willing to bet the BBC (thanks to the unique way it’s funded) splurged on a job lot of cheap pay as you go mobile phones, and bought about three top-end phones, two of which Spooks nicked, before the Survivors crew could finish writing their script out on the back of a fag packet…

I mean I wasn’t expecting a Nokia N96 or anything, but a phone released in the last couple of months would’ve been nice.

All in all, then, Survivors was a massive disappointment, didn’t even come close to the memory of the Terry Nation original, and not even the mobile phones in it could keep my interest for long. Oh, and it had the single stupidest decision any character in any fiction has ever made, when the daft moo with the now dead mobile phone (played by the hugely overrated Julie Graham) decided the best way to open a closed glass door was to drive her perfectly serviceable and fully working car into it (thus wrecking it and leaving her stranded on foot), instead of, like, using a brick…

Be smarter than the dizzy woman in Survivors (though I suspect the virus itself was more intelligent than her character), and get a newer phone… grab the Nokia N96 today (warning: probably won’t be much use if a super-flu virus DOES actually wipe out humanity)!