Doomwatch at 50: a timely reminder
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| The 'shocking' climax of Survival Code, summarised on this Radio Times cover from December 1970 |
Britain is reeling... how will a
shocked viewing public come to terms with the bombshell that BBC1 has
just (almost literally) delivered? Here in 2020, the words ‘Survival
Code’ could be taken to signify yet another set of
self-contradictory governmental instructions, but in 1970 they were
significant for a much more trivial reason: as the title of the final
episode of the BBC’s new eco-thriller Doomwatch, which had
ended explosively on Monday 11th May. The episode was
controversial, and its aftermath saw a record number of shocked
viewers complaining in the only way they knew how: by writing
indignant and possibly tear-stained letters to the Radio Times.
The reason for this avalanche of mail? The unexpected demise of
Doomwatch heart-throb Toby Wren, portrayed by future Jesus
of Nazareth superstar Robert Powell.
At this point in Powell’s career arc,
resurrection was definitely not on the table. He had signed up for
just one series of Doomwatch, with no commitment to continue,
and the production team clearly decided to use the situation to their
advantage by building up a popular character who could then be
shockingly written out of the format. From the outset, Powell’s
character, an idealistic and trendily-attired young scientist, had
been brought to the fore as one of the series’ star turns. So when,
in the series’ finale, Survival Code, Toby was set to work
disarming a nuclear device that had (somewhat implausibly) become
lodged beneath a seaside pier, viewers must have been expecting the
brilliant young boffin to save the day yet again. Which he did... in
as much as his work helped avert a nuclear explosion... he just
failed to save himself: having disarmed the nuclear stage of the
warhead, Toby was blown to bits by the conventional explosive that
served as the trigger for the device. His relief was palpable as he
cried, in triumph: ‘I’ve done it!’ believing the disarming
procedure to be complete. Then, seconds later, his expression altered
dramatically as he found another wire, still leading to the
detonator. Calmly, the RAF officer watching from above, issued his
instructions: ‘Don’t pull it... follow it back to the terminal.’
Seconds later, the pier amusement arcade was consumed in a fireball.
As dramatic televisual events go, it was unprecedented at the time:
no one, but no one killed off their most popular character... and it
would take a genius worthy of Conan Doyle to bring back Toby Wren, who was most definitely gone for good.
With the departure in flames of Toby
Wren, and a second series of Doomwatch set to air from December 1970, a new young hopeful was called for, and into the breach stepped
actor John Nolan, whose character Geoff Hardcastle was pretty much
Toby-again-but-not-as-interesting. John Barron, always a reliable
hand at bristling officialdom, returned in his ministerial role from
The Plastic Eaters as a regular foil for department head Quist (John Paul), offering the writers
a chance to take pot-shots at governmental laxity and incompetence.
Plus ça change...
The first series had rightly been
criticised for its sexism and the absence of any credible female
leads, a failing which the production team addressed by introducing
the mostly ineffectual character of Dr. Fay Chantry (Doctor,
you’ll note, not Mrs or Miss or Ms) and the downright dull Dr. Anne
Tarrant, the latter intended principally as a kind of love interest
for Quist (implausible though the idea might sound). By mid series
two, there were simply too many main characters, and some of the
leads were absent for whole episodes at a time. The absence of arch chauvinist Dr. John Ridge (Simon Oates),
whose shirts alone always made him worth watching, was a guarantee of
this week’s episode being a stinker, and sadly many of them were.
By the time series three rolled around,
Ridge was going off his chump, ahead of being effectively sidelined,
and the storylines were moving away from the more hard-nosed ‘not
quite sci-fi’ of series one towards more conventional political
thrillers. Most of series three is missing, but I think we can live
with that: the couple of surviving episodes only serve to illustrate
how far the rot had set in. Back in 1970, Doomwatch was
considered unmissable, but in 1972, nobody seemed to care any more.
It still made the cover of Radio Times, but the summertime
transmission slot was indicative of the BBC’s attitude towards this
former flagship drama. It didn’t matter any more. Would Ridge
destroy the world, as the Radio Times cover warned? Frankly,
nobody really cared.
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| His shirts have sent him insane: Ridge poses with phials of anthrax on a Radio Times cover promoting Doomwatch's dodgy third series |
I was too young to be tuned in to
Doomwatch in 1970, so I missed my one and only chance of
seeing many classic episodes, now sadly junked. Ironically, Survival
Code itself did not survive, aside from the closing few minutes,
retained for a teaser scene at the commencement of the second series.
The rest of the episode is currently missing, with scant hope of its
ever being recovered. Back in 1970, I was entirely unaware of the
whole 'you killed Toby Wren' controversy surrounding Survival Code. I had, however, seen
plenty of trails for earlier episodes, most notably the first episode
The Plastic Eaters, whose preview ended on an image of the
cover of that week’s Radio Times (showing a half-melted
aircraft model kit inside an opened attaché case). From the little I
saw of Doomwatch, in these early evening previews, it looked
pretty damn exciting to me, but with a transmission time of 9.10pm,
it was well beyond my bedtime at the tender age of nine.
Aside from these small clips, I
remember Doomwatch principally as a series that seemed to stir
up controversy in its day. Adults spoke about it, and the title was
quickly picked up by the mass media as a convenient journalistic
shorthand for any story related to environmental pollution (and
despite what today’s youth may think, such issues did matter
back then). Doomwatch returned for two further series, in
1970-71 and 1972: I had ample opportunity to see the final series,
most of which aired during the school summer holidays (a ‘graveyard’
slot in the TV schedules), and I certainly remember seeing a trail
for the episode Flood (along with a related Nationwide
feature), and the series’ finale The Killer Dolphins. I may
even have watched the episodes themselves for ten minutes or so, but
sadly, they didn’t leave much of an impression. Thereafter, I
forgot about Doomwatch almost completely. A year or so later,
I came across a paperback novel by the series writers Kit Pedler and
Gerry Davis, which reused the old Radio Times cover shot of
the plastic plane: sadly, the book was not a novelisation of
Doomwatch, and even as a standalone thriller, it was pretty
woeful as a piece of writing – albeit nowhere near as bad as their
follow-up novel, whose scarily realistic depiction of a nuclear
meltdown is negated by a lot of feeble Bond-by-numbers stuff and a
lead character utterly devoid of interest or personality. It does,
however, chime rather unsettlingly with modern life, in that the
storyline concerned the spread amongst the population of an incurable
virus affecting the brain...
The poor characterisation in the novels
serves to illustrates one of the principal problems with Doomwatch
itself, which only came across to me when I finally got to see the
surviving episodes many years later. The characters were either
cardboard, or offensive, or both, certainly in terms of how they were
written. It took the acting skills of series leads John Paul and
Simon Oates to breathe some life into what were essentially
scriptwriters’ clichés. Not only that, but the series is riddled
with the kind of casual sexism that passed without comment in much
television and film of the same era: much of it courtesy of Dr. John Ridge, a strange and not entirely believable hybrid
of boffin and international playboy, like Jason King with a phD. Ridge would have been
insufferable had it not been for the innate charm and sly humour of
Simon Oates, who managed to make him the most watchable thing in the
series. On the plus side, the first series contained some great ideas
– not all of which made for great drama – and a few manipulative
moments such as the rodent-paranoia story Tomorrow the Rat,
which was taken surprisingly seriously despite including a scene in
which Robert Powell attempts to remove a stuffed rat from his trouser
leg by walloping it with a frying pan...
It took an article in archive
television magazine Timescreen to rekindle my interest in
Doomwatch, and convince me how good it must have been when it
was at its height. The BBC’s mid-80s Sunday lunchtime archival show
Windmill had dug up The Plastic Eaters and screened the
opening few minutes during one episode, which gave me my first
glimpse of Doomwatch in over a decade. I later acquired some
very fuzzy multiple-generation VHS dupes of various episodes, which
would have to suffice until an official release. This finally arrived
in the form of two BBC ‘best of’ compilation tapes, but there
would be no more to come for over twenty years, when Simply Media
finally brought out a DVD box set of the surviving material. This in
itself was slightly disappointing, because the company for whom I
work, Network, had been in negotation to release Doomwatch,
and would have made a much better job of it. Still, it was better
than nothing at all...
So here we are, fifty years on from
Survival Code, with survival right there on the agenda of everyday
life. We’ve gone from watching Doomwatch to actually living
through it. And, dare I say it, I suspect that Quist, Ridge, Toby et
al would have made a better job of handling the current crisis than
any of those currently in charge, who show every sign of attaining
the same level of ministerial competence as John Barron.
Risible though it now appears in certain aspects, Doomwatch was an important step towards raising the public’s awareness of environmental issues and the many institutional failures that had allowed pollution to continue unchecked. Its message is even more starkly relevant now than it was fifty years ago: wake up to reality or face the consequences. And it proves that environmental activism does not begin and end with a Swedish schoolgirl. As the world struggles to cope with a disaster beyond even the imaginations of Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis, we should all take a moment to reflect on Doomwatch and our own new codes for survival...
As Donald Fagen once said, 'the keyword is survival on the new frontier...'