There’s something about apocalyptic scenarios that gets the imagination going. First there’s the creativity needed to come up with the particular flavour of apocalypse. Nuclear accident was popular back when we lived in the shadow of the mushroom cloud. Why not get more fanciful though? Nanotechnology has its own particular downside with the notion that the world will become a ball of grey goo. And what would happen if dogs started walking on their hind legs and ordering us about? However fanciful it sounds, you can bet a science fiction writer somewhere has come up with something even more bizarre.

But what’s really interesting about apocalyptic scenarios is the aftermath. How people react, the choices they make, are the core of drama, and end of the world settings give a whole new scope for drama to unfold in. Survivors starts when a lethal strain of flu takes hold of the world and kills most of its population, but really it’s about what kind of life people opt for in the absence of all the things they’ve taken for granted.

It started predictably enough, with glimpses into the lives of a cross section of people we’ll presumably be spending more time with in the next five episodes. A woman who loses her young son, away on an adventure holiday. A prisoner who kills the warder who wanted to keep him locked up for the next twenty years. And my favourite pairing, an 11 year old Muslim lad and a half-Kuwaiti playboy whose fridge is stocked with caviar and champagne.

The business of the world falling apart was handled reasonably enough given the constraints of a BBC budget, with a mix of inspired and clunky moments. The cut from the playboy saying to his latest conquest ‘You can’t get to sleep with your hair wet, you’ll catch your death’ to bodies at a hospital was clumsy, but I loved the more poetic jump from the prisoner shooting a gun to a sky full of ominous clouds. The image that stays with me more than any other is of the young Muslim lad finding all the worshippers dead in a mosque, still kneeling in prayer.

Based on the book and 1970s series by Terry Nation, Adrian Hodges has done an admirable job of reinventing Survivors. The later portion of the opening episode promises plenty of interesting material to come. Just how will a world that communicates by Facebook and text cope with the disappearance of those services and the necessity of working together to survive?

There’s an underlying deep green philosophy to questions of this nature, ever more relevant in the resource-stretched world we’re living in, plus some fundamental questions about the nature of community and the individual. If those questions can be resolved with some inventive friction between survivors of different outlooks, some wielding golfclubs studded with Stanley knife blades, so much the better.

If the promise of the first episode is realised, Survivors promises to be the BBC’s second strong drama series with elements of the fantastic to debut this month: this and Apparitions share an undercurrent of speculative intelligence that I’d like to see more of on screen. And they’re both shows I’d love to write for.