Doomwatch - yet another Torchwood ancestor

Barney climbs further up the British sci-fi family tree...

I've watched a couple more episodes of Torchwood over the last few weeks, and my initial opinion that it's good, but not great, hasn't really altered. I've recorded all the episodes and will watch them back over my extended long Christmas break - if I get time in between watching the several episodes of Doctor Who I didn't watch first time round, the twenty or so films I've recorded over the year (mostly off the recently Freeviewed FilmFour) and god knows what else.

In the meantime BBC4's Sci Fi Britannia series continues and this week the focus in on Doomwatch, which is in many ways a more immediate ancestor to Torchwood along with Quatermass, which I mentioned in a previous post. OK, so the theme is environmentalism and the corruption and dirty deeds of big business and the government rather than extraterrestrials or the paranormal, and in some ways it's closer to the X Files - at least, the X Files episodes that don't deal with extraterrestrials or the paranormal. But it does look amazingly ahead of its time. Doomwatch is a highly flawed series - the investigative team (particularly the leader, a guy who looks a bit like a teddy boy gone to seed) are arrogant f***ers who seem to credit the public with about as much intelligence as Matthew Taylor does (see previous post), and whose idea of the good society seems to be a dictatorship where everything is hosed down with disinfectant every 90 seconds. The guys are also unbelievably sexist, even for the early seventies (which does lead to a lot of dialogue about sex, which is another link to Torchwood.) But still very interesting, as I knew very little about the series at all, let alone that it had been so popular. .. roll on next week's feature.