European flu is sweeping across the nation. Everyday there are more people off sick and the hospitals are more full. The government's not calling it a crisis yet, but it is one and far more serious than anyone can know. The flu is more than that, it's a disease that will leave more than 90% of the world's population dead and only a handful of survivors wandering the stunned aftermath.

With the nuclear threat receding (in people's minds at least), the possibility of a devastating epidemic beyond the skill of doctors to treat is one that sits in a corner of the public consciousness, overshadowed perhaps by terrorism's constant threat, but there nonetheless. A timely moment, then to resurrect Terry Nation's seventies postapocalyptic drama.

The feature length opening episode deals with the day civilisation died, the apocalypse itself, and yet it feels far from apocalyptic. There is no sense of the mounting scale of the disaster. The government are keeping the facts from the public, but they're also keeping them from the minister left in charge, so there's little sense of the millions sick or dying, of hospitals failing to cope (except in one short sequence) of morgues filled to overflowing (same sequence). There's no fear, no panic. Is this the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a sniffle? Following the hysterical frenzy over a few worldwide deaths from Asian bird flu that seems hardly likely.

How is it, also, that everyone seems to die overnight? A whole mosque of praying people die in considerate quiet so as not to wake a sleeping boy; a playboy's lover dies in her sleep without so much as asking for a glass of water and yet there are hints that it's not the most peaceful of deaths. Following the apocalypse the show feels a bit lost, much like its cast of stock characters as they wander around wondering what to do next. There's the mother searching for her son, the hardened killer, the doctor who's lived through the worst of it, the playboy, the child...

Even so, there are moments of persuasive power. How could there not be in a story about the end of life as we know it? Abby looking for someone to help when she wakes to find her husband dead, searching through an outward bound centre's corpses for that of her son, the playboy drinking champagne and eating caviar because that's all he's got in the fridge. And of course the vista of empty city streets and silent motorways. These never fail to impress, even without the cacophony of birdsong blasted over the soundtrack to amplify the lack of human noise.

The characters are all together now and drama will begin to get personal as the hardships begin to set in. There's promise in SURVIVORS and its good cast, but it's a promise that has yet to be fulfilled.