Doomwatch 50 year anniversary

I'm rewatching Doomwatch (1970-1972).  It’s Doomwatch’s 50^th anniversary, since it was first broadcast on 9^th February 1970.

As a science fiction fan, I'm used to being an early worrier about man-made apocalypses, and Doomwatch, the ultimate 'My God, man should not meddle with things he cannot comprehend, doctor!' program certainly was the sine qua non of early worrying about the apocalypse. Episodes covered pandemics, incorrectly tested pesticides, antibiotics erroneously used on livestock, nuclear-armed missiles lost from submarines and found by scrap-hunting yokels, the effects of western diseases on island populations, computer-monitored intensive care units where the computer is the sole Death Panel arbiter, the dangers of subliminal advertising, anthrax-contaminated military bases and invasive super lab rats in the sewers... and I'm only half way through. (And half the episodes are lost, so technically I'm only a quarter of the way through.) The one thing we haven't panicked over so far is global warming (but we haven't had global cooling either).

I note that the episode debunking the then commonly held belief that men with two Y chromosomes, XYY Males, are powerful, overgrown violent offenders must have worked, because nobody believes it today.

First broadcast in 1970, it is one of the first TV series I remember watching.  Many Brits my age will remember the episode in which pretty boy Toby Wren (Robert Powell) died while disarming a bomb. Well, that’s a lost episode, so you have to rely on that memory there. (The events leading to the explosion and Wren’s off-screen tragic death are recapped in a still-extant sequel in this DVD set). I certainly remembered the first episode, in which a biological agent (a 'virus', it says here), which was designed to eat plastic waste, gets loose and starts degrading plastic parts of such items as an aircraft, unfortunately while the plane is still in flight. I even have the book (by series writers Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis).

The show is astoundingly, outrageously sexist. I'm not just saying the usual ‘But Then Everyone Was In Those Days’, I'm saying it was off the freaking radar. I thought at first this was confined to Ridge, the porn-hairdoed playboy-scientist whose job was basically to schmooze while code-switching so that he could seduce secretaries (all secretaries are women in miniskirts) with a smooth line in dolly bird-pulling patter in order to pump them for information, and yet at the drop of a hat seduce Ph. D. molecular biologists (yes, even in Doom Watch 1970, women could be Ph. D. molecular biologists) with a smooth line of doctorate-level patter, and pump *them* for information. But it wasn't just Ridge slapping the secretaries on the bottom and ogling pharmaceutical salesgirls. At one point, the head of Doomwatch, Dr. Quist, sets up a Doomwatch job applicant, a lady molecular biologist (or possibly a lady heart surgeon or whatever), to have an argument with a previous extra-marital lover so she can 'get it out of her system', because everyone apparently knows women are incapable of logical thought if male pheromones are in the air. A bit later he reiterates that women are just hurtling balls of emotion. You'd think a man who had shouted "You Bastard!" at Ridge and had Ridge shout "You Bastard!" at him several times, along with half a dozen other shouting matches and incidents of Ridge’s insubordination would have noticed that men can also get a little overheated emotionally at Doomwatch HQ.

The science ranges from thoroughly sketchy – exemplified by the way all the Doomwatch team can perform all experiments necessary to investigate any issue, from psychology to computer science to nuclear physics – to some passable biology, including a couple of Big Pharma plots where the technobabble holds up to this day, fifty years later. I mean, I’m not saying I believe that the way to get a new drug approved is to have Quist and Ridge put a manila file folder on the government minister’s desk, but the technical language used leading up to that scene was pretty solid.

I’m looking forward to the final episode, Sex and Violence, which was never broadcast as the BBC did not want to get up the nose of the anti-porn campaigners of the day (for example, Mary Whitehouse) by showing an episode that questioned their motives and failed to support their premises. Lord Longford and Whitehouse seem like they’re from so long ago, but then again we’re still dealing with the numerous environmental and medical horrors Doomwatch tackled so now’s as good a time as any to find out what we early adopters were afraid of five decades ago.

Edit to add: You can buy this 7 DVD set on Amazon, and presumably elsewhere. Make sure you specify the TV show, as there is a related film out there on DVD.