1990

I found this very watchable, in fact rather more-ish. Dystopian SF thriller series made in 1977 and set in 1990. In a run-down Britain a lot like the real late 70s extrapolated, journalist Edward Woodward tries to stop a nasty and repressive government becoming a flat-out totalitarian one and has a Pimpernel-style sideline in helping people escape abroad. Parts still strike a chord and raise a cynical smile today ('to safeguard freedom' MPs are exempt from the draconian laws inflicted on the rest of the nation, for example.) Connoisseurs of retro-futurism will enjoy things like a car-phone the size of a small fruit machine but the landscape is largely grey and 70s brutalist (and the phone is in an Austin Princess.) There are some good future-shock jokes - 'Oxfam are raising funds for us in India' and we've sold off the Crown Jewels (both only a matter of time.) One thing they got vastly wrong but which must have been a daring act of lese-majeste is that there is a King on the throne only 13 years in the future.

Woodward and friends are likeable and the situations are interesting. There's wiggle-room and a vestige of due process in the repression; things are just short of Orwellian, iron fist in velvet glove, in a way that also rings true: fascism (actually extreme socialism) with a saccharine smile in a polite British face. It's how it would happen or some might say did. The hero has a Deep Throat mole in the civil service, and his would-be squeeze is a woman high up in the security apparatus who may be trying to be human or may be using him for her own ends; this could have been schlocky or camp but their relationship is an entertaining mix of the cerebral and the playfully flirtatious. It's not just them who have charm and humour and appear to like each other, something missing from the dead-eyed robots on TV now. We care about even minor characters; as a result things get awfully tense at times. Modern TV drama commissioners, please take note. (Also that there's a whole universe of untapped possibilities outside child abuse, terminal disease and serial killing.)

That said, it gets darker as it goes; Woodward has some splendid victories but is sometimes powerless to help people, and ultimately it's less an adventure series than a shrewd and at times pretty grim study of the misuse of the levers of power - often 'soft' power - all the ways that freedom can die without people actually being shot (no need to imprison people when you can stop them from working; if you don't toe the line your wife and kids will suffer too) and how people variously knuckle under, go along to get along or courageously and self-sacrificingly resist. Anyone living in communist Eastern Europe would have recognised all of it; and similar pressures are to some degree still at work here, now. There are nice touches such as the surveillance room in the baddy HQ looking like a Benthamite panopticon, or a haunting moment dramatizing how poison in the political world seeps into our private ones when a dissident neglects his child because he's obsessively watching the news.

"1990", along with "The Guardians", represents great British "political" sci fi from the 1970s. I heartily agree with the previous commentator who looked forward to a "1990" DVD reissue. Let's hope they do a double with "The Guardians".

The real innovation of the show was not the police state future conjured up, that's been done before, but the fictional dictatorship's use of "Authorised Systematic Harassment". This amounted to essentially the use of all the mundane irritating rules and regulations we are familiar with today, in a systematic, targeted and tyrannical way.

1990 was a lot more innovative and chilling than modern movie treatments like "V".

I was 16 when this was shown on the BBC,Woodward was a star after Callan but this series is not well known. I hardly saw it when it was on. So I was happy to buy the series 1 DVD. It is both very good and very obvious and clichéd. 1970s Britain was a rough place,the country was split politically,there was much talk of anti democratic behaviour from left and right. There were strikes yes but Britain was a fairer place in 1978 than 1968 but the reaction was the election of the Tories in 1979.

1990 is a sort of Daily Mail readers worst nightmare of what the Labour government was like. There are many mentions of civil servants with good pensions and government bully boys. But all governments contain a danger of oppression and the bureaucrats often do behave badly in real life,the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

This has some great writing and acting and the series hints at the truth that George Orwell revealed that bullies are bullies because they like doing it,not because of political commitment.

It is almost funny to recall that some people celebrated the victory of Mrs Thatcher in 1979 as a victory for freedom but soon miners were not allowed to drive from Kent to Yorkshire and the police were being well paid to restrict human rights during the sometimes violent miners strike.

I just about remember this as a child, In was at 11-12 too young to really get it, though the limited understanding I had, was enough to stay in the memory as sinister.

It was a product of the time in that it took what some saw as the post war advance of 'big government' to one possible conclusion. Just like the best sci-fi, of the best, understated British kind, with the pessimistic view of a future inherent in this genre.

But I cannot agree with the idea that this series foretold today, the recent, under the previous government (though some may cite the handling of the 1984/5 miners strike by the government of the day as well) questioning of civil liberties, the expansion of a 'police state', all the CCTV, the DNA database, the (latterly) unsuccessful attempts to lengthen detention of terrorist suspects, were not, unlike in '1990', the systematic work of a very authoritarian regime. Rather it was driven by fear. Fear of hostile media on crime, fear of, if a massive '9/11' style attack happened, being thought of any neglect that allowed an attack. An obsession to meet targets to produce evidence of 'fighting crime'.

Reality check - most CCTV systems in the UK are not controlled by the police, the state in general, rather they are operated on private premises, shops, shopping centres, business parks etc. Central control only exists in the third Bourne movie.

For all that, it does now seem that the coalition are going to roll back many of the controversial changes of the last 15 years or so. Because in a democracy, a change of government can do this. Unlike the world depicted in '1990'.

Still, I would love to see a DVD release, it was a superior series which did make for useful comment of a possible future, some of which did occur, though not so far in the all encompassing way of '1990'.

I remember watching it thinking naaa it could never happen in the U. K., fast forward 43 years we are living the nightmare.