The 1970s Project

The 1970s was a decade of political and social dislocations. It is well understood that the television of this period frequently reflected such current debates in its realist drama and popular long-running series. My interest lies in the way feminist debates were treated within British television and film. Moving beyond realism, this paper will concentrate on the science fiction genre, long understood as a means of reflecting socio-political uncertainties and anxieties, with a particular focus on conceptions of futuristic domestic arrangements, and explorations of the female role in society. A central question is how different feminist debates of the 1970s filtered through British science fiction television and film of the same decade.

The 1970s television series Survivors (Terry Nation BBC1 1975-7) depicts a post-apocalyptic British civilisation catastrophically reduced by a plague-like virus, leaving a decimated population struggling to find the means and the purpose of survival. Earlier SF television such as The Prisoner (ATV 1967-8) and Doomwatch (BBC1 1970-2), had already introduced the British viewing public to broader politicised issues such as duplicitous government motivations, ecology and scientific experimentation. Survivors went on to address social and individual questions concerned with personal and local politics. Those who remained, the 'survivors', were faced with far-reaching questions about how to reform social relationships. This TV programme is worth revisiting precisely because of its visionary depictions of 1970s man and woman without the support of a late twentieth-century infrastructure.

Problematic links between the personal and the political were germane to the 1970s women's liberation movement. Feminist activism and publication did much to raise popular awareness of gender politics, female sexuality, domestic arrangements and familial relationships. Realist dramas of the late 60s and early 70s had already started to illustrate unspoken aspects of female lives. Survivors, in its weekly plots and regular themes, focuses very sharply on tensions created between the use and abuse of power and individual identities when rebuilding communities. Such debates were pertinent to feminism at this time. Further, in its combining of different generic modes such as the weekly series (some have argued soap opera), science fiction tropes and borrowings from realist drama format, Survivors was able to radically and immediately addresses feminist issues, far ahead of mainstream British science fiction film.