Porton Down - Porton Down in Popular Culture

Porton Down in Popular Culture

• In 1962, Alistair Maclean published his novel The Satan Bug, about someone removing biological warfare agents from a Chemical Warfare Establishment called the Mordon Microbiological Research Centre (based on Porton Down), and using them to blackmail the country.
• Victor Canning's 1976 novel The Doomsday Carrier is set in Fadledean Research Station near Salisbury, clearly a fictional Porton Down. In it a chimpanzee escapes after being injected with a plague bacillus and is hunted across the country.
• In 1979, Peter Hammill recorded an album entitled pH7 which featured the song "Porton Down" which referred to the Porton Down military research facility in Wiltshire, England.
• In 1980, the band Tricks Upon Travellers released the song "Porton Down".
• In 1984, the band The Legendary Pink Dots released a song called "Black Zone" on their album "The Tower" which was inspired by Porton Down.
• In 1995, folk-metal band, Skyclad, referenced Porton Down in the song 'Jeopardy' on their album 'The Silent Whales of Lunar Sea'
• The 2001 "Parallox" episode of Absolutely Fabulous satirized Botox when Patsy chose to use the fictitious chemical Parallox as a high-powered alternative. Patsy stated she got it from her "little friend at the lab." Saffron angrily points out, "It's a chemical weapon — they make it at Porton Down!"
• Grimbledon Down was a comic strip by British cartoonist Bill Tidy, published for many years by New Scientist. The strip was set in an ostensibly fictitious UK government research lab, which was in fact a thinly veiled reference to the controversial Porton Down bio-chemical research facility.
• In Spooks series 9 episode 3 Porton Down is referenced as being used to store a fictional nerve agent called Paroxocybin.
• In Doc Martin series 3 episode 6 Porton Down is referenced as the former workplace of a spinster who, though caring for her sister, is suspected of insanity and murder.