Post by michael on Jul 4, 2010 5:32:08 GMT -5
THE DEVIL'S SWEETS
This is a story about manipulation, getting someone to do something that they didn't necessarily want to do but think they do. That's advertising in a nut shell. Informing the great General public that a new product is on the market place is all very well and good, but you need it to make your target consumers not so much WANT the product, as MUST HAVE IT. Aspiration. Desire. And fear if you don't have it.
Two of the advertisers' greatest weapons are sex and fear. Sex is used at the very top of the story. Four mini skirted young ladies, flirting and giggling with two city Gents (who can't believe their luck) are offered chocolates on a plate.
The advertiser manipulates his cigarette clients into thinking their sales increases is a result of his work rather than the drugs he puts into someone else's chocolates! Both the 'Sweet man' and the 'Fag man' are in thrall to Shipton - they need advertisers to promote their product. Or so advertisers tell their clients! A business will look for ANY advantage over their competitors.
The story is not explicit whether the experimental psychologist, Doctor Benson manipulates Shipton into getting him funding his department in return for letting him have a brand new drug or whether it is the other way round. Shipton's trade is persuasion, he tells Doctor Quist. Is he persuading Benson of his version of events - or was the one he gives to Ridge the truth?
Shipton understands the psychology of his clients - or victims. Quist understands Ridge, and uses the possibility of Pat's death to force the truth out of the accused. Whoever picked up the phone to hear Wren's false reports on Pat's deterioration and death, Ridge would have heard. And Quist didn't even have the decency - or nerve - to come out with the truth in the end. He lets Ridge work it out for himself. You bastard indeed. It would have been far more effective if we, the viewer, had discovered the truth at the same time as Ridge. But, alas, that's not what they did. Oh well.
Cigarettes, like pesticide in Train and Detrain, is simply a plot device. The episode is not a warning against smoking in any way. Quist is convinced that they have cut smoking by 9% but, also like the Ministry of Health, don't want any more to do with it. Quist is only intrigued by the sudden rise in sales by one, previously poorly performing firm. It is a bit like The Battery People - a mystery his scientific background wants solving and it uncovers a crime, In this day of cigarette advertising outlawed - and plans were afoot to try and ban even adverts within their sale points - it is instructive to remember this episode was aired eight years after the Royal College of Physicians raised concerns over the health impact from cigarettes. 1971 would see the introduction of health warnings on the packets. 'The Big C' - is mentioned, but that's it.
The story also points out a number of unnecessary drugs and chemicals we pump into our bodies on a daily rate. As well as nicotine from your good old cigarette, but we see Pat on the slimming tablets - which contain a Benzedrine derivative, according to Quist, It was widely used as an appetite suppressant in America. In those days, a scientific tag was a mark of trust. Nowadays in these post Doomwatch days, we prefer homoeopathic remedies. Because they're natural... Come on Doomwatch. Where's your report on that? Here, the Benzedrine react with the phototropine drug. This is the warning of the episode. Things can clash.
As well as looking at advertising, the story also studies the links between business and University departments for whom funding from the private sector was just as important then as it is now.
It shows, again, how - in this case - struggling businesses will take any help that is offered to gain a competitive advantage. A struggling firm funds an under-funded department in a University which gives secrets to a struggling ad agency. For Benson, he wants the prestige from delivering a paper based on his research.
The episode's other theme is experimentation. Shipton is quite happy, and rather proud of the idea of having 'a few thousand' people to experiment upon. To be as fair as you can, he was sure the drug was safe - he took Benson's word for it. But that's where fairness ends. Ethically he poisoned those women. Pat Hunnisett was an unwilling guinea pig for the experiments in the Doomwatch lab but treated as a specimen by Wren, Ridge AND Quist! It is only when she storms into Quist's office and demands an explanation that he tells her. The public and Pat are the pigeons!
This is a great way of using the Doomwatch team integral to the plot rather than side lined by 'this week's guest stars' dominating a writers' plot. This is an ideas episode, a good first series scientific detective story. And there is a peril affecting London, getting worse, affects one of their own. They can't stop it from starting, but they can pinpoint the cause and stop it. Quintessential Doomwatch.
By now, we are seven weeks in and so hopefully by now we are in love with the Doomwatch team and the series itself. The episode shows the Doomwatch team engaged in unimportant work, teasing each other, get snipey, and Quist is slightly more eccentric than usual! As Wren is giving him a report, Quist is clearing away coffee cups and takes a biscuit packet out of his hand. Then, when the phone rings and Brad goes to pick it up, Quist looks up, almost alarmed and tries to get out of the office quick before he is called back. Twice, he lets being called a civil servant annoy him, once by Shipton, and then from Dr. Benson. He throws onto the ground that flask of his demonstration of what was happening inside Pat's stomach. He does not like to be helpless. He has no problem this time in allowing Ridge to break into a lab. No persuasion needed. Perhaps it is because Pat, a victim, is sitting right in front of him. 'Why don't we have a male secretary?' is hopefully an expression of his concern... But her serious illness, he is concerned but will not show it, and then uses her recovery as a tool by keeping it secret and manipulating it.
For once, Quist is not up against Government interests. This is the first story actually to feature a deliberate crime rather than an accident or a side effect covered up by the authorities. Here, he is dealing with a scientist, taking great risks in order to preserve his life's work.
Ridge is as flirty as usual, has a greater line in humour than normal ('Twenty random samples, please... Women, children and me first!') and this conflicts with his feelings over Pat's condition and death. Interestingly, he too treats Pat as a subject during the tests, and upsets her at one point.
Wren is his usual clinical detached self, and for some reason, when interviewing Pegg in the chocolate factory, adopts a rather high pitched, nervous approach, until he sees the chance for an experiment and offers Pegg a cigarette... Interestingly, it seems that Pat has invited him out for a drink at one point, and the chance is declined due to her headache.
Pat, at last has something bit more to do than simper in the office, look good in mini-skirts and big hair, or that rare occasion in Tomorrow, the Rat, gets out of the office to help an investigation. She is actually on location this week! She has a chance to be ill, upset, confused and frightened. In her final scene, the director is trying to make us think we are looking at her death mask. no make up, head slumped forward before she looks up and a jaunty sound track tells us all is well.
Apart from a dinner date in Spectre At The Feast where Wendy Hall dons a face mask to look like an old crone, that's really it for the character. No wonder the actress quits. Earlier I thought they should have kept her recovery dark until the very end. But imagine if they let her die for real...
For the director, it is another thankless script where he has to make office scenes interesting and lots of little bits of business no doubt worked out in rehearsals to make them more interesting. The third series is often criticised for a lack of film effort, but how does that really make an episode more interesting? There's more film effort in the three surviving episodes of the third season, and judging by the scripts we have story lined on this site (so far), there is more in them than in the first series. This week's exotic locations are the exterior of a chocolate factory, a university campus (with that same befuddled gate man looking at a speeding car twice), and outside a newsagents. Sure, they went inside a chocolate factory, but the way the Pegg/Wren scene was filmed suggested they had limited time to do that shot with only a few cutaways right at the end when we finally see Robert Powell's face. There he is, acting away, and we only see the back of his head. Were they really going to light up a cigarette in a chocolate factory - even in 1970!