Let's Quist Again

 

Doomwatch is back. 

It stirred up controversy in its day, and made a pin-up out of a young Robert Powell (above) before blowing him to kingdom come. What was the fuss all about? If you haven't seen Doomwatch since the 70s (or indeed, at all), now's your chance to find out.

For those of us who bought the DVD collection back in 2016, the return of Doomwatch to broadcast TV is no big deal. What matters is that it's being shown at all, having been absent from the small screen since an early 90s Saturday morning repeat on UK Gold. But as of tonight, it's back in its proper place, at 9pm, on Talking Pictures TV.

Fans of the series will, of course, own the DVDs already, but what makes these 2025 repeats more interesting is the fact that they will draw in more casual viewers, many of whom will probably remember the show from back in the 70s, without ever having thought to seek it out on DVD or online. Others will be watching for the first time...

One might well wonder what today’s audience will make of Doomwatch. With its eco-friendly agenda, it will no doubt have a certain resonance even if the environmental disasters it predicted are more reflective of the era in which it was made. Today’s eco disasters are way beyond the scope of Dr. Quist’s Doomwatch department. Even so, it was an important series in that it was one of the first, if not the first television series that asked its audience to engage with the problem of pollution in its many forms. It went a bit off the rails at times – by series three, the Doomwatch department were dealing with moral pollution, in an episode that has yet to be broadcast by any television channel – but on the whole it did much to forefront concern for the environment, and sounded a timely note of caution in respect of scientific progress left unchallenged.

Fifty-five years later, we can all see the results of what happens if you give technology its head – the internet is arguably the atomic bomb of the 21st century, and if you want an example of moral pollution, there can be no more pernicious example. There are many other arenas in which society today could benefit from an initiative like Doomwatch – driverless vehicles for one – and in general, it seems, from where I’m standing, as though science and technology are being given far too much leeway. App-based AI has played into the hands of multi-billion corporations, and Keir Starmer’s naive pronouncements this week about Britain becoming an AI superpower need watching very carefully. AI allows big business to do away with manpower and transform its customer-facing operations into a chatbot-driven nightmare. It has almost totally eliminated banking from our high streets, and if you want virtually any other kind of public service, there is no alternative other than to go online. Will this make for a better Britain, or will it transform society into a mass of smartphone-dependent individuals, everyone online but no one truly connected to their fellow human beings? Or has that already happened? Where's Dr. Quist when you need him?

Doomwatch may not have foreseen the internet, but its creators Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis could already see the potential danger of putting too much faith in computers: the episode Project Sahara is the closest Doomwatch gets to interrogating AI, where we see an advanced computer system (far beyond anything that existed in 1970) being used to make recruitment decisions – exactly what is happening right now.

Elsewhere, the concerns of 1970 sometimes seem like a storm in a teacup – there has never been a nuclear-powered rocket launch system, nor has science evolved a species of intelligent super rats. Some of the science was questionable even at the time: ‘thunder shake’, a pheomenon which Quist observes in a cracked brandy glass (having supposedly been caused by aircraft noise) is a real thing, but it is observed in wood, not glass. Real scientists occasionally took the series to task in print, but Doomwatch was always a step ahead of reality and therefore, essentially, science fiction. Its value as a piece of television was in getting people talking, stimulating debate about the real problems posed by real world science.

It was, of course, a product of its time, and casual sexism abounds, to an extent that 21st century viewers will find hard to accept. The characters were, on paper, cardboard cut-outs, and it was only the skill of the actors that brought them to life. Much of the series consists of men in ill-advised attire shouting at each other in rooms that look like the Goodies’ Cricklewood headquarters. At its worst, Doomwatch is Man at C&A vs Man in Carnaby Street, with the two extremes personified by Doctors Quist and Ridge respectively. But it meant well, and it didn’t deserve the treatment it got from the BBC, who wiped the bulk of the master tapes without ever repeating a single episode. 

It is more by luck than judgement that Doomwatch survives at all, and viewers tuning in to the upcoming Talking Pictures repeats are bound to notice the uneven quality between episodes preserved as video master tapes, and those upscaled from poorer quality sources.

Will I even bother to watch myself? It’s not that long since I last dusted off the DVD collection, and I only made it through the incomplete first series before giving up. Series two is a very mixed bag, with far too many regular characters and some episodes that are plain boring. Series three effectively doesn’t exist, with only three episodes extant, one of them the unbroadcast Sex and Violence, which is embarrassingly bad. For a series that started on a thermonuclear bang, Doomwatch went out on a whimper – relegated to a midsummer slot when hardly anybody was watching.

That said, I’ll be tuned in, if only for the existential experience of seeing Doomwatch broadcast at a properly adult, 9pm ‘post watershed’ slot for the first time since 1972. And I hope that it won’t just be the old guard watching. The series deserves to be better remembered, and if today’s viewers can see past the flowery shirts and sexism, they may be surprised at what they find.

Doomwatch – Fridays from 17 January, 9pm, Talking Pictures TV