‘A chilling story from today’s headlines:’ Community, Maritime Apocalypse and Discourses of Eco-Dystopia’s in Doomwatch (1972)
Spun-off from the preceding and pioneering BBC eco-disaster television series of the same name, Doomwatch (1972) is an early British cinematic example of environmental disaster. It elegiacally imagines a British island irrevocably despoiled by industrial pollution, offering a microcosm for the British Isles. As such, and as this article will demonstrate, it is thematically significant in giving audio-visual expression to cultural fears and concepts of eco-dystopia. Furthermore, this article will elaborate that the film is culturally bound in a circular relationship between the TV series that inspired it and the era’s headlines which similarly prefigured environmental catastrophe. In the 1970s, Doomwatch became a lexigraphical shorthand for the horror of impending environmental destruction.