Big Finish Reviews+ Survivors Series 9 by Tony J Fyler

Tony makes it through.

It’s the end, to coin a phrase, but the moment has been prepared for.

Survivors, like several other ideas in the mind of Terry Nation, has lived on far beyond its creator, and has taken directions that have made it chillingly relevant even in an age beyond that in which it’s set. The coming of ‘the Death,’ the plague that wiped out most of the world’s human beings, feels like a generation ago, a fact subtly underlined in Jane Slavin’s opening episode of this box set, The Farm, by the fact that young women of childbearing age can’t remember exactly how old they are, because their parents died when they were young and so precision about such things has been lost. The world our survivors used to know is gone, and even the world of the immediate aftermath, of paranoia, fear, and violation-danger, particularly for women, has curled around the edges into something more horribly productively-minded. In The Farm, Jenny (Lucy Fleming) is being kept, along with lots of other women, on the farm run by would-be British Supremo, Meg Pritchard (Richenda Carey). The conditions are primitive and unsanitary, the food rations small, and by the use of strict segregation of men and women that might not be quite as strict as it’s made out to be, there’s a degree of human-farming going on without anything so vulgar and authoritarian as a forced breeding program.

But ask yourself – in a human farm, what happens to women when they hit the menopause?

Strap in for this one, it’s funny and hopeful and dark and vicious and the silver thread of psychopathic human-using evil runs glistening through Richenda Carey’s Meg Pritchard, as she tries first to subvert Jenny to her cause, make her a trustee to be bought off with little luxuries that mean the world, and then, when that fails, to put her and her friends down as they make a break for it. Listen out for Issy Van Randwyck as Beryl and Lizzie Stables as Victoria, a pair of characters that show from different angles the commoditisation of women in this environment, each doing their bit to harden Jenny’s resolve to break Pritchard’s power. Above all, there’s a sense of realistic women together in captivity that’s too often missing from modern TV drama, and which would be enormously welcome there. It’s welcome here too, showing the strength, resilience and nous of women under pressure.

If you want a story with an interesting and intense single central set-up, you go to Christopher Hatherall, because he has some serious form in Survivors when it comes to delivering nitty-gritty stories about the actual, practical ‘hows’ of bad situations – in Series 6, he wrung every last drop of tension from a story mostly set in a great big hole in the ground (The Trapping Pit – worth a re-listen). Here, he takes us into a coal mine, because yay, more holes in the ground! More seriously, Hearts And Mines is more than just a play on words, it’s the beginnings of a real fracture between our chosen group of survivors, the group loosely identified as the Federation, with Craig (George Watkins) wanting to strike at the heart of the survivors-come-lately, the Protectorate, run by Captain Robert Malcolm (Hywel Morgan) on behalf of Meg Pritchard. Abby Grant though is torn between what she knows is the right thing, ethically speaking, and what her intuition tells her, which is that she has to rescue her son Peter (Joel James Davison) from the clutches of Malcolm and the brutal military lifestyle in which Peter’s been raised in her absence. The division comes to a head when the Federation gang try to seal off a coal mine to save the workers from Protectorate oppression. Tense, sweaty, and unexpected, the episode brings common sense and instinct into sharp conflict. Where will Abby’s true loyalties lie when every single chip is down? You’ll know by the end of this episode.

Fade Out, by Roland Moore, is a purposefully shocking episode of Survivors, reviving some of the initial series’ horror value, as some of our Federation friends hold out in an old cinema against the encroaching forces of Robert Malcolm and Peter Grant. It’s one of those crisis-point episodes of Survivors where allegiances crystallise, horror pushes people to extremes and souls are won and lost – not everybody makes it out of Fade Out alive, and the repercussions of the events here break friendships, force dark alliances and finally push one character over a line of definition from which there may be no return.

And finally, Andrew Smith, master of early Survivors and its philosophical questions of exactly how you re-establish a society you recognise or like in the aftermath of a cataclysm, returns to the series for the final episode of the full-cast audio Survivors. In Conflict, he forces events to what was probably always their inevitable conclusion in a post-Death world – when there are groups with differing ideologies competing for control of resources, you don’t get peace until you win a war, until your enemies are routed, defeated or killed. There are historical precedents for this idea going back at least as far as ancient Rome, and Andrew Smith delivers a final clash between the forces of the Protectorate and the Federation, between the brutal authoritarianism of Pritchard and Malcolm and the firm but fair comparative civilisation of Jenny and Ruth (Helen Goldwyn), that has that sort of epic scope, where instinct and rational decision-making are at odds, where choices are made, a watching populace pick a side and there are fatal consequences that decide what the future of Britain in the post-Survivors era is going to look like. It’s by no means all happiness and light – our survivors are irrevocably split, there will be trials and probably further executions, and at least a couple of banishments give a note of realistic sourness to the ending of a series as dark and bright and brilliant as Survivors on audio has been. The very last note of the series is a careless welcome given to a world-changing event – leaving us as listeners to imagine whether that welcome will herald a brave new era, or the beginning of a whole new level of conflict.

Survivors on audio has been one of the most traumatic, philosophically fascinating, realistically human, hopeful, dark, gritty and horrifying series in Big Finish history. It has never been anything less than breathtaking in its writing and its performance. It has expanded massively on the legend established by Terry Nation and the TV writers, and it ends with a set of stories as emotionally exhausting, as pulse-racing and as inventive as any in the series. If you’ve come this far with the audio version of Survivors, it’s a massive pay-off of all your investment and a suitably bittersweet resolution of the long story-arcs that have seen characters pushed to their limits and beyond by the challenge of surviving the end of the world as we know it.

Listen to Survivors 9 – then take a long breath, have a cup of tea, look at the world around us… and go back to the beginning for one more apocalypse.

Big Finish Reviews+ Survivors, Series 8 by Tony J Fyler

Teenagers today, says Tony.

Never meet your heroes, they say.

As Survivors moves into its eighth audio series, and extends beyond the end of the TV version into the realms of pure creativity, it’s just possible they should add ‘never meet the son you’ve been searching for across eight box sets either’ to the perennial warning.

For those just joining us…where the hell have you been till now? There was a Seventies TV show, a 21^st century updated remake, a novel by Terry ‘dystopian genius’ Nation and now, eight box sets back in the Seventies from Big Finish, so you’ve got some ground to make up. The short version is that a woman named Abby Grant survived a plague that decimated the world, and has been searching for her son, Peter, ever since. Peter was away at boarding school when ‘the Death’ struck, and has been on adventures of his own since, never actually appearing in the audio show, but heard of, tantalisingly, as a rumour, as a member of this group or that, as a corpse, and most recently as a boy soldier under the command of a man named Robert Malcolm.

Abby, in the company of her long-time friend Jenny, starts this series on a train – the ambition and prize of fellow survivor, and Jenny’s husband, Greg Preston, who has sadly snuffed it while adventuring to make the world a better place.

The train is a key asset for the beginnings of a new federation of settlements, the beginnings of a real interconnected society again, rebuilt from the ashes of the post-Death world of isolation, will to power and desperation. That…makes it valuable.

Christopher Hatherill kicks us off in Series 8 with Bandit Train, a story which is divided roughly into two halves – all action in real time for the first half, mostly thought and talking for the second half. With Abby, Jenny and their relatively new young friend Craig on the train, Bandit Train delivers what it promises – the first half is almost textbook Western, with one additional Land Rover, and it introduces us to a new power dynamic – Abby and her friends have the train and the Federation. The so-called bandits are Teenagers With Attitude, out for a bit of not-so-great train robbery. The owner of the Land Rover – a glittering impossibility in an England that’s mostly returned to a pre-industrial technological level – is Captain Robert Malcolm and his boy soldiers, which raises Abby’s hopes at the same rate as her heartbeat. Has she finally found Peter? Is she about to have the long dreamed-of reunion with her little boy?

Don’t be silly, this is Survivors, moments of unalloyed joy are few and far between.

Christopher Hatherill has a distinct knack of taking single incidents and stretching them out, believably and more engagingly than you’d imagine was possible, while dealing realistically with the practical problems the incident raises and wringing every drop of sweat and tension out of them. In one of his previous episodes, for instance, we spent most of the run-time in a big hole in the ground, exploring the annoyances, the terrors and the pains of being stuck in a big hole in the ground. There’s a touch of that sweaty realism about Bandit Train too – the first half of the story has that Western vibe of raiders on horseback and riders on a train shooting actual bullets at each other as though their very lives depend on possession of the transport – which in some cases they do. Again, this is Survivors – with a gloriously sick interpretation of the title, people die here, for the sake of train ownership.

The second half of the story is equally sweaty but far more delicate, as we learn the reality of the power balances in the region. Is Robert Malcolm all he seems to be? Or is he just another in the seemingly endless line of tin-pot local dictators against whom our heroes are destined to come up?

It would be telling to answer that question, but there’s something about Robert that takes us back to the early, sharp-end days of the Survivors series. He may be trying to do the right thing by his boys, but does that necessarily make him a good man?

Here’s the thing about Survivors – or indeed about any post-apocalyptic drama. The further away you get from the initial point that changes the world, the easier it is and the more likely you are to fall into ‘villain-of-the-week’ territory, mistrusting every friendly leader who reaches out to your group of heroes because of course they’re going to be horrible, evil gits who want nothing but harm and control underneath their happy, smiley exteriors, because that’s where the maximum drama is. Series 8 is pretty far from the collapse of the world’s infrastructure – it’s unlikely that anyone new is going to infect you with the Death, and the perils of the immediate aftermath, like rape-gangs, cannibalism, extra-apocalyptic religious grimness and so on has all been done, documented, and at least by some, survived. So Series 8 runs close by the danger of formulaic villain-of-the-week territory.

Annnnd then along comes Jane Slavin, with an episode called simply Robert. In fact, along comes Big Finish with an idea to take us behind the scenes, behind the pre-Death life of Robert Malcolm and make us face the realities of grey areas. Malcolm is a central pivot around which the action of Series 8 moves, and Jane Slavin shows us what we all instinctively know, but rarely want to face when we’re invested in a drama – that good and evil are mostly positional judgments, and the more we know about each other, the more we can understand where any action is coming from.

Slavin paints us a military man with a wife entrusted to a 1970s asylum, a girlfriend more accepting than many would be, and a life, like many in the Armed Forces, complicated by the tangle of emotion, and eased by action, by plans, by discipline and direction. When the Death catches up with Robert Malcolm, his wife is gazing adoringly at fellow patient Jesus, his girlfriend’s none too keen about a road trip with the ex-who-isn’t and a trip to the country goes healingly, happily right – and then…well, at least less right. There’s undoubtedly more to learn about Robert Malcolm, and it would probably pay dividends to get Slavin to write a second part of his backstory between this episode and when we encounter him in the main thrust of the Series 8 story-arc, but here, Hywel Morgan as Robert Malcolm takes Jane Slavin’s seemingly simple script and gives its protagonist life and layers that alter how we understand him for the rest of the set.

Oh, and - there’s no way this can go unsaid – Wendy Craig’s in this one. Wendy ‘ruler of late-Seventies-early-Eighties TV’ Craig. In fact, Big Finish gets maximum Wendy Craig magic for its money in this set, as she takes on three separate roles, and makes them each so individual, you’d never know they were the same actress, and, in all fairness, never particularly slap your forehead and go ‘It’s Wendy Craig Doing Things!’ you’re so absorbed in the reality of her performances. More Wendy Craig on audio, please, she’s a downright national treasure who’s clearly still got the knack of adding emotional reality and value to any story in which she’s cast.

Episode 3, The Lost Boys by Lisa McMullin and Episode 4, Village of Dust by Roland Moore, bring us screeching back to the ‘present’ of the Series 8 narrative, and do in fact present us with an answer to one of the series’ longest running questions – is Peter Grant, Abby’s son and the Holy Grail the search for which has kept her alive and surviving all this time…actually still alive?

Yes. Yes, he is. You can call that a spoiler if you like, but it’s in the episode-synopses and the packaging, so we can’t feel too bad about it.

But of course, Peter, like his mother, has had to survive the world of the Death. He’s by no means the seemingly innocent young boy he used to be. In fact, in Lisa McMullin’s The Lost Boys, he’s rather neatly nicknamed Pan – leader of the lost boys under Robert Malcolm’s command. And where Malcolm has had the benefit of Jane Slavin’s backstory episode to muddy the waters of his motivations for us, with Peter, there’s a sharpness, an almost evangelistic nihilism in the ways he’s found to survive – but is there any way for this Peter, the real one, rather than the dream of the young boy that Abby has carried around with her, to reconcile with the mother he feels abandoned him to the world of the Death? Is he in fact a boy too lost to find his way home?

These are questions that stretch across both the latter episodes of the set, and in Village of Dust by Roland Moore, the question is put significantly to the test as Abby, determined that her blood connection to Peter will prove stronger than the bonds he’s made since they were separated, tries to reach out to him from a childhood he barely acknowledges. The way in which the question is put involves the siege of a village we’ve visited before in the Survivors audio adventures, and foreshadows the rise of a new potential threat – Abby and Jenny have been working to build their Federation, but in Village of Dust particularly, it becomes clear that there’s another idea fighting to win the future, backed by intensely organised, well-resourced and comparatively ruthless individuals who are yet to be revealed.

It would have been easy to create Survivors Series 8 to a plotting formula – drama, death, tension, betrayal, and a clash of ideologies. There’s a degree to which all those things are present and correct in Series 8, certainly, but the care that’s taken to avoid the formulaic, to give unusual angles on what could otherwise have been stock figures and standard situations, raises it far above such easily constructed and button-pressing drama. That’s the Big Finish difference.

Here, there’s a genuine idea that maybe there are other ways to survive and build a future than anything our Survivors have imagined. There’s the argument of which is more important in shaping character, nature or nurture. There’s a love song to the complexity of humanity and how very little is as straightforward as it seems when you first meet it. And, of course, there’s a train robbery, a siege, betrayal, treachery and the rise of a new Big Potentially Very Bad, all of which is no mean feat for a series in its eighth box set. Get Survivors Series 8 because if you’ve come this far with it, you have to hear the reunion of Abby and Peter Grant. If you’re new to the series, go back and catch up, but Survivors Series 8, when you get to it, will make perfect emotional and intellectual sense, while giving you at least a moment of closure, and opening up new vistas of potential plot towards the end.

Big Finish Reviews+ Survivors Series Seven by Tony J Fyler

Survivors has always been a particularly British apocalypse – the pandemic plague that laid waste to over 90% of human beings is a worldwide event, absolutely, but the domestic grimness of the storytelling has always been true to Terry Nation’s original vision. That said, the Big Finish audio Survivors is now reaching its seventh box set, while the TV version in the Seventies stretched only to three series. That means two things are happening to the audio version. Firstly, it’s reaching and exceeding the point in the storytelling where the original series left off. And secondly, the nature of the issues facing our band of survivors is changing – we’re long past the initial devastation of ‘the Death’ now, past the point of panic which led to religious cults and cannibalism, rape-gangs and forced breeding, just a few of the highlights of earlier box sets. The world, while still far from getting back on its feet, is beginning to normalise in its post-Death realities – food is gold, work is silver, sex is sellable, and medical care is practically priceless. A new social order is beginning to emerge, based on knowledge and skills – engineers, teachers, farmers, heavies, they all have their place, whereas, for instance, the more effete disciplines, like accountancy, are significantly less valuable and less in demand. But the excessively sharp edges of the world are, for the most part at least, rather worn off, meaning the dilemmas our survivors face in Series 7 are rather more philosophical and character-driven than they were in previous box sets. There’s a theme here: forces of societal progress versus forces of individual greed, destruction and protectionism.

That means there’s more time and space in Survivors Series 7 to deal with character issues, and many of our original survivors come to points of particular personal crisis in this box set.

In Journey’s End by Roland Moore, for instance, Abby Grant faces a long dark night of the soul when her quest to find her son Peter comes to an end. There are some twists and turns here that play with your ingrained Survivors expectations of what people will be like, and some guessable issues around the trustworthiness of information, but you won’t care much about any of that, because Carolyn Seymour’s performance in this episode as a mother who’s been kept alive and kept going by the quest for her son, and whose quest is over, will blow your hair well and truly back. There’s a rawness and a viscerality to her reactions when she finally finds Peter that you can only applaud, and get out of the way of. Journey’s End leaves you wondering whether, and how, Abby will go forward beyond this point, having had answers to the questions that have kept her searching and moving all this time.

In Legacy by Simon Clark too, we’re dealing with the impacts on people of big discoveries about the people they love. Greg Preston, the series’ itchy-footed engineer, is evoked here in one of his final ‘off-screen’ adventures, having left his wife Jenny and their son at home and gone off to clear a railway line and run the train that served it, bringing connections, trade, news and other invaluable commodities, including people, to and from a series of settlements. Legacy splits its storytelling between Greg at some point in the past, getting the railway up and running, and falling foul of a settlement that’s run on the basis of indentured servitude, offering food for work on an ongoing basis, and Jenny (Lucy Fleming) riding the train without him, some time later, and confronting the very same community. Each of them makes their own impact, bringing a degree of freedom to the enslaved workers, but there’s a distinct separation between them, and it’s more than hinted that they never got back together after Greg left to go on his quest to bring a bit of civilisation back to the world.

For all the power of the first two episodes though, Old Friends by Matt Fitton is the undimmable bright spot of this box set. Jackie Burchall, played by Louise Jameson, has always been an odd survivor. In Old Friends, Jameson’s back as Burchall, and the world in which she lives is one of ghosts of happier times as she wills herself to waste away in secrecy and solitude, unwilling to carry on living in the ‘real’ world, and yet, discovering a sliver of faith, unable to simply take her own life. When fellow survivors Ruth and Evelyn come to find her, move her out of the way of a new generation of post-plague anarchists, Jackie has to decide whether to hold on to her happier ghosts or face the world as it is. It takes dark, bright, scandalising confessions, tough love, and the urging of a very particular ghost in her ear to push Jackie to a final decision. There’s not a dud note across the hour’s length of Old Friends, with Jameson as Burchall, Helen Goldwyn as Ruth, Zoe Tapper as Evelyn and John Banks as Jackie’s friend Daniel all turning in vibrating, pitch-perfect performances that keep you glued all the way through and mean you’re never entirely sure which way Jackie will jump. Old Friends brings the drama down to a single cold question: when everyone you care for dies, would you want to survive?

The box set rounds out with Reconnection from Christopher Hatherall, a more plot-driven story that takes the Survivors world forward. Jenny, en route to re-starting a hydro-electrical power plant, she bumps into Abby, and faces opposition from the forces of greed, nationalism and unreconstructed machismo. Without spoiling the end, it’s a story that balances the progress of plot with some blistering characterisation and dialogue for Jenny and Abby, and shows how far our particular clutch of survivors have come since the immediate impact of the Death.

Series 7 of Survivors more than pulls its emotional weight, but more than usual, there’s a sense here that even in horrifying, dark times, good people will still exist, and sometimes, they’ll even triumph. In that, Survivors 7 is a box set that speaks to the mood of 2017 and 2018, like catharsis in audio, and for that, as well as the powerful performances and character development, it’s definitely worth a listen.

Big Finish Reviews+ Survivors Series Three by Tony J Fyler

Tony Fyler survives again – not everyone’s so lucky.

Survivors is an audio series that’s evolving. Series 1 was one of the two best Big Finish releases of its year (Domain of the Voord, since you ask), because it showed scenarios that the original TV Survivors couldn’t afford to show – how victims of the pandemic plague now being simply called the Death suffered in urban environments like airports and suburban environments like a college. The TV Survivors from the 1970s became largely rural pretty quickly, mostly because it was cheaper and more realistic to shoot scenes in a rural environment but also because, to be fair, most people with any sense would flee urban environments in a plague scenario – when basic amenities break down in cities, they become a magnifying glass not only for additional piggy-back diseases, but also for the competition for scarce resources and the worst in human nature. That being said, the first audio series of Survivors  didn’t take it as read that this was necessarily a bad environment to set its drama in, and it was genuinely shocking even to a 21^st century listener.

Series 2 saw our band of survivors shift to the countryside and experimented with storytelling, confident enough in itself and its cast to not have to have all of them in every story – it pretty much broke its cast up into a male group and a female group, and allowed an episode to really focus on each, giving an almost sing-song rhythm, despite tackling some hardcore subjects, including a psychotic rural reversion to cannibalism and tribal ‘us and them’ mentalities.

Series 3 evolves that confidence even further, leaving some of the characters behind entirely, focusing on stories involving Abby and her continuing search for her son Peter, Molly, the young woman who had suffered at the hands of a rape gang in Series 2 (did I mention the storylines were hardcore?), Daniel the reporter who found himself changed and guilt-ridden at the end of Series 2 by his actions, and – as a joyful surprise – Maddie Price, kickass American attorney and would-be Bridezilla, last seen as pretty much one of the last people alive in Heathrow, back in Series 1. Maddie’s played by switched-on queen of the geeks Chase Masterson, and added exactly the right kind of international accent to turn Survivors Series 1 into a depiction of a worldwide epidemic. She does much the same here in Series 3, and episodes 2, 3 and 4 involve her right in the thick of the action. But before any of that, we go a little back in time with Molly, to set up the Big Bad of Series 3, John ‘Vinnie’ Vincent.

If there’s a worse place to be when a global epidemic breaks out than a city, it’s a ship. Episode 1 of Series 3, Cabin Fever by Jonathan Morris, shows exactly why. In between fever dreams, Molly relates the story of how she survived when the Death hit the cross-Channel ferry, she and her friend Janet (played by long-time Big Finisher and new Sixth Doctor companion Miranda Raison) having nipped across for a cheeky weekend in France.

What becomes clear quickly as port after port refuse to allow the ship to dock is that the rules of society break down in a closed environment, and they who have the muscle make the law. A group of football louts, led by Vinnie, become the new ‘police’ of the ship, enforcing a kind of brutish martial law, rationing  food and resources, and ultimately throwing people overboard if they believe they have the Death – or even if they’re just inconvenient. In a story that allows Paul Thornley as Vinnie to bring the very worst of the seventies growling to the fore, including sexism, racism, and casual threat (basically everything kept alive in the 21^st century by Britain First and Donald Trump), the atmosphere is claustrophobic and returns us to that Series 1 sense of shock that things like our civilised society can fall apart so quickly. Listen out for Lisa Bowerman too, in a role unlike those you’ll expect from her, as the storyline delivers one of the greatest, most ghastly moments in the history of MASH, repurposed here to show the utter depth of Vinnie’s depravity.

Why this focus on Vinnie? Because in the remaining three stories, he has established himself as the leader of ‘The British Government’ – essentially a growing gang of his ferry thugs, armed to the teeth and promoting ‘British purity,’ meaning not only an isolationist standpoint as regards contact with the outside world, but also a twisted attempt to justify their own racist and homophobic viewpoints.

In episode 2, Contact by Simon Clark, we’re reintroduced to Maddie Price, now a kind of almost solitary queen on top of the Post Office Tower (in the 1970s, one of, if not the highest point in London). Above all the carnage, Maddie and her geeky, slightly creepy friend Jonathan (a new acquisition for this series, played by the fabulously-named James Joyce with a good degree of balance between the positive and negative elements of his character) operate a radio, as ‘London Calling’ – a beacon to try and communicate with anyone abroad, to help discover whether there still is anyone abroad. With both Abby and her friends – Daniel, Molly, Jimmy Garland (making his first appearance in the audios proper) and Dalton Roberts – and Vinnie and his gang en route to find her, it’s a powerful episode that tears down the niceties of what ‘can’t be done’ in civilised society.

It’s also a setting that’s continued in episode 3, Rescue by Andrew Smith – famous for many things, but not least for penning some of the most philosophically interesting Suvivors episodes to date. He doesn’t disappoint here either – while the plot is essentially a kind of British, 70s, Die Hard at the Post Office Tower, Smith gives us plenty of gruesome confrontation between attitudes, as Vinnie and Dalton (who is black) stand off, and Daniel (who is gay) has a particularly spectacular episode. It’s by no means all jolly hockey sticks, triumph of the just stuff though – there are plenty of bodies by the end of this episode, underlining the stupidity of the human race, which will kill its own kind for arbitrary differences even when there is no scarcity of resource pressing on it.

Episode 4, Leaving by Matt Fitton, brings this long storyline to a conclusion, with plans for a ship to sail across the Atlantic, and some of the Survivors desperate to get on board and make a new life away from the likes of Vinnie and his thugs. Vinnie’s not having any of that though, and Thornley, whose portrayal bristles throughout this series with enough intelligence to make Vinnie’s thuggery more shocking than it would be were it just reactive, continues his superb work, playing Mr Nice Guy to buy himself time to scupper the plan. It’s particularly creepy when Vinnie, whose attitudes are so utterly repugnant, is pleasant and plausible – it reminds us that human vileness often comes with a smile and a suit, and it makes us trust our leaders slightly less.

All in all, the truth is that any series of Survivors from Big Finish is money beautifully well spent. But in returning to the urban environment and dealing with the dangers and the personalities that would arise there, Series 3 feels like a return to the unique selling point of Series 1 on audio – it can take us into places that the TV version never could, and here it succeeds utterly in delivering four shocking episodes. Best episode this time out is tricky to choose, but if pushed, I’d say Cabin Fever is something truly special, showing how ordinary, day-to-day run-of-the-mill loutishness can turn into something far more brutal and terrifying if simply given the scenario that allows it to do so.

Series 4 has just been announced for June 2016, and is said to focus on the characters left behind this time – Greg, Jenny, Jackie and others, returning to the more rural setting. Survivors continues to set its bar ridiculously high: here’s hoping Series 4 can match the intensity and humanity of this series. It will be no easy task.