There shouldn’t be any pressing need for this book to exist. Sadly, the short-sighted attitude of the BBC to their archive back in the ‘70s means we’re glad it does. Fourteen episodes of acclaimed eco-drama Doomwatch have🍨 been wiped; this book reproduces 🍃the scripts of half a dozen of them.

Five hail from the third and final series, which revamped the show more along the lines of a political thriller, with less focus on scientific investigation. “Fire And Brimstone” and “Say Knife, Fat Man” are both race-against-time tales concerning the theft of deadly weapons – anthrax and plutonium respectively. Both read like they made for gripping television, but not much like the Doomwatch of old.

Mind you, you might conclude that’s not such a bad thing when you read the sole series one script, “Spectre At The Feast”, a feeble tale of LSD-like hallucinations caused by eating polluted lobster (now there’s an everyman problem for you…). Sadly, these include a rather racist vision of a spear-waving “negro”. The other three episodes included are “High Mountain” (where Doomwatch &rsq🅠uo;s Dr Quist is tempted with corporate funding), “Deadly Dangerous Tomorrow” (which dramatises the debate about the effect ecological policies have on the developing world, in a drearily didactic manner) and “Flood”, which sees London threatened by… well, you can probably guess.

The scripts are presented with meticulous care. Footnotes provide behind-the-scenes insights and historical context, while differences between the rehearsal script and the final camera script are flagged up in bold and italics; for “High Mountain”, where the changes were more significant, both scripts are included, in full. It’s an approach we’d love to see adopted for a Doctor Who script book sometime. How about it, BBC Books?

Ian Berriman

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