Survivors

Executive producer Sue Hogg was inspired to revive Survivors following increased public concern about future pandemics and diseases such as SARS.

For legal reasons, the 2008 series is officially billed as being based on Terry Nation's 1976 novelisation of his original 1970s scripts rather than as a remake of the 1975-1977 series, and securing the rights from Nation's estate took months of negotiation before an agreement was signed in 2007.

Writer Adrian Hodges added two new characters, Al and Najid, to give the series a cultural and class mix reflecting modern Britain, and he aimed to focus more on hope and humanity to make the show 'less depressing' than the original.

City scenes were filmed in Manchester for series 1 and in Birmingham for series 2, with locations including a house near Helmshore in Lancashire as the survivors' base, the disused Earth Centre near Doncaster, and the Jaguar Cars test track in Nuneaton standing in for empty motorways.

To depict a depopulated world without heavy use of CGI, some scenes—including a sequence of Al Sadiq driving fast through the city centre—were filmed very early on Sunday mornings when streets were naturally empty.

The series was shot on 35mm film instead of high-definition video or Super 16, chosen to cope with the low light levels of filming a world without electricity during an autumn shoot.

Roger Lloyd-Pack, who played truck driver Billy Stringer in the 2008 series, is the only actor to have also appeared in the original 1970s Survivors, having played Wally in the 1976 episode 'Lights of London'.

Series 2 was delayed until 2010 because of the real-life swine flu pandemic in 2009.

In 2013, when Survivors was added to Netflix, it became the platform's highest-watched programme, prompting Netflix to contact the BBC about continuing the series, though nothing further came of the talks.

The 2008 series differs significantly from Terry Nation's source novel, including changes such as Jenny's fate, Samantha Willis replacing the book's Arthur Wormley figure, and an altered, non-fatal ending for Abby compared to her accidental death in the novel.