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Doomwatch
1970 · TV series · 50 min episodes · 4 seasons
Created by Gerry Davis, Kit Pedler
Doomwatch is a British science fiction television programme produced by the BBC, which ran on BBC 1 between 1970 and 1972. The series was set in the then present-day, and dealt with a scientific government agency led by Doctor Spencer Quist, responsible for investigating and combating various ecological and technological dangers. The series was followed by a film adaptation produced by Tigon British Film Productions and released in 1972, and a revival TV film was broadcast on Channel 5 in 1999.
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6 comments on Hacker News
> UK garage and rave culture took off in the UK with influences from reggae, soul and R&B. Now with the help of BBC Radio 1
I think there's an important middle step here, which is stuff that wasn't "banned" but was nevertheless not on the playlist, and the pirate radio stations whose personnel gradually went mainstream. Both from the Radio Caroline era (Jonnie Walker, rock) and Kiss FM (Trevor Nelson, UK garage). Let's not forget the government's attempts to ban the rave scene.
In comics you had 2000AD and Judge Dredd, inspired by the French Metal Hurlant.
> If you really want to argue for British dystopian science fiction movies
Not movies, but TV: Doctor Who (often dystopian), Blake's 7, the Prisoner, and the little-seen but extremely prescient Doomwatch. And of course the darkest nuclear apocalypse movie, Threads. Filmed in the parts of Thatcher-era Sheffield which looked like they had already been nuked.
UK always simply had less money and a narrower set of TV/radio gatekeepers. The diversity and inventiveness is there nonetheless. So, yes, a lot of things have to get American money and licenses in order to be made.
There have been several bacteria-eats-stuff novels. https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/260552/novel-that-imagines-a-dystopia-created-by-the-disappearance-of-plastic
This was the basis for Mutant 59: The Plastic Eaters (1971 novel), which was adapted from an episode of Doomwatch (1970 UK TV), which was inspired by the fighter jet crash scene in The Andromeda Strain (1969 novel), where the organism ate through a plastic hose. There was another UK show where a fungus destroyed all the paper.
In the present article, the problem is that dissolvable sutures are made out of biodegradable polycaprolactone, and there's a Pseudomonas biofilm that can grow on polycaprolactone, so it's an infection problem.
I think there was a Doomwatch episode that addressed this sort of thing, it didn't go well.
You're fifty years late. Doomwatch did an episode called The Plastic Eaters in 1970.
"A plane dissolves in mid-air, its plastic components eaten away. Doomwatch faces its first challenge: to halt the disastrous spread of a man-made virus with the power to melt all plastic."
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0564476/
Does anyone remember the first Doomwatch episode, the Plastic Eaters?
> microorganisms that can metabolize plastic
Subject of a Doomwatch episode in 1970: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0564476/?ref_=ttep_ep1