Doomwatch - Cast and Crew

Cast and Crew

The main character throughout the series was Nobel prize winner, Dr Spencer Quist, who had been given the task of setting-up and running the department by the British government. Quist is haunted by guilt of having worked on the Manhattan Project, making the first nuclear bomb. He was played throughout the BBC run by John Paul, a familiar face from a range of British television series, who later went on to appear in I, Claudius.

The other main regular character throughout the run was Dr John Ridge, played by Simon Oates who often did not see eye to eye with Quist, who he called a "bastard" in episode 7 for manipulating one of his own staff. He appeared in only four episodes of the final season. One of the first season's main characters was Tobias 'Toby' Wren (Robert Powell), who provided one of Doomwatch’s most memorable episodes when he was dramatically killed off in an explosion at the conclusion of the season one finale, Survival Code. Powell had only signed for one series originally and the producers wanted him to sign for a second run but he was adamant that he wanted to leave the show on a high, and suggested that they get rid of him by blowing him up, which they did. The BBC got more letters on his unexpected death in the series than any other subject since World War II.

Wren was trying to disarm a terrorist's nuclear device, which had been traced to a pavilion at the end of a seaside pier at Byfield Regis. Having thought he was finished, a pair of wire cutters slips from Wren's hands and falls into the sea just before he discovers a last wire as the remaining seconds tick away. Though the nuclear part of the bomb is safe, we see the pavilion explode as the conventional explosive goes off, killing Wren and two others. Though this episode is missing, the scene is shown at the start of the first episode of Series 2 in which there are recriminations, guilt and an official enquiry which is intended to get rid of Quist.

Wren was played by Robert Powell, who later found worldwide fame as the title character in the television series Jesus of Nazareth, and starred in films such as the 1978 version of The Thirty-Nine Steps and later the BBC medical series Holby City in the 2000s and 2010s. The ministerial antagonist to the Doomwatch team, determined to keep the department following the government line, was played by John Barron, better known as 'CJ' from the comedy series The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin. Other members of the cast were: Philip Bond as Inspector Drew, Joby Blanchard as Colin Bradley, Wendy Hall as Pat Hunnisett, Vivien Sherrard as Barbara Mason, John Nolan as Geoff Hardcastle, John Brown as Commander Neil Stafford, Jean Trend as Dr. Fay Chantry, Elizabeth Weaver as Dr Anne Tarrant, and Moultrie Kelsall as Drummond.

Throughout its run, Doomwatch was produced by Terence Dudley, who also contributed several scripts himself. Dudley later went on to produce another well-remembered BBC science-fiction drama Survivors, and in the early 1980s wrote and directed episodes of Doctor Who. Aside from Davis, Pedler and Dudley, several other writers wrote episodes for the programme, including well-known veterans of several other British television science-fiction productions such as Robert Holmes, Dennis Spooner and Louis Marks.