Survivors

The BBC has remade one of its classic serials, Survivors.  The first episode of the original series was broadcast at 20:10 BST (19:10 GMT) 16th April 1975 (time taken from a scan of the original Radio Times page). A chart set for London has 29Libra rising,  with Uranus at 00Scorpio and Aquarius  on the IC – this strong Uranian emphasis shows how revolutionary such a programme was at the time (co-incidentally, Bill Gates had founded Microsoft just 12 days before).  The first episode of the new series was broadcast at 21:00 GMT on 23rd November 2008; this chart has 9Leo rising – the same degree as the MC of the 1975 chart.
As Paul Newman has shown in his articles about the Dr Who TV series – especially A New Dr Who in Transit May 2004 (on the web at  http://tinyurl.com/6lbgwp), the charts of popular TV shows often reflect their times.   If you don’t remember it, Survivors is about the aftermath of a plague that wipes out 95% of the world’s population; the survivors must suddenly learn how to live without any of the benefits of a technological civilisation.  Its revival and broadcast now, when everyone is learning how fragile the world’s economy is,  is eerily prescient.