Doomwatch International

A chance discovery in a BBC file uncovers Terence Dudley's thinking which shaped the writing of Doomwatch's third series, including ideas that never became a script.

As with a large number of BBC drama series from the 1970s, the BBC’s Written Archives no longer retains any Doomwatch production files, and research relies on what you can glean from actors’ contracts or letters written by angry (and happy) writers or their agents. Only by chance will you stumble across something in an unrelated file from late 1968 to the middle of 1972 when Doomwatch was in development and then production. The world of BBC drama series employed from a relatively small pool of writers and directors because producers and script editors understandably want to work with familiar and experienced professionals, who usually were guaranteed to write workable scripts, which uses the regular characters well and keep to a budget.

By 1971, producer Terence Dudley had total control over the series following a deterioration in his relationship with series creators Kit Pedler (whom he regarded as unprofessional) and Gerry Davis, who also served as script editor. Pedler had been side-lined early during the production of the second series, reduced to commenting on scripts he had little to originate. He finally demanded to have his scientific advisor credit removed from ‘Public Enemy’, the final episode of the second series. He also stipulated that wouldn’t return for a third series unless Dudley was removed as producer, something Head of Series Andrew Osborn was disinclined to accept. Gerry Davis asked to be moved onto another series which turned out to be the third series of Softly Softly Task Force and he is credited on the programme early into 1972. This was a series which practically wrote itself, employing a small pool of regular writers, but one of the scripts he edited was an Elwyn Jones story called ‘Priorities’ which could well have been a successful instalment of Doomwatch.¹

On New Year’s Eve 1971, Dudley sent a memo Andrew to Osborn, responding favourably to a format for a new series which he had been asked to comment on by William Slater, currently Osborn’s assistant. This format explored ideas Dudley was planning to push within the series which no doubt was why he was sent it. Pollution and environmental problems were obviously not an exclusively British problem. Therefore, he reasoned that the Department for Observation and Measurement should no longer be regarded purely as a domestic (doom)watch dog, ‘but an international Cerberus’.²

Dudley planned stories to be set in Italy, Egypt, and Holland. Wanting was one thing, but the Doomwatch budget did not allow for overseas filming. Scotland or the Isles of Scilly were just about manageable. Budgets for Series productions were not very large, and overseas trips were out, unless the programme was specifically designed to be set overseas, like The Lotus Eater in Crete, or as with the recently cancelled series Paul Temple, they had access to co-production money and facilities. In the past, BBC management expressed concern if a drama programme dared to take a film crew for a few days in Paris, rather than using stock film or faking it at Ealing. In the event, ‘The Killer Dolphins’ was the only story set abroad in Italy, and Sussex (filmed in January) doubled for sun kissed Naples. Director Darrol Blake had great difficult with Equity when he cast overseas actors to play the Italian scientists.

When Dudley was writing his memo, ‘Deadly Dangerous Tomorrow’ was still at ideas stage and had yet to be scripted by Martin Worth. Dudley reveals that the original focus for the story was on an emergent African nation rather than an unidentified Asian one. Their passionate ‘European Scientific Advisor’ advocates the use of the banned pesticide DDT to defeat malaria and preserve the quality of life of his ‘primitive employers’. Dudley reveals Ridge would return in the episode, who after attempting to blackmail the world with stolen anthrax phials, is vindicated by the ‘lead in petrol’ episode. However, after being released from hospital, Ridge has been forced to take a job overseas. Perhaps he was the advisor described above. In Worth’s final script, the story takes place mainly in central London and Ridge performs what appears to be a tasteless publicity stunt by bringing in an ill Asian family to shame and shake the complacency of the west.³

Another story with international overtones is ‘Flood’, the second script to be commissioned by Dudley back in June 1971. This featured secret NATO exercises and saw – or rather heard – Colin Bradley (Joby Blanshard) in a helicopter somewhere over the North Sea monitoring a fleet of naval ships. When the script was written, the world was waiting for the Americans to test a nuclear bomb planted underneath Amchitka in Alaska, which finally took place in November. There had been genuine concerns that the Amchitka test would trigger a tsunami and was briefly delayed by the presence of a boat called Greenpeace. Dudley’s idea for Ian Curteis to write was that the Americans and NATO had made a secret deal with the Russians and would ‘allow’ them to conduct their own reciprocal tests. Unfortunately, these tests in the Baring sea would have resulted in the catastrophic flooding of London. ‘Flood’ is one of the best scripts in the series.

Dudley reveals that a script called ‘Bird of Prey’ was to be set in Holland and presented as ‘a microcosm of international pollution’. This one may have revolved around the current realisation that muck is no respecter of boundaries. There had been a brief examination of this in ‘Public Enemy’ where the deaths of leaves on trees was traced back to a factory’s emissions. The solution was to build higher chimneys, but rather than dilute and dissipate, the winds can blow the pollution overseas where it falls as acid rain on Scandinavian forests. Louis Marks had been commissioned to write this story but the script he eventually delivered in April 1972 was called ‘Cause of Death’ and focused on the plight of the elderly and the right to die with dignity.⁴

It is quite possible this pollution story idea was then developed and given to Wolf Rilla as ‘I Never Promised You a Rose Garden’, although it has been postulated that this was about building on the green belt, which is hardly an exciting story concept. The script was never made but survives in an American institution among Rilla’s papers. The script was dropped presumably because the series was cut short by one episode for budgetary reasons, something which affected other BBC series at the time such as The Lotus Eaters – and they lost four episodes.⁵

Dudley revealed that he abandoned a story featuring the ‘Aswan dam disaster’ because it would have required filming in Egypt. It had been predicted that the building of the dam – which had recently finished – would seriously upset the ecology of the Nile basin. It already flooded parts of the Sudan.⁶

The other story with international (but unintentional) ramifications was ‘Fire and Brimstone’, written and soon to be directed by Terence Dudley. In return for locating six phials of anthrax he has stolen and sent abroad, Ridge wants six lectures published in newspapers all around the world – his costed manifesto for a saner planet. Dudley predicted the Unabomber, whose manifesto was published in newspapers to prevent his sending more letter bombs to institutions he blamed for ecological catastrophes. His style was spotted by his brother and he was quickly arrested. In our fiction, Ridge is tricked into thinking they were published, but not all the phials were recovered.

In a letter sent to the format’s author in January 1972, Dudley reveals he had based the idea on the 1950 film Seven Days to Noon, where a scientist holds London hostage with a nuclear device to stop anymore from being made. He was delighted that Ridge’s ‘lectures’ were to be echoed in real life by the publication of ‘A Blueprint for Survival’,⁷ a special and influential edition of The Ecologist magazine. Governments who only see economic growth the way forward to prosperity and pollution as an unfortunate consequence, were inclined to dismiss them. Dudley suspected he would be accused of jumping onto the ‘Blueprint’ bandwagon when ‘Fire and Brimstone’ reached the screens in June. Instead, Dudley was criticised for destroying a much-loved character and few had anything complimentary to say about it.⁸

These fascinating snippets from Terence Dudley’s office are to be found in the file of another television writer, John Elliot, whose own series was the antithesis of Doomwatch - The Troubleshooters. It had recently come to an end after six years. Like any good writer, he devised a new format, and it ended up on Dudley’s desk.

And that’s next time.

1. The episode will be examined in a future article. Detective Superintendent John Watt nearly followed Toby Wren into TV Heaven.

2. Gerry Davis wanted to make an international Doomwatch and devised a format World Force 5 which was reproduced in Time Screen magazine in the 1990s.

3. For those unaware, Simon Oates, who played Dr John Ridge, only agreed to appear in four episodes as he did not like the direction the second series had taken. Terence Dudley wrote him out of the third series in ‘Fire and Brimstone’, attempting to blackmail the world to clean up its act. This apparent breakdown will be revealed in ‘Waiting for A Knighthood’ to have been caused by lead poisoning. By the end of the episode, he is fit to leave a special hospital. ‘Fire and Brimstone’ was recorded first, and Ridge’s next three episodes were recorded at the end of the production block.

4. There is no reference as to whether Ridge was meant to make his fourth and final appearance in the series.

5. ‘Sex and Violence’ was pulled from transmission making this a much shorter series than originally planned.

6. There is a jokey reference to the dam in ‘Deadly Dangerous Tomorrow’ regarding prestige projects. His Excellency tells the Minister that his country wants nothing from the west, including aid for building projects. ‘Nothing like a good dam to give a shaky government prestige. So solid, so graceful, so redolent of power and prosperity. Great morale boosters, dams. Look at Egypt. The Aswan dam may have wrecked the land for generations, but it did wonders for Nasser.’

7. Doctor Who fans will recognise the magazine as being the seed for the 1973 story ‘The Green Death’. The original idea was for giant aliens visiting the Earth to absorb its pollution, although something similar had been done by ‘The Dominators’ in 1968.

8. The episode was also criticised by the Evening News, for in a montage of newspapers seen in the episode, its rival, the Evening Standard, was prominent. They hoped future episodes requiring ‘dummy’ newspapers would show theirs – purely for balance… Their offer to help was politely turned down.