Post by michael on Jul 10, 2010 15:53:17 GMT -5
By the decade of the 1960s, scientific breakthroughs and advances were still seen as the way forward but their side effects, sometimes lethal was causing alarm. Despite all the advances in home consumables like fridges, washing machines and the like making life easier, especially for the house wife (no more mangles, hours in the wash tubs and having to buy fresh food every day) we were also living under the shadow of the nuclear bomb. CND was created in the 1950s and late 1962 saw the Cuban missile Crisis and the world was perilously close to its first, possibly last, nuclear exchange. After that things cooled. Harold Wilson wanted to modernise British industry which was lagging behind America and places. He created the Ministry of Technology. 'The Britain that is going to be forged in the white heat of technology will be no place for restrictive practises or for outdated methods on either side of industry.' He had a vision of science and technology solving problems. He was referring to unions and industry resistant to change. Government is pushing. New vision politics.
“Watch out for the technological appeal. Harold Wilson cooked this one up and he was a master of political tactics. Technology means the use of scientific knowledge for practical purposes. That's a little vague and hard to pin down. So another characteristic of New Vision politics is that it promises a fresh set of technological toys to solve problems. New visions never have any sympathy with anybody who wants to sit whittling a piece of wood in the back garden. A new Vision demands a get-out-there-and-do-things outlook...” Brain Walden, himself an ex-Labour MP at this time writes in 2001.
But by the sixties, people were becoming suspicious ('We've grown up,' declared Gerry Davis in a contemporary interview,) and not so ready to embrace the revolution. Disasters at Winscale, the side effects of modern industry, there was a new form of pollution competing with the old Victorian problems. Plastic waste is one of them. And our Minister, has a New Vision.
Several things strike you after watching this episode. First of all, there are no lectures about the evils of plastics and their waste. We don't need it. The problem is how to dispose of it, and how a method which has been developed is not safe enough to be used, but the New Vision of political pressure is forcing through an early test. There doesn't need to be a lecture because the episode demonstrates are reliance on the artificial material and how another artificial product can destroy it. A second or third season episode would have debates about landfills, pollution and strangled swans. The fear expressed in this episode, is of a leak...
In traditional, first series Doomwatch, we have a trail for our three scientific detectives to follow and our fourth journeyman detective is in the thick of it! Like in The Devil's Sweets, assumptions are made to advance the plot: Quist is convinced that the melted wires was created artificially and by something originating in this country because of our acute plastic waste problem. Not being allowed access to Beeston adds to his hypothesis. And so on. What a good job Miss Wills' cousin hadn't married... That gave them the link from Beeston to the Minister's Office and to the doomed flight. And it is the Minister who secretly used a nice bit of modern technology, the Dictaphone, in a restricted area who was responsible. Why on earth did Miss Wills continue working for this man? She is still name checked in the third season!
This minister is cold, undemonstrative, contained in his movements, almost the complete opposite to how Terence Dudley will write him in the second and third series. Likewise, characters like Bennett and Symonds speak terse, direct language. The 'flowerful' dialogue of Terence Dudley and later, Martin worth won't begin to blossom until later.
As an introductory episode, I can't think of many examples that sets up the premise of the series and its characters in as satisfactory a manner. We learn what we need to know of Quist – his passion, his frustration with being kept at arms length from inconvenient facts he may need to know in order to fulfil his function; his guilt and involvement with the creation of the atomic bomb; his nobel prize, and popularity with the press and public. Like a hound dog he cannot leave the trail alone once he's caught its scent. He goes ahead and ruffles more than a few feathers. It's almost as if he has nothing to lose. The Minister, at this point, is an enemy he has made. Later, they will understand each other better.
Ridge we learn was a former MI5 man and demonstrates his skills in handling people, especially women and in breaking and entering, although why he wore that slinky black number in broad daylight AND break into the lab during the day is best left for revisionists to consider. He does – and he uses his real name, and is released from Beeston without too much fuss... Perhaps Symonds fears the press more than spies and saboteurs? He is also abrasive with Quist, manipulates him into authorising his first escapade.
Toby Wren gets precious few lines of dialogue and is thrown into the thick of the action and barely has a chance to interact with the rest of his regular cast. Unwittingly he throws the second flight into mortal danger and can do little but just watch events unfold. His first brush with death, and certainly not his last.
Colin Bradley is presented as a computer expert, and doesn't approve of Ridge. Of all the cast, he is the one who will see the series through with Quist right to the bitter end with killer dolphins. A rock, but not the conscience.
Pat Hunnisett is seen as the one with the mini-skirt, who mocks Ridge, and asks the questions on behalf of the audience. A handy device, but not very rewarding to play.
In other reviews and articles over the years, the words 'chilling', 'frightening' and 'paced' are used to describe early Doomwatch. Well, if you are prone to a nervous disposition, Doomwatch can certainly be; the ideas are frightening enough. What if a plastic eating bug which can reproduce no end escape from a laboratory and endanger us all? The only problem with the visual side of this episode is that the effects of the melting plastic are too small to have a great visual impact. But you get the message. Pens, cassettes, raincoats, bags, cups, trays, doors, oxygen masks, window blinds, insulation on wiring, all fall victim.
The set piece of the episode is the forced landing at the end, although where all those flames come from, someone tell me. Was it the burning tyres, if so why are there flames in front of the plane? Never mind, that foam stuff looks gorgeous, strangely erotic. Yes, I said erotic. I also love the fact that an ambulance will park where a man puts a sign for it. God Save The Queen. This sequence is far better than the opening one with its painful CSO and mixture of stock footage showing test crash dummies being thrown about in their seats. Until you realise that the nuclear explosion that followed was part of the main titles, you felt that was a little bit over kill.
Only a few years later, Gerry Davis and Kit Pedler write a novel called Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater. Here, the plastic eating virus is developed at home by a scientist who is killed by a brain haemorrhage at the point he realises he has made a breakthrough and as a result, the virus is thrown into a sink during his death spasm. The virus feeds on the rotting remains of plastic powder from packaging designed to disintegrate when exposed to sunlight. This gives the virus food in the sewers, and the gas it produces is explosive. The description of carnage on pages 109 to 111 could not have been achieved on a Doomwatch budget. And the passengers on an infected airplane were not so fortunate as Wren's flight...