Survival Code

Doomwatch at 50: a timely reminder

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 11^th 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.

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...'