Post by DR. QUIST on Sept 27, 2009 4:36:34 GMT -5
Cover story: DOOMWATCH IS BACK
Presenting the deadly dangers of today...
Doomwatch — You Killed Toby Wren: Monday 9.50 BBC1 Colour
KIT PEDLER, scientist, and Gerry Davis, dramatist, had an idea for a sci-fl thriller series with a difference. It was a bold idea, for the difference was that their stories were actually likely to come true. While having to succeed as exciting drama, each story in their series would be anchored in scientific reality, its writers projecting what could happen if a particular experiment or technology got out of hand. That was three years ago. Doomwatch finally reached the screen last February under producer Terence Dudley and made an immediate impact. By the time popular Toby Wren (Robert Powell) had been killed attempting to disarm a nuclear device in the last episode, the series had gained a record audience for a first run — 12 million viewers. In the Doomwatch offices on the eleventh floor at Television Centre, the team has been working flat out since spring on the new series that starts on Monday. Gerry Davis declares succinctly: ‘We intend to discomfort, shock and provoke.’ Terence Dudley says he believes in the characters as much as he does in his friends. And Kit Pedler tells you that as a scientist he’s deeply concerned about the dangers of uncontrolled scientific growth.
Nerve gas
For a programme that purports to be fictitious, Doomwatch has an ominously accurate record, scoring four prophetic bull’s-eyes in its first four episodes. The last series’ first episode was The Plastic Eaters, which opened with a shock sequence of an aeroplane dissolving in midair, its plastic components eaten away by a mystery virus. Shortly after this was transmitted, the search for a plastic- eating organism to ease waste disposal problems was intensified, and scientists launched a research programme involving a range of self-destructive plastics that crumble into a powder which would then be eaten by bacteria. Doomwatch 2— Friday’s Child — showed a surgeon breeding a human embryo, which he planned to bring to life within his private laboratory, in a flask. ‘We thought this up as a warning,’ Kit Pedler explains. ‘If this technique were perfected a general, for instance, might be able to order 100,000 troops to be produced. The possibilities would be terrifying.’ During the very same hour that Friday’s Child was being televised the newspapers were printing a headline story. At Oldham General Hospital, gynaecologist Dr Patrick Steptoe, in conjunction with others, had just succeeded in fertilizing a human egg outside a woman’s body. The egg was alive and developing. In the next programme, Burial at Sea, a group of pop stars and their girls were found drifting out at sea close to a secret dumping ground for surplus chemical warfare projects. Two of them had died from the effect of a defoliant which should have been safe in canisters on the sea bed. Pedler says: ‘After the episode was written, but before we’d had time to screen it, a branch of the American armed forces actually tried to dump something like ten thousand tons of toxic gases in the Atlantic. They were rumbled only just in time, and stopped by pressure of public opinion. Subsequently the Pentagon has dumped nerve agents in the sea near the Bahamas. This time public opinion was brushed aside.’ Could they have been coincidences? ‘There were no coincidences, says producer Terence Dudley. ‘Our idea was to entertain, but to entertain with cautionary tales. Our objective was to base every Doomwatch subject on something real, something that could and probably would happen in time if nobody took steps to stop it.’
Killer rats
In Tomorrow the Rat, written by Dudley, an experiment in rat breeding got out of hand and London was plagued with a new breed of intelligent killer rats partial to the taste of human beings. In that same week a massive outbreak of a particularly dangerous kind of rat was reported in Shropshire. These ‘super rats,’ as they have been christened, were hitherto unknown in Britain. They are immune to Warfarin and all permitted rodent poisons. Ministry of Agriculture experts soon gave up hope of ever exterminating them completely. With The Battery People they showed men who were handling hormone-based fish feed becoming impotent. ‘This seemed a little over-speculative at the time we thought it up two-and-a-half years ago,’ Pedler says. ‘But just a few months before it was screened a similar incident actually occurred on a farm in Leicestershire.’
Computer spy
Now that so many of the fears of Pedler and Davis have already become fact, can we afford to ignore their other warnings? Electronic invasion of privacy is just one, and Project Sahara examined life with a state computer programmed with highly personal information on all citizens. ‘Even in this country,’ Pedler says, ‘there’s evidence of a lot of information stored on computer tape which should be private — and certain people we’d prefer not to may have access to these tapes.’ More and more of the organisations that keep tabs on us are using computers, and now even the police are having a centralised computer built at Hendon, London. While there seems no reason at present to doubt the confidential treatment of information we give to the police, the Giro, the Inland Revenue, our banks and employers, the prospect of computers getting together for a chat, and in effect becoming one mammoth computer with an eye on us all like the computer in Project Sahara, must alarm anyone who likes his privacy. As if to back up the Doomwatch team’s judgment, a programme called The Red Sky, which showed the damage caused by a high-flying rocket plane, has recently become all too real. Concorde, on supersonic test flights down the west coast of Britain and over the North Sea, split roof tiles, cracked windows, disturbed animals and, when it landed at Heathrow, caused people to complain of the unbearable noise.
New perils
‘I’m just as concerned as I ever have been,’ Kit Pedler says. ‘But I’m putting my concern to a more practical use now. I’m giving a series of lectures on Doomwatch themes; and I meet with a group of scientists who are just as concerned are about the dangers of technology. ‘I very strongly believe that there should be some sort of real- life equivalent to Doomwatch. Not acting for the Government, but investigating on behalf of the people. I believe it to be a feasible proposition.’ Whatever the chances of the creation of an official Doomwatch Department, the name has been tossed around Parliament and seized upon by the press. One national newspaper now runs a regular Doomwatch column. And a college in Plymouth has launched a course in the social responsibilities of science entitled ‘The Doomwatch Diploma.’ But Doomwatch, however scientifically accurate it has proved, is first and foremost an entertainment programme. Assuredly, it looks as if anything could happen when Quist, already riddled with self-doubts, is attacked on all fronts in You Killed Toby Wren. Besides introducing three new characters including Jean Trend as Dr Fay Chantry (‘a real dish,’ promises Davis), the new Doomwatch series offers 13 frightening new predictions for the future, many of which, let us hope, may never come true. Unfortunately, one already has — will you be able to spot which of the 13 it is?
Article by PETER FRENCH
Photograph by PHILIP SAYER
Presenting the deadly dangers of today...
Doomwatch — You Killed Toby Wren: Monday 9.50 BBC1 Colour
KIT PEDLER, scientist, and Gerry Davis, dramatist, had an idea for a sci-fl thriller series with a difference. It was a bold idea, for the difference was that their stories were actually likely to come true. While having to succeed as exciting drama, each story in their series would be anchored in scientific reality, its writers projecting what could happen if a particular experiment or technology got out of hand. That was three years ago. Doomwatch finally reached the screen last February under producer Terence Dudley and made an immediate impact. By the time popular Toby Wren (Robert Powell) had been killed attempting to disarm a nuclear device in the last episode, the series had gained a record audience for a first run — 12 million viewers. In the Doomwatch offices on the eleventh floor at Television Centre, the team has been working flat out since spring on the new series that starts on Monday. Gerry Davis declares succinctly: ‘We intend to discomfort, shock and provoke.’ Terence Dudley says he believes in the characters as much as he does in his friends. And Kit Pedler tells you that as a scientist he’s deeply concerned about the dangers of uncontrolled scientific growth.
Nerve gas
For a programme that purports to be fictitious, Doomwatch has an ominously accurate record, scoring four prophetic bull’s-eyes in its first four episodes. The last series’ first episode was The Plastic Eaters, which opened with a shock sequence of an aeroplane dissolving in midair, its plastic components eaten away by a mystery virus. Shortly after this was transmitted, the search for a plastic- eating organism to ease waste disposal problems was intensified, and scientists launched a research programme involving a range of self-destructive plastics that crumble into a powder which would then be eaten by bacteria. Doomwatch 2— Friday’s Child — showed a surgeon breeding a human embryo, which he planned to bring to life within his private laboratory, in a flask. ‘We thought this up as a warning,’ Kit Pedler explains. ‘If this technique were perfected a general, for instance, might be able to order 100,000 troops to be produced. The possibilities would be terrifying.’ During the very same hour that Friday’s Child was being televised the newspapers were printing a headline story. At Oldham General Hospital, gynaecologist Dr Patrick Steptoe, in conjunction with others, had just succeeded in fertilizing a human egg outside a woman’s body. The egg was alive and developing. In the next programme, Burial at Sea, a group of pop stars and their girls were found drifting out at sea close to a secret dumping ground for surplus chemical warfare projects. Two of them had died from the effect of a defoliant which should have been safe in canisters on the sea bed. Pedler says: ‘After the episode was written, but before we’d had time to screen it, a branch of the American armed forces actually tried to dump something like ten thousand tons of toxic gases in the Atlantic. They were rumbled only just in time, and stopped by pressure of public opinion. Subsequently the Pentagon has dumped nerve agents in the sea near the Bahamas. This time public opinion was brushed aside.’ Could they have been coincidences? ‘There were no coincidences, says producer Terence Dudley. ‘Our idea was to entertain, but to entertain with cautionary tales. Our objective was to base every Doomwatch subject on something real, something that could and probably would happen in time if nobody took steps to stop it.’
Killer rats
In Tomorrow the Rat, written by Dudley, an experiment in rat breeding got out of hand and London was plagued with a new breed of intelligent killer rats partial to the taste of human beings. In that same week a massive outbreak of a particularly dangerous kind of rat was reported in Shropshire. These ‘super rats,’ as they have been christened, were hitherto unknown in Britain. They are immune to Warfarin and all permitted rodent poisons. Ministry of Agriculture experts soon gave up hope of ever exterminating them completely. With The Battery People they showed men who were handling hormone-based fish feed becoming impotent. ‘This seemed a little over-speculative at the time we thought it up two-and-a-half years ago,’ Pedler says. ‘But just a few months before it was screened a similar incident actually occurred on a farm in Leicestershire.’
Computer spy
Now that so many of the fears of Pedler and Davis have already become fact, can we afford to ignore their other warnings? Electronic invasion of privacy is just one, and Project Sahara examined life with a state computer programmed with highly personal information on all citizens. ‘Even in this country,’ Pedler says, ‘there’s evidence of a lot of information stored on computer tape which should be private — and certain people we’d prefer not to may have access to these tapes.’ More and more of the organisations that keep tabs on us are using computers, and now even the police are having a centralised computer built at Hendon, London. While there seems no reason at present to doubt the confidential treatment of information we give to the police, the Giro, the Inland Revenue, our banks and employers, the prospect of computers getting together for a chat, and in effect becoming one mammoth computer with an eye on us all like the computer in Project Sahara, must alarm anyone who likes his privacy. As if to back up the Doomwatch team’s judgment, a programme called The Red Sky, which showed the damage caused by a high-flying rocket plane, has recently become all too real. Concorde, on supersonic test flights down the west coast of Britain and over the North Sea, split roof tiles, cracked windows, disturbed animals and, when it landed at Heathrow, caused people to complain of the unbearable noise.
New perils
‘I’m just as concerned as I ever have been,’ Kit Pedler says. ‘But I’m putting my concern to a more practical use now. I’m giving a series of lectures on Doomwatch themes; and I meet with a group of scientists who are just as concerned are about the dangers of technology. ‘I very strongly believe that there should be some sort of real- life equivalent to Doomwatch. Not acting for the Government, but investigating on behalf of the people. I believe it to be a feasible proposition.’ Whatever the chances of the creation of an official Doomwatch Department, the name has been tossed around Parliament and seized upon by the press. One national newspaper now runs a regular Doomwatch column. And a college in Plymouth has launched a course in the social responsibilities of science entitled ‘The Doomwatch Diploma.’ But Doomwatch, however scientifically accurate it has proved, is first and foremost an entertainment programme. Assuredly, it looks as if anything could happen when Quist, already riddled with self-doubts, is attacked on all fronts in You Killed Toby Wren. Besides introducing three new characters including Jean Trend as Dr Fay Chantry (‘a real dish,’ promises Davis), the new Doomwatch series offers 13 frightening new predictions for the future, many of which, let us hope, may never come true. Unfortunately, one already has — will you be able to spot which of the 13 it is?
Article by PETER FRENCH
Photograph by PHILIP SAYER