The Cardiff Communications.
The new material written by Terry Dudley arrived in my hands after Vivienne Burgess had been cast, after the studio set of her flat had been designed and constructed and very possibly even after I had shot the establishing street sequence on the back lot at Pinewood studios.
An overrun of this nature was quite exceptional. The SURVIVORS schedule was usually so tight we had to struggle to get everything recorded in time...
What more can be said about this unique two-parter from SURVIVORS 2? Very little, probably, considering the excellent analyses by TV Zone, Andrew Pixley and Rich Cross and from the first-hand reminiscences of director Pennant Roberts.
In a way LIGHTS OF LONDON is the SURVIVORS movie that never quite was. An awesome amount of film footage is used in the story. It seems to me that the whole film budget for SURVIVORS 2 was used up on these episodes. Later in the series, the remaining film stock was used for the exteriors on THE CHOSEN, but whole sweeps of LIGHTS are preserved on pristine celluloid. This contrasts with the film inserts on Series One, which have a slightly faded edge. I haven't timed the sequences, but I would guess a fair proportion of the one hundred minutes of LIGHTS unfolds on film.
I've often wondered if BBC considered a cinematic spin-off for SURVIVORS as they had done for sister show, DOOMWATCH which made it to the big screen around that time. LIGHTS certainly comes close to such a concept.
Following the first 'shooting block' on Series Two (WITCH /LOVE /HOPE), everyone appears to have had a month's holiday from SURVIVORS before re-assembling to produce the epic London tale - Jack Ronder's final script for the show. The whole exercise proved something of a watershed amongst the SURVIVORS team. Ronder was aggrieved by Terry Dudley's alterations to his script, and Pennant Roberts was unwittingly drawn into the row over the storyline. Pennant recalls: "'Script tampering' may be too clumsy a description - whilst Terry's rewrites were usually for the right motive (in this case because Ronder was asked to switch his attentions to THE WITCH in order to cover Lucy Fleming's maternity leave, whilst Dudley 'tidied up' LIGHTS 2: NL), they were made too late in the day for the original writer to have any means of redress. One of the principal reasons why Terry and I parted company arose out of the fact that at even shorter notice I rewrote his rewrite of Jack's LIGHTS Part 2 in order to erase some of Terry's heavier 'smudgemarks'."
Lucy Fleming was spared the long hours filming the final gruelling underground sequences, as LIGHTS 2 is another SURVIVORS episode in which she does not appear.
LIGHTS OF LONDON is the first SURVIVORS story in which we see Greg and Charles on horseback as they set out on their perilous quest to rescue Ruth.
This story remains a favourite with the fans, and the scenario has been expanded in the fan fiction of Ray Armfield ('Farewell, Leicester Square'/The Big Move).
S.B.
