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The burned fool's bandaged finger
Dec. 4th, 2008 09:36 amI watched the BBC's Survivors again on Tuesday; I know, I'm a sucker for punishment and all that but this episode was markedly better than last week - it had a fairly good script, some good actors, some interesting moral dilemmas, and far less of irritating bad actress to spoil the flow. What was most interesting about it from a personal perspective was that about five minutes in I realised that the episode had been filmed less than a couple of miles from where I grew up.
I dont' know if you've heard of the Earth Centre. It was an ill-fated late 1990's project to regenerate the former industrial heartland of South Yorkshire by building the world's first eco-friendly educational theme park.
Yes, it was just as stupid as it sounds.
It could have been done well, like the Eden Project, or they could have built a full-on Alton-Towers style eco-friendly theme park, perhaps with exciting rollercoasters based on the journey of a bran muffin through your digestive tract. Instead of any of that, they spent several hundred million pounds building something incredibly worthy and highly educational. Unsurprisingly, it went bankrupt less than three years after it opened. I walk past it often; it's on one of my usual walks when I'm back at my parents. The bridge upon which irritating bad actress was shot at (but, alas, not killed) is one I regularly walk over.
It's an odd, jarring experience seeing somewhere you know well on television, and it can lend the programme an entirely different perspective. For example, the I know the Earth Centre is just over the road from the town of Denaby, which is an absolute hellhole and one of the few places I can think of which would be improved by an outbreak of the Black Death. When the moral dilemma of the episode (should The Survivors kill some scavengers who were stealing from them) was revealed, my reaction to this was based upon local knowledge and I was gamely nodding and shouting "Shoot them! Shoot them!".
I rather hope that the series stays on local ground for me. I can suggest all kinds of locations they could use for shooting; I mean, the Earth Centre is within half a mile of one of South Yorkshire's other famous landmarks, which I think could be valuably used in the series:
I dont' know if you've heard of the Earth Centre. It was an ill-fated late 1990's project to regenerate the former industrial heartland of South Yorkshire by building the world's first eco-friendly educational theme park.
Yes, it was just as stupid as it sounds.
It could have been done well, like the Eden Project, or they could have built a full-on Alton-Towers style eco-friendly theme park, perhaps with exciting rollercoasters based on the journey of a bran muffin through your digestive tract. Instead of any of that, they spent several hundred million pounds building something incredibly worthy and highly educational. Unsurprisingly, it went bankrupt less than three years after it opened. I walk past it often; it's on one of my usual walks when I'm back at my parents. The bridge upon which irritating bad actress was shot at (but, alas, not killed) is one I regularly walk over.
It's an odd, jarring experience seeing somewhere you know well on television, and it can lend the programme an entirely different perspective. For example, the I know the Earth Centre is just over the road from the town of Denaby, which is an absolute hellhole and one of the few places I can think of which would be improved by an outbreak of the Black Death. When the moral dilemma of the episode (should The Survivors kill some scavengers who were stealing from them) was revealed, my reaction to this was based upon local knowledge and I was gamely nodding and shouting "Shoot them! Shoot them!".
I rather hope that the series stays on local ground for me. I can suggest all kinds of locations they could use for shooting; I mean, the Earth Centre is within half a mile of one of South Yorkshire's other famous landmarks, which I think could be valuably used in the series:
