State of Emergency: the Way We Were

by Dominic Sandbrook

  Since Doomwatch shared not only many of its writers but its cast and production team with Doctor Who, it was perhaps not surprising that the older series also became an unashamed champion of the new environmentalism. The very first Doctor Who story of the 1970s, ‘Spearhead from Space’, introduces us to an alien enemy that infiltrates the plastics industry, bringing shop-window dummies to life with murderous effect, and soon Jon Pertwee’s Doctor finds himself working with a United Nations team to fight off weekly threats from mad scientists and alien invaders. But while this era of the programme’s history owed much to precursors like Quatermass, it also reflected the cultural concerns of the early 1970s. Barely a week went by without the Doctor infiltrating some top-secret research establishment, often in defiance of the government and the military, and discovering a terrible elemental threat to the world’s existence, unleashed by mankind’s heedless meddling. As the critic James Chapman astutely remarks, it is telling that the Doctor’s foes in these years tended to be green-skinned organic monsters – Silurians, Sea Devils, Axons, Ogrons, Draconians – rather than the silver metallic robots that had proliferated during the years of ‘white heat’. In ‘Doctor Who and the Silurians’ (1970) and ‘The Sea Devils’ (1972) the threat even comes from the planet itself, as it is revealed that the Earth once belonged to two highly intelligent reptile species, who retreated into hibernation hundreds of millions of years ago and have been awakened by – surprise, surprise – a nuclear power research centre. Indeed, given that the series was initially conceived as a way of educating children about science, it is striking how badly scientists come out of Doctor Who in the 1970s. If they are not drilling to tap the power reserves hidden beneath the Earth’s crust, releasing a toxic slime that turns people into hairy lunatics (‘Inferno’, 1970), then they are leading ill-fated geological expeditions in the far future and infecting themselves with anti-matter (‘Planet of Evil’, 1975). Disaster always ensues, but they never, ever learn. ‘Listen to that!’ the Doctor yells at the mad scientist in ‘Inferno’. ‘It’s the sound of the planet screaming out its rage!’39

  As in Doomwatch, the succession of ecological disasters inevitably takes its toll on the morale of the Doctor’s friends. In ‘Invasion of the Dinosaurs’ (1974), the Time Lord finds modern London deserted after an infestation of very poorly realized dinosaurs, who have been brought through time by a group of radical environmentalists. It transpires that this is all part of Operation Golden Age, a plan to return the Earth to ‘an earlier, purer age’ before it was soiled by technology and pollution, and the conspirators include not only a group of renegade scientists, but an ecologically minded government minister and the Doctor’s friend Captain Mike Yates, who has become obsessed with the dangers of industrial development. Despite the havoc, the Doctor has some sympathy for their motives, but insists that the best answer is to ‘take the world you’ve got and try to make something of it’. And when his more literal-minded ally Brigadier Lethbridge-Stewart suggests that the conspiracy leader must have been mad, the Doctor retorts: ‘Yes, well of course he was mad. But at least he realized the dangers that this planet of yours is in, Brigadier. The danger of it becoming one vast garbage dump inhabited only by rats … It’s not the oil and the filth and the poisonous chemicals that are the real cause of pollution, Brigadier. It’s simply greed.’

  But by far the most radical Doctor Who story of the era, as well as the best remembered, was ‘The Green Death’, broadcast during the summer of 1973. This time, the Doctor and his assistant Jo investigate some strange goings-on at a disused coal mine in South Wales, where a miner has been found dead. (‘It’s exactly your cup of tea,’ the Brigadier points out. ‘The fellow’s bright green, apparently, and dead.’) The cause, it turns out, is toxic waste from a local chemical factory, which has not only given birth to a poisonous green slime that kills all who touch it, but is also breeding terrifying giant maggots. No doubt many viewers had already guessed that the factory was up to no good when its managing director appeared at the beginning of the story promising a group of unemployed miners ‘wealth in our time’, but they surely could not have guessed the chilling reality behind the façade. For, as the Doctor discovers, Global Chemicals, the multinational corporation that owns the factory (motto: ‘Efficiency, productivity and profit’), is actually run by a megalomaniac super-computer, the BOSS, indifferent to ecological damage and human life. To defeat it, he has to forge an unlikely alliance with a group of environmentalists based in the local Wholeweal commune. Their leader, Professor Cliff Jones, is a Nobel Prize-winning biologist; the Doctor has been looking forward to meeting him, but is taken aback when Professor Jones turns out to be a long-haired, denim-clad hippy, now working on a fungus substitute for meat. In a clear victory for the forces of environmentalism, however, it is precisely this fungus that kills the toxic slime. Meanwhile, the Doctor’s ditzy companion Jo has fallen head over heels for Professor Jones’s ecological message, insisting: ‘It’s time to call a halt, it’s time that the world awoke to the alarm bell of pollution instead of sliding down the slippery slopes of, of whatever it is.’ At the end of the story she announces her intention to marry him, rubbing salt in the wound by telling the Doctor that ‘he reminds me of a sort of younger you’. Capitalism, chemicals and computers have been defeated, the hippies have won the day, and the Doctor drives off disconsolately into the night, alone with only the memory of a hearty fungus meal to console him.40

  Most ecological fantasies of the 1970s were rather less heart-warming. With the headlines full of pollution and the bookshelves groaning with predictions of disaster, unutterable catastrophe tended to be the order of the day, especially in stories for children. In John Christopher’s trilogy The Prince in Waiting, Beyond the Burning Lands and The Sword of the Spirits (1970–72), we find ourselves in a future England that has reverted to medieval customs and superstition, a bloody, paranoid world of walled cities in which dabbling with machines is a crime punishable by death. The landscape is littered with relics of modernity – one character ties his horse to a piece of wood on which are painted the words ‘RADIO TV DEAL’, ‘something that meant nothing’ – but it is also full of the casualties of science, such as ‘polymufs’, people disfigured by genetic mutations, who are treated like menial slaves. People in this neo-medieval future live in small wooden houses, conscious that their ‘ancestors had built in stone and metal, their houses hundreds of feet high, and had died under the rubble of their tumbled pride’. But it transpires that the priestly Seers, who preach anathema towards machines, are secretly preserving the wisdom of the ancients, and have a bunker full of machines beneath Stonehenge. In the climax to the first book, they explain to the youthful hero that ‘the earth itself rebelled’ against the scientific arrogance of their ancestors: it ‘shook and heaved and everywhere men’s cities tumbled and men died in their ruins’.

  The worst of it did not last long, days rather than weeks, but it was enough to destroy the world of cities and machines. Those who survived roamed the shattered countryside and fought each other for what food there was.

  Gradually they came together again … They returned to their old places, at least to the villages and the small cities. Not to the large ones which were left as rubble. They did as they had done in the past – grew crops, raised cattle, traded and practised crafts and fought. But they would have no truck with machines, identifying them with their forefathers’ ancient pride and the reckoning which had followed. Anyone found dabbling with machines was killed, for fear of bringing down fresh destruction.41

  Hatred of machines was a popular theme of apocalyptic fiction in the 1970s. The BBC series The Changes (1975), adapted from Peter Dickinson’s novel The Devil’s Children, imagines a future in which mankind is filled with an overwhelming revulsion against modernity, smashing machines and banning even the mention of technological terms as society reverts to a brutal, pre-industrial order. In its chilling opening scenes, all kinds of machines – televisions, radios, toaste
rs, cookers and cars – suddenly give out a strange, unsettling noise, filling people with an unstoppable urge to smash and destroy them. This time, however, there is a rather more upbeat conclusion. The programme’s young protagonist, a secondary school girl called Nicky, decides to find out what lies behind this Luddite madness, and traces its origins to a quarry deep in the mountains, where miners have disturbed a rock identified as ‘the oldest on Earth’, a living entity that has been disturbed by man’s industrial activity (just like the Silurians in Doctor Who, although here the stone seems to be an incarnation of the legendary Merlin). Only when she has begged the stone for forgiveness – and received by telepathy some home truths about man’s greed and pollution – is the terrible process reversed, the world apparently having been restored to ‘balance’ between nature and machine – although what that means is anybody’s guess.42

  In April 1975, only a month after the conclusion of The Changes, the BBC showed the first episode of what would become the last word in eco-catastrophe dramas. Thanks to its terrifying global-pandemic opening, its earnest back-to-the-land message, its endless shots of Volvos trundling down country lanes, and its cast of balding men in parkas and feisty women in dungarees, Survivors captured the spirit of the mid-1970s better than almost any other cultural product of the day. It follows the adventures of three plucky survivors – Greg, an engineer, Abby, a middle-class housewife, and Jenny, a young secretary – in the aftermath of a devastating pandemic that has wiped out the vast majority of the world’s population. In the opening titles, we track the progress of the deadly virus from a Chinese laboratory, where a scientist has become accidentally infected (do they never learn?), across the Western world. And in ‘The Fourth Horseman’, the show’s first and arguably best episode, we watch as society crumbles in the face of what appears at first to be merely flu. When we first meet Abby (Carolyn Seymour), she is playing tennis in her Home Counties back garden against a serving machine. When she leaves the court, the machine continues to pump out balls, but we know it will stop eventually – as will all other machines on the planet, although for very different reasons. And as Abby cooks her husband’s dinner, listening to the news of the illness striking London, she muses prophetically on the fragility of civilization. ‘I never thought what happens to a city if it all breaks down, all at the same time,’ she says. ‘There’s no power, no lighting or cooking. And food, even if you get it into the city, you can’t distribute it. Then there’s water, sewage, ugh! Things like that.’

  Soon afterwards, Abby falls ill; when she awakes, not only is her husband (Peter Bowles, in pre-bounder days) dead, but so is everyone else in the village. Together with a handful of like-minded survivors, she faces the overwhelming challenge of eking out a decent life in a world without electricity or running water, without government or police, without televisions or telephones, supermarkets or hospitals. In this Hobbesian world, the very concepts of affluence and technology have lost their meaning. And while the little group of survivors establishes a rudimentary commune in a country house, they are not fleeing the modern world from choice, like the hippies of the early 1970s, but because they have no alternative. The cities have been reduced to cesspits: when Jenny flees London, she is leaving a city collapsing into anarchy, the streets jammed with traffic, the hospitals choked with corpses. Later, when the survivors visit a supermarket in search of provisions, they find it crawling with rats; from the ceiling hangs a corpse, a sign around its neck reading ‘LOOTER’. When they make it back to London in the second series, they find a city haunted by vermin and disease: although a little commune survives at the Oval and still has heat and light, it has to maintain an electric fence to keep the rats out, and is ruled by a fascistic despot. The future lies not in the city but in the countryside; as the series progresses, the survivors become increasingly self-sufficient, giving the lie to Abby’s despairing claim that they are ‘less practical than Iron Age man’. Indeed, by its third season Survivors often seemed like a how-to guide for viewers expecting an imminent apocalypse, patiently following its characters as they teach themselves gardening and medicine, grow wheat and make soap, and even set up a rudimentary government, with its own approved currency. There is even a happy ending, as they rediscover the means to generate power: a sign that the narrative of human progress, for good or ill, can begin again.43

  In interviews to promote the first series of Survivors, the show’s creator Terry Nation claimed that the idea had come to him long before the oil shock of 1973. But in an age when petrol pumps seemed in danger of running dry and the next power cut was always just around the corner, his series struck a powerful chord. In particular, its fascination with self-sufficiency took up one of the most fashionable and popular themes of the day. Previewing the show in April 1975, the Radio Times advised its readers that ‘in a survival situation, the only things we would have to rely on would be our hands and our muscle power’. Helpfully, the magazine recommended a couple of good reads on how to provide for a family in the event of disaster: ‘Food for Free [by Richard Mabey] is literally that: plants you can pick up in the hedgerows. And John Seymour’s book on Self-Sufficiency actually tells you how to kill a pig – and how many of us would know how to do that? Dismiss the technical approach and think primitive!’

  Thinking primitive was all the rage in the mid-1970s: the Radio Times piece, for example, was illustrated with a montage of other exciting titles, from The Vegetable Garden Displayed and The Rearing of Chickens to The Small Commercial Poultry Flock and Soil Conditions and Plant Growth. When Terry Nation showed his interviewer a carved wooden ornament and asked: ‘Who cut the tree down? Who made the steel to create the saw to cut it down? Who dug the coal to feed the furnace to make the steel? Who dug the iron ore out of the ground?’, he was merely echoing the ideas of one of the gurus of the self-sufficiency movement, John Seymour, who liked to ask audiences to work out the processes behind even the most basic household items. And when Nation’s survivors were shown painstakingly learning crafts from scratch and building up a body of knowledge to pass on to the next generation, they were following all the principles of Seymour’s manifesto, Self-Sufficiency. No doubt they would have benefited from a trip to the Centre for Alternative Technology, which had been founded in a disused slate quarry outside Machynlleth two years previously, opened its doors to the public in 1975 and soon became Europe’s most successful eco-centre. And if only they had had a subscription to the magazine Practical Self-Sufficiency, founded in the same year, then they might have picked up all sorts of useful tips. ‘The country faces grave economic difficulties and the likelihood of severe shortages,’ an editorial in the first issue began ominously.

  Rapid inflation, unemployment, soaring food prices, chemically adulterated foods and the increasing dehumanising of our Society have all contributed to a growing awareness of the need to be more self-reliant – to grow more of our own food – to make less demands on a welfare state which can no longer cope with the needs of its citizens … The need is for direct experience of the whole and natural life, irrespective of the situation in which we find ourselves – whether it be in the centre of a city or in a commune in Wales. This is of paramount importance, not only for us, but for our children – for knowledge and experience gained in childhood are never lost.44

  The founders of Practical Self-Sufficiency were a husband-and-wife team, David and Katie Thear, who had started running an organic smallholding in rural Essex after David was made redundant. But it was another husband-and-wife team, Tom and Barbara Good, who were to become the poster children of self-sufficiency, thanks to the great success of the BBC sitcom The Good Life, which began life just two weeks before Survivors. In less skilful hands the show might have become painfully worthy, but thanks to the accomplished writing of John Esmonde and Bob Larbey, and perhaps even more to the performances of Richard Briers and Felicity Kendal, it became one of the fondest-remembered comedies of the decade. One of the keys to its appeal was that unlike the characters
in Survivors, the Goods never take themselves too seriously and are actually not very good at self-sufficiency. Although they set out with the best of intentions, Tom throwing up his job as a Surbiton draughtsman designing the plastic toys in cereal packets, their failures are more notable than their triumphs: their goat is always escaping, there are all sorts of mishaps with their pigs and chickens, and their beloved peapod burgundy is practically undrinkable. Their relationship with their next-door neighbours Jerry and Margo, the souls of suburban respectability, affords plenty of opportunities to poke fun at middle-class conventions, but it must have been a rare viewer who did not, from time to time, have a sneaking sympathy for poor, beleaguered Margo. There could, after all, be something unbearably self-righteous about even the most well-intentioned defender of the planet. The feminist paper Spare Rib reported the case of ‘an ecologically orientated’ mother who ‘chews up her baby’s food for him rather than use the blender that she has been given. She believes that turning on the blender contributes unnecessarily to the pollution produced by electric power plants.’ Not even Tom and Barbara were that bad, although the series did have one or two detractors. ‘Saw Richard Briers in a comedy series,’ recorded Kenneth Williams after watching the second episode. ‘It was terrible. Not a laugh line in it.’45