“In its paranoia, its gleeful attitude to the apparatus of espionage, it’s bureaucracy and jargon… Edge of Darkness clearly owes a debt to John Le Carré, and no doubt memories of the success of the BBC’s 1979 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy helped get it made. The way in which the series explores some similar territory as Penda’s Fen, and also its possible forebears in film and television, was discussed in an article written by Robert Hanks for the January 2020 issue of the BFI’s Sight & Sound magazine, that was included as an accompaniment to the series’ Blu-ray release: These sections are set in Yorkshire and because of that and their subterranean nature, both literal and figurative they bring to mind the hidden histories and settings of David Peace’s Yorkshire noir Red Riding crime novels, and also his occult (as in hidden) history of the 1984-1985 UK miners’ strike GB84, alongside the intriguing and oddly out of place rant about secret underground bases in Alan Clarke and David Rudkin’s visionary rural drama Penda’s Fen. Back then that really was quite the thing and it’s hard to imagine just how significant and unusual that was in these days of constant broadcast and online repeats of programmes – or to give them their new name, catchup and TV on demand (!) (Thanks to Mat Handley of Pulselovers for pointing out the similarity of those.)Įven though much of the series is set in urban areas, I tend to think of it as being about the landscape, perhaps in part because of the way that the land is shown as containing layered, hidden subterfuges in a system of former mining tunnels below a rural area, where there are some decidedly shady and undeclared experiments taking place. It went on to win multiple awards and due to it’s popularity was re-broadcast only around 6 weeks after it’s original showing, which was the fastest time between original broadcast and repeat in the BBC’s history. To a certain extent the first four episodes are more conventional but during the 5th, and to a degree the 6th, episode the gloves come off and it becomes quite unhinged, almost hallucinatory in parts, possibly reflecting Craven’s descent into obsession, madness, in part due to his unresolved grief. There is a sense of dark forces being at play, which, as I say in Straying from the Pathways, are not supernatural but may be in part preternatural or beyond the realms of the day-to-day world. It is intelligent but also highly entertaining television, where real world, mythical and mystical elements intermingle and brings to mind some form of Arthurian Knight’s quest as Craven attempts to defeat those who possibly threaten the existence of all human life. Heavily influenced by the political climate of the time, it notably explores the aura of secrecy surrounding the nuclear industry and the implications of the Gaia hypothesis of environmentalist and former NASA scientist James Lovelock, which posits that living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic and self-regulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet. His investigations lead him into a murky world of government and corporate cover-ups, and as they proceed his sanity appears to crumble, while it is also slowly revealed that he may well have known his daughter was involved as an activist in that murky world and that he did not stop her. If you don’t know the series, it was written by Troy Kennedy Martin and originally broadcast on the BBC in 1985 and is a mixture of crime drama and eco/political thriller, in which a policeman called Ronald Craven attempts to unravel the truth behind the murder of his daughter. I’ve written about the series elsewhere at A Year In The Country and also in the Straying from the Pathways book but with recently rewatching it on Blu-ray I thought I would revisit it. I seem to find myself collecting/seeking/gathering these kind of things in the way I once did different twelve inch releases and remixes of single once upon a time. Every now and again I check my shelves and I start to realise that something that started out as, say, just one DVD, has started to become a mini-collection.Īlong which lines Edge of Darkness, which I now appear to have on DVD and Blu-ray, alongside a copy of the Radio Times from November 1985 with the series on the cover, John Caughie’s BFI released TV Classics book on the series, with an afterword by its writer Troy Kennedy Martin and the book of his script for the series, which amongst other extras includes a background to the events that preceded the series (I think I used to own the series on VHS as well but I’m not sure).
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