Christmas crunchiness for all

Last night, in Screenwipe’s round-up of the year, Charlie Brooker noted various sillinesses about Survivors, mostly either relating to the onset of the initial plague or to the acting tics of the lead characters; Max Beesley’s eye-narrowing, Abby’s smug insistence on banging on about a son we’ve never met and therefore aren’t fussed about, etc. He was spot on, as usual. But I still like it more than anything else that the BBC’s produced for a very long time. At least it doesn’t have any bonnets in it.
I also realised how much terrible nonsense I’ve happily managed to avoid negating my existence by watching. Noel Edmonds! John Barrowman! Luridly coloured quiz shows with a vague political agenda? What hideousness was this? If you sat through too much of this stuff, you’d morph into a pink flashing buzzer with an inane grin plastered across the void where your brain used to be.
One thing I like about Survivors is that for a homegrown production it’s relatively un-crunchy; crunchiness being when a show looks a bit rubbish, like it was conceived and shot by the work experience. The nativity show, however, is an art form that’s wonderful precisely because of its crunchiness. I watched one yesterday. The same three kings costumes come out of storage every year, and are always inhabited with regal dignity, whatever the misbehaving three-year-old at the foot of the stage does to break through the fourth wall. At the end the children were allowed onto the stage to greet Baby Jesus, a real newborn who actually let them stroke him without crying.
In the Christmas issue of The Spectator Rod Liddle is all hot under the collar about some woman who withdrew her child from RE lessons, then protested when he was excluded from the Christmas party: ‘But Christmas is nothing to do with Jesus!’ she allegedly protested.
Actually, she had a point, given that the Christians co-opted the Roman midwinter festival of Saturnalia, just as they adapted the horns of the pagan fertility god for the iconography of the Devil. When you’re establishing a new power base, if you’ve got any sense, you don’t attempt to sweep away what was there before entirely, you seek to employ and control it; and people need a knees-up when it’s cold and dark, and would, then as now, be most upset if it was disallowed.
Now it seems that the pagans have co-opted Christmas back again, or, to be more precise, Commerce, the upstart god of the age, known in infancy as Mammon, has made it his own. (Gluttony and Debauch also get a good look-in.) Or so it may appear, but actually the midwinter feast, celebrated for and by children, their families and tribes, retains its magic regardless of who’s meant to be in charge. The annual ritual of the nativity play, acted out on school stages and in churches the length and breadth of the land, has a gentle power that is succoured by something quieter and more enduring than the incessant tinkle of Christmas musak, something older even than Saturnalia; something that doesn’t need to advertise and couldn’t if it tried.

Post-apocalyptic pastoral: eat, shoot, leave

Oooh! The final, cliffhanger episode of season one of Survivors brought me out in a sweat. I have a very low resistance to suspense. It really was very good – genuinely gripping, chilling and thought-provoking. The thoughts it provoked, for me at least, went something like this:

• What on earth would I do in this situation? I have no useful practical survival skills. I don’t know how to trap and skin a rabbit, fix up an engine or use a gun.
• Oh yes... that’s exactly the kind of shitty behaviour people would probably indulge in if the social order fell apart. That irritating prick who’s enjoying shoving a rifle into people’s faces and throwing his weight around – yup, that’s what you’d have to put up with if you made it through to the grim new world. I’m not sure any of our current ministers or politicians would actually really end up wielding any authority over their fellow men when the chips were down, though. Our generals, maybe. Or maybe any surviving politicians would be in their element, conniving and bullying their way back to the top. Just one unpleasant possibility among many.
• ...Yes! Yessss! Shoot him! He’s an irritating prick! (The post-apocalyptic scenario does away with one’s willingness to give people the benefit of the doubt and deal with threat in a peaceful and diplomatic fashion.)

Guns are crucial in the post-apocalyptic world. So are old-fashioned huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ countryman-type skills. Perhaps you’d end up with a sort of peculiar civil war with urban guerrillas and well-armed yokels fighting it out over who gets to be lord of the manor.

One thing’s for sure, the manor’s the place to head for. Cities always turn nasty very quickly when the social order goes into meltdown in the aftermath of plague. The whole post-apocalyse genre is a sort of perverse pastoral in which there’s no option but to go back to the mean old serfdom of tilling the soil, probably with a bunch of thugs and enforcers living off the fat of your labour and deploying you to fight turf wars with the neighbouring badass...

Anyway, roll on season two. Next up: season four of The Wire, which has just become cheap enough to be eligible for purchase. Happy Christmas Eve!

More daft birth: how Survivors screwed up

BBC1’s Survivors: whoever put this together has been watching Lost and Heroes, and it’s all the better for it; its characters, being Brits, aren’t as consistently gorgeous, but they’re morally ambiguous while remaining sympathetic, which is the winning hand played by big American dramas at their best. But the recent birth scene was, in one crucial respect, a letdown.

OK, we’d been primed for it to be a quick labour; it was her third, and she was sure it would be as easy as shelling peas, or picking daisies, or something. But the creepy music had warned us that the delivery might turn out not to be as straightforward as the fate-tempting mother anticipated... And lo, it’s breech. Here’s the fatal flaw; it was completely preposterous to suppose that the sexy sister from Nathan Barley would have been happy to push one out with Mumsy Abby and the slick boss from Peep Show looking benignly on.

I know this character was exceptionally Zen – so much so that she responded to the unmedicated schizoid antics of her group leader with warm affection, and instead of deciding it might be a smart move to keep her newborn out of his orbit, volunteered the hope that the baby would help him to recover. But all the same... She might have put up with Abby, just, but Mr Peep Show Boss, delightful though he is, would have almost certainly received some very sweary marching orders. Am totally digging him in his Survivors incarnation, though. I hope it’s true that he’s going to be the new Doctor Who.