I have quite a low boredom threshold, which is only partly offset by the fact that as a rule I tend not to get bored by the same things as people with standard brain function. It’s therefore just a shame that I never quite connected with science at school, as I think I would have been quite a good fit for the Doomwatch team – their work is nothing if not extremely varied. Having already dealt with rogue polymervorous viruses, the ethics of transplant surgery, chemical warfare, genetically engineered super-intelligent rats, the threat of a computer-dominated society, and the issue of mental health in the space programme, episode seven of the first series finds the lads seconded to the Department of Health and doing research into how people are smoking. (This being 1970, the answer is usually ‘like a chimney’.)
I say lads, but of course there is also Pat the secretary to consider. This episode, The Devil’s Sweets (written by Don Shaw), is Pat the secretary’s big showcase, in which she gets to do much more than just sit around and get macked on by Ridge. (Although, to be fair, this does happen as well.) As things get underway, the team are finding a startling rise in cigarette consumption across London, for no readily apparent reason, and limited to one particular brand of cigarettes. Even Pat the secretary, who gave up years ago, is back on the fags, and no-one understands why.
A bit of detective work by the team, not to mention scans of Pat the secretary’s brain (‘let’s hope we can find it!’ chortles Ridge, as hilariously misogynistic as ever), reveals a connection between the cigarette company, a recent promotion giving away free chocolate, the ad agency handling both products, and a scientist at a local university doing research into behavioural conditioning.
It basically comes down to whether or not the team will be able to get evidence or a confession proving that illegal psycho-active drugs were put into the choccies, giving people the compulsion to smoke, but the situation is complicated by the fact that – lawks! – the drugs synergise extremely poorly with the diet pills that Pat the secretary has been popping, meaning she’s rushed off to hospital and put in intensive care – actually, it looks more like some kind of iron lung. (Told you Pat the secretary was central to this episode. Admittedly, she’s central and unconscious a lot of the time, but you can’t have everything.)
I’m tempted to say that any episode of Doomwatch featuring Ridge is bound to be a bit suspect in its sexual politics (to be fair, Toby comes across as rather a lech sometimes, too), but this one kind of takes the biscuit, opening with mini-skirted dollies handing out the tainted chocs to gleeful city gents, and the actual physical jeopardy limited solely to anyone taking diet pills – who are exclusively women, of course. This is my main takeaway from the episode, other than a rather extraordinary appearance by Maurice Roeves as the amoral ad man – it’s not his delivery of the material which startles as much as the wardrobe he’s given, which gives Ridge’s eye-searing outfits a run for their money.
The mystery of how the spike in smoking is linked to the chocolate giveaway is an engaging one – is it subliminal messaging? Is something else going on? – but unfortunately it doesn’t quite have the clever resolution one might have hoped for. Instead, the episode’s climax gets its impact from Quist’s brutal tactics in extracting the confession he needs. It is a little bit stagey, but the performances of John Paul and Simon Oates just about sell it. Again, this barely qualifies as SF by any reasonable metric, but it’s a bit difficult to say which other genre could comfortably contain it.
On to Pedler and Davis’s The Red Sky, one of the episodes most likely to seem slightly absurd to a 21st century audience. One interesting factoid is that Doomwatch was so popular in the 1970s that three episodes were adapted into a graded reader for students of the English language, one of them being The Red Sky. The English language teaching industry being what it is, these books are still in circulation forty years on, and I came across the Doomwatch reader a few years back. The main thrust of the plot survives intact, but the book can’t quite do justice to the extravagant weirdness of the episode.
The story opens with unusually high levels of grumpiness between the various members of the Doomwatch team – one notable thing about this show is that the main characters often genuinely seem to dislike one another – and Quist in particular showing signs of stress. After an intervention by the others, Quist agrees to take a few days off, and heads to the country to spend some time with his conservationist friend Colley.
However, Colley and his daughter are distracted by the peculiar suicide of another friend of theirs – the local lighthouse keeper, who was seen staggering out of his lighthouse in a demented state and then jumping off a cliff in the pre-credits sequence. Quist is initially more concerned by the level of noise pollution from the test beds at the local aviation research installation, but then Colley himself has some kind of fit while visiting the lighthouse – could there possibly be some kind of connection? (Hint: yes.)
Well, as I’ve suggested in the past, many episodes of Doomwatch still do a decent job of feeling relatively plausible, one way or another, but this is one of the occasions where the show falls over in a fairly spectacular manner – the central conceit of The Red Sky feels about as scientifically plausible, to a modern audience, as that of the average episode of The Avengers. The proposition in this instance is that the sonic boom generated by a rocket-powered hypersonic aircraft, when focused by the distinctive structure of a lighthouse, can cause intense hallucinations and actual seizures in anyone unlucky enough to be in the building when the plane flies over. Even if this is true, it seems like a bit of a niche problem, and the episode’s credibility gap is not much helped by the way that Quist’s hallucinations are realised – lashings of garish CSO and close-ups of John Paul’s eyes bugging at the camera. The episode attempts a suitably ominous conclusion, with the lighthouse scheduled for demolition and flights of the rocket plane on hold. ‘What will happen when the plane is flying all over the country?’ someone asks. We don’t know, yet, says Quist. Well, I would venture to suggest, not much, in the real world at least, although to be fair this strange conjunction of lighthouses and rocket planes isn’t a particularly common one as far as I know.
That said, the episode is well-structured with the central mystery functioning more satisfactorily than in some other offerings. There’s a typically solid guest appearance from Paul Eddington as the top chap at the aircraft company, who is (understandably) dubious of Quist’s theory, and a fairly engaging subplot about Ridge, who suspects that Quist’s wild claims indicate he is having some sort of breakdown and seems primarily intent on mitigating any damage this may do to Doomwatch as an agency. Apart from the hallucinatory sequences, this is a solidly produced episode in all departs. But the central concept is still pretty bonkers.