YOU are invited to the Boxcutters Eurovision Party upstairs at Seraphim (formerly Vibe), 123 Smith Street, Fitzroy on Sunday, May 15th, 2011.

43 countries enter… one country leaves.

Join the excitement and the insanity as the glitter hits the fan.

The 2008 version of Survivors started off as a lesser-populated EastEnders before descending into sub-Lost territory, and was finally put out of its misery at the end of the second season (which ended – optimistically – with a cliff hanger). The best word to describe the show was “workmanlike”, combining all the usual elements of 21st Century genre telly in all the usual ways.

That’s not how you’d describe the original. Debuting in 1975, it remains the bleakest programme ever to be a prime-time hit. A man-made virus sweeps the earth, killing the majority of the population. Faced with disease, wild animals, starvation and loneliness, the few who are left struggle to survive. It’s hard to imagine showing that one against Masterchef today. Survivors, however, was a hit in the UK and across Europe, and watching it on DVD now it’s hard to imagine anyone having the guts to make such unrelenting fare now.

Part of the success is due to Terry Nation cleverly playing against type – two of the three leads are female, and Abby Grant’s search for her son forms a rock-solid premise that other story lines can weave around. Carolyn Seymour as Abby is superb, playing the part with a stoic determination you wouldn’t see on telly today. Lucy Fleming plays plucky Jenny Richards (the only totally likeable character) and Ian McCollough plays granite-faced tough guy Greg Preston. The first series raises difficult questions about the life ahead and society they will need to build, and the episode “Law And Order” still packs a punch, an unrelenting tragedy combining rape, murder and the failure of justice.

Sadly the show goes off the rails after the first season, getting bogged down (literally) with the minutiae of subsistence farming, muddled storylines and continued (and seemingly random) changes of cast. Most shamefully, Jenny Richards gets relegated to background “wife-and-mother” character and Abby Grant vanishes altogether (Seymour claims she was fired for being argumentative and drinking too much, so she moved to the US and played villains for the next 20 years. She’s particularly good as Dean Stockwell’s evil counterpart in two episodes of Quantum Leap).

All three seasons of Survivors are now available as a 39-episode box set and are worth a look, if only to see a time when television was made without focus groups or the bourgeois concept of audience appeal. The lack of incidental music, the grimy look, the strong female characters and the powerhouse credit sequence all form a convincing world that make for a fascinating visit. You do have to allow for the cheap video look and cod-Shakespearean delivery that was de rigueur for the times, but even these add a certain quality to this barren world.

A final word on the recent remake – in a bizarre piece of legal jiggery-pokery the 2008 series claimed to be “based on the novel by Terry Nation”. That “novel” was actually a novelisation of the 1975 series published a year after it went to air. Yet Adrian Hodges still had the gall to claim a “created by” credit. Shame, Adrian, shame.

Find TV series, DVDs and Blu Ray discs, including the complete Survivors Series at Sanity Entertainment.

The Podcraft – Jade Gulliver‘s show about podcasting – is usually a tight half hour. Not this week. Really, it’s like a bonus episode of Boxcutters as?the fabulous Jade tries to get a word in edgeways.?It’s sixty minutes talking about television?- teacher, mother, secret lover. Warning: podcasts about podcasts may break the internet.

That Podcast Show says some lovely things about us, and they’re American so it feels like Hollywood. Listen to the lovely Daniel and Jana?by clicking here.

Josh flies the Boxcutters flag as guest on episode 20 of?The Fool And The Opera, Joy Melbourne’s opera show (hosted by the fantastic Dan Vo).

And don’t forget you can see what the boys would look like if they were awkwardly holding televisions by clicking here. Oh, and buy some T-shirts. It’s better than going nude.

Sex on television – is there too much of it? Is there too little? What works for you, and what doesn’t? What is gratuitous and what is justified? What would you cite as good and bad examples?of sex on television, and why? In your opinion, does television portray sex unrealistically? Unethically? Unyieldingly?

We’ll be reading your comments out on the show (it’s just like CNN!) so feel free to discuss the issue in the comment below, or email us at?hooray [[at]] boxcutters [[dott]] net,?or sms us at 0458 288837 (that’s 0458 BUTTDR. Or even 0458 CUTTER).

Boxcutters – you only get out what you put in. Oh, that sounds rude. And a Happy New Year to you all!

You may remember back in episode 155 we talked about Louis Theroux, who is now (rather belatedly) playing on Channel 7. They seem to have bought an enormous package of Theroux, covering everything from his first Weird Weekends series running through to his later stand-alone pieces. Well, if you think too much Theroux is barely enough, there’s a book you can read as well…

Entitled The Call Of The Weird (with the subtitle “Travels In American Subcultures”), this 2005 publication finds Theroux embarking on a “reunion tour” as he tries to find out what happened to the people he met many years ago (or about three weeks back, if you’re watching on Channel 7). Among them are the survivalists of Almost Heaven, Idaho; aspirant porn-star JJ Michaels; “Hayley” who appeared in his brilliant piece on the Wild Horse brothel in Nevada; and Thor Templar, the man who claimed to have killed ten aliens.

He also revisits some stories we didn’t see – Ike Turner, who changed his mind half-way through the doco Theroux was making back in 2000; and a bizarre piece that reveals he was the preferred media representative for the Heaven’s Gate cult when they committed mass-suicide in 1997 (“…the documentary was supposed to be a light-hearted look at UFO belief. How we would have used footage of me stumbling on to the scene of a mass suicide was far from clear”).

In the book Theroux hopes that by returning by himself, with no camera crew, he’ll be able to get a better understanding of these people who he’s never been able to fully grasp. He also uses it as an opportunity to question his own motives – is he mocking these people? Has he presented them unfairly? Theroux has been criticised (in the UK, particularly) for using a faux-naive style to stitch people up, but from the book it seems that really is him – he’s just trying to understand these people, how they can have such beliefs.

Of course, that could all be a front too, and I shouldn’t oversell the depth of The Call Of The Weird – it is, after all, an extremely breezy read in surprisingly large type. But if you’re interested in Louis Theroux‘s work, or documentary-making in general, it’s an interesting glimpse behind the curtain.

The Call Of The Weird is available through various sources – I borrowed mine from the Fitzroy Library. Oh, I love the Library.

- John