Doomwatch
It was a standard follow-up operation for the team at the Department for the Observation and Measurement of Scientific Work, Doctor Del Shaw visiting the island of Balfe a year after the clean-up undertaken following a chemical spill to assess the long-term impact on the wildlife, gathering samples of seaweed, gastropods, bivalves, even perhaps some eggs from the gull nests, but upon arrival the locals are unaccountably hostile towards someone who has come to help them.
Greeted with slammed doors and watched from behind twitching curtains, followed by a man with a gun every time he explores the island, albeit at a distance, Doctor Shaw finds cautious kinship with schoolteacher Victoria Brown, more accustomed to the insular locals having lived on Balfe for two years, but finding dogs fighting in the woods over the body of a young girl in a shallow grave convinces Shaw there is a deeper investigation needed.
The television show having launched in 1970, as was the custom for many high-profile series of the era Doomwatch made its transition to a cinema adaptation in March of 1972, a year after the conclusion of the second season and six months before the debut of the third and final, the established core cast of that period taking supporting roles though the lead was an investigator new to the Department, Ian Bannen as Doctor Del Shaw.
Where many such expansions would simply take an existing storyline and rework it, examples being the Doctor Who feature films which condensed the first two encounters with the Daleks and 1974’s Callan, adapted from pilot episode A Magnum for Schneider broadcast as part of Armchair Theatre seven years previously, Doomwatch was an entirely new storyline devised by Clive Exton though paralleling the format developed by Gerry Davis and Kit Pedler.
Victoria Brown played by Judy Geeson, she has learned not to ask questions of the fractious islanders, loyal to them but aware they are suffering, only now beginning to be accepted by them and choosing to focus on her work rather than cause trouble, only opening up to Shaw when he promises it will not require her to betray their trust, while in London the familiar quartet of doctors Spencer Quist, John Ridge, Fay Bradley and lab technician Colin Bradley (John Paul, Simon Oates, Fay Chantry and Joby Blanshard) examine the specimens.
With overlap in the themes of pollution and corporate responsibility, specifically the episodes The Battery People, The Islanders (with which it shares a guest star, a pre-Star Wars Shelagh Fraser) and No Room for Error, the credits show footage of spoiled beaches and sickening birds and wildlife, stains of industry impacting those who have little understanding of what has been done to them, feeling shame for the disease symptoms which some see as a judgement on them for being sinners which drives their reticence to engage with outsiders, but the film is aimed at a broader audience as indicated by the reductive American title, Island of the Ghouls.
The BBC show driven by intellect and investigative rigour, interpreting and understanding evidence, Tigon’s feature slate generally favoured horror and action, and transposing the discursive Doomwatch format into a mystery thriller is not entirely successful, the deformed and violent villagers emphasised not to be monsters as presumed but outcasts ashamed of the misfortune handed to them with no recourse, a secret hidden from outsiders, the film at least true to its source material in that there is no happy ending, with compromise and sacrifice called for in order that the community might survive though inevitably changed.
The Stone Tape director Peter Sasdy making the best with no easy answers or simple solution, while Shaw is an acceptable and assured substitute he lacks the caustic and uncompromising attitude of the established characters, seen in an expanded facility but their presence marginalised, Quist refusing to sugarcoat the findings of the team regardless of who they will upset; Ridge commenting “the results will look very ugly on a graph,” his response is typically blunt, topical for the era and challenging: “Put them on a graph, then; perhaps Doomwatch can frighten the petrol companies into stopping using lead additives.”
Doomwatch is available on Blu-ray from 88 Films and also streaming on Shudder
