Tomorrow, the Ratatouille

 

An evening of 1970s rodent paranoia

I used to like those occasional themed nights of programming that once upon a time tended to turn up on BBC2. These days, the natural home for that kind of television is BBC4. Or you can always create your own...

The idea came to me part way through watching a notorious episode of the BBC’s 1970s eco-thriller series Doomwatch. The story, which caused a minor stir when first broadcast, concerned the accidental creation of a strain of man-eating intelligent rats. I thought it would be amusing to contrast this melodramatic story with something more frivolous in the shape of Fawlty Towers’ swansong episode, Basil the Rat. But for a proper ‘evening’ of rat-infested viewing, I really needed a third example. No problem on that count… and if you have the DVDs yourself, you might like to ‘try this at home’. Just don’t invite any real rats along to the party…

Let’s start with Doomwatch, the earliest of our three rodent reruns. Tomorrow, the Rat was first broadcast on Monday 2 March 1970, as the fourth episode in the series. Much of the first season was wiped without ever being repeated, but this example was recovered from a Canadian 525-line copy a few years later. Whether it deserved to survive is another matter entirely. Doomwatch meant well. Its ecological themes focused viewers’ minds on the pressing issue of what humankind was doing to its home planet in a way that television had never explicitly dealt with before. To get their points across, series creators Kit Pedler and Gerry Davies took real world topics and gave them a ‘what-if’ science fiction spin. If this resulted in some implausible narratives, then no matter – at least it got people talking. It even got questions asked in the house. The series’ title was seized on by journalists who went on using it long after the programme itself was long forgotten.

So far so good. But Tomorrow the Rat pushed the boundaries a little too far. Series producer Terence Dudley not only produced but directed his own script. And with no one above him to question his judgement, some poor decisions were made. At its heart, the narrative contains a solid, worthwhile idea, being aired years ahead of its time – the question of genetic engineering, its morality and implications. Unfortunately, Dudley chose to go for the jugular – or in the case of Robert Powell, the trouser leg – and his script set out intentionally to shock. Like almost all of Doomwatch, it is mired in outdated chauvinist attitudes towards women (of which, more later), and this week’s guest character, a geneticist whose ill-advised experiments have created the dreaded ‘rattus sapiens’, is portrayed as a neurotic nymphomaniac. Ultimately, she falls victim to her own creations, and in a closing scene included specifically to shock and anger viewers, the camera lingers on her half-eaten corpse. It wasn’t acceptable in 1970 and it’s even less so today. There were, of course complaints, which the BBC’s internal programme review board upheld, deeming that, as producer/director/writer, Dudley had been allowed to go too far.

I’m pleased that some of Doomwatch has survived, but I can’t say I’m still as enamoured of the programme as I was when I first got to see it on the videotape releases of the 1980s. The acting style is typical of its era – full-on, no holds barred – and the scripts can be very unbalanced. The production values are dire even by 1970 standards, with the Doomwatch office a case in point, and the stuffed rats on show in this example are funnier than anything served up (with biscuits) in Fawlty Towers. Sexism is rampant – a complaint that the producers attempted to address in the second series (unsucessfully, in my opinion). It’s a series that, frankly, has to be cut a hell of a lot of slack to be tolerated today, and Tomorrow the Rat, despite being a fan favourite, enshrines pretty well everything that the programme makers got wrong. 

Time for some light relief. Basil the Rat, first broadcast in 1979 as the very last episode of Fawlty Towers, has gone on to enjoy legendary status. I saw it the first time and have to say that while I agree it was funny – very much so in places – for me, it didn’t quite match the series’ best efforts (if you’re asking, I’d nominate Gourmet Night and The Hotel Inspectors). After many, many repeats, it can still raise a smile, though as I’ve got older I do find myself more sympathetic towards Basil (Fawlty, not the rat), whose staff in this episode are conniving and stupid. I also find I’ve come to almost loathe Manuel. ‘Don’t look at me with those cow eyes!’ cries Basil as the hapless waiter cowers before his wrath. I know how he feels. ‘Filigree Siberian Hamster’ indeed! Nine years had passed since Doomwatch, and the BBC’s special effects people had got a little better at realising rats and the creation that gazes at Mr. Carnegie from out of the biscuit box is a shade less risible than his verminous chums who scuttled up Toby Wren’s trousers back in 1970.

From humour, we move onto a piece of genuinely scary television, from the pen of Nigel Kneale, a man who knew all about shocking the viewing public. His 1950s Quatermass tales were prefaced with a warning that they might not be suitable for those of a nervous disposition. Twenty years on, Kneale had clearly not mellowed one iota, and, like Doomwatch before it, this episode of his anthology series Beasts set out to give its audience nightmares. During Barty’s Party places an upper-middle-class couple (Elizabeth Sellars and Anthony Bate) in a remote, rural house which comes under siege from a mass migration of ‘intelligent super rats’. Sounds familiar? Kneale would certainly have been aware of the earlier Doomwatch episode, but a more recent source of inspiration probably came from James Herbert’s famous pulp novel The Rats. Which may itself have contained a bit of Doomwatch DNA. 

Kneale’s writing belongs in the same sexist league as Doomwatch, with Elizabeth Sellars’ character portrayed as a twitchy neurotic. He’d done the same thing a few years earlier in the BBC ghost story The Stone Tape, and it’s a bit tedious to see the same old schtick on display here. Her husband Anthony Bate starts off calm and collected but by the episode’s end he too has been reduced to a quivering wreck as the army of rats closes in.

Of our two dramatic selections, Beasts is a much more effective piece of television, due in no small part to the power of suggestion. Doomwatch is full of cutaways of scuttling (and dead) rodents, but here we don’t get to see a single one. We just hear them. And that’s the genius of Nigel Kneale. You’ve probably never found yourself in a lonely house with a hoard of scratching scuttling, invisible rats for company, but my partner and I once were, and I can attest to the fact that it’s every bit as unsettling as the events we see depicted here. During Barty’s Party is a claustrophobia-fest. Aside from some sinister shots of an abandoned car which open the episode (with the implication that its occupants have fallen victim to the rats), the camera never moves outside the house, with its gloomy, oppressive décor. This was videotaped drama doing what it always did best – the so-called ‘bottle’ story. The only minor let-down comes in the form of radio DJ Barty Wills, whose phone-in programme runs as a background to the unfolding events. Even by 1970s commercial radio DJ standards, his patter is unconvincing. TV scriptwriters never were able to judge this kind of thing, and there were innumerable examples in the BBC’s Shoestring. That aside, this is a grim, convincing hour of television that builds nicely towards an unresolved climax, and knows how to play on the viewer’s imagination for its shock effects. Where Doomwatch was gratuitous, Beasts kept the horror out of sight, and comes out on top of our, if you will, TV ‘rat-a-thon’.

Back in the 1970s, TV producers seemingly couldn’t go wrong with rats, whether they were employed for comic or shocking effect. After all, nobody likes rats. Or do they? Personally, I don’t share the seemingly universal revulsion they engender in most people. I wouldn’t want them in my home, but I’ve had them in the garden and have to admit that there’s something in those twitching whiskers and bright button eyes that I can’t bring myself to hate. But then, I’m probably drawing on childhood memories of the first rat I remember from television – Roderick, in Tales of the Riverbank. Back when hamsters really were hamsters...