The shock of 1974's Watergate scandal not only brought down a president, but
brought home to the American public the potential for abuse in the political
system. Watergate led to a rash of Hollywood conspiracy movies - notably The
Parallax View (1974), Three Days of the Condor (1974) and Winter Kills (1979) -
which tapped into newly unleashed anxieties about unharnessed State power. This
flowering of the conspiracy genre found an echo a decade later in Britain, with
the feature film Defence of the Realm (d. David Drury, 1985) and television
series like Edge of Darkness and A Very British Coup responding to widespread
political unease and cold war anxieties. But as is the nature of conspiracies,
the story neither starts nor stops there.
While the American conspiracy narrative borrows from the films noirs of the 1940s and '50s, the roots of the British variant can be found in Alfred
Hitchcock, particularly his The 39 Steps (1935) and Sabotage (1936), and in
wartime films like Went the Day Well? (d. Alberto Cavalcanti, 1943). But whereas
those films identified dark forces - enemy spies, anarchists or Nazis - seeking
to undermine the British State, in later conspiracy drama the dark forces are
those of the State itself. In this respect, the genre's true ancestor is George
Orwell's vision of a totalitarian Britain, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Nigel Kneale's
television adaptation of Orwell's novel (BBC, 1954) caused one of the medium's
early controversies for its brutality, and became the template for a series of
dramas imagining a dystopian Britain in which totalitarianism has overturned
democracy.
In 1971's The Guardians (ITV, 1971), the backlash against a Britain in social
and economic freefall has led to a rightwing dictatorship backed by a brutal
paramilitary force. The Donati Conspiracy (BBC, 1973), and its sequel, State of
Emergency (BBC, 1975) featured a similarly authoritarian regime, this time under
direct military leadership. 1990 (BBC, 1977), as its title suggests, was more
explicitly Orwellian, describing a bureaucratic dictatorship characterised by
restrictions on freedom of information and the press, overseen by the oppressive
Public Control Department.
In these 1970s serials, the conspiracy is external to the state, an
underground rebel movement struggling for liberty, even if, as in The Guardians
and The Donati Conspiracy, the methods the rebels employ are explicitly shown as
terrorist. This reflects a decade which saw the leftist activism of the 1960s
transmute into more aggressive forms with terrorist cells like Germany's
Baader-Meinhof gang, Italy's Brigate Rosse and Britain's own Angry Brigade. In
Nineteen Eighty-Four, the power of the state is so absolute that the rebel
movement is entirely fictitious, a ruse to unmask potential dissidents.
The 'dystopian' branch of conspiracy drama shares characteristics with
science-fiction, with a future setting, a preoccupation with the technology of
control, and an extrapolation of present concerns (Kneale's adaptation of
Nineteen Eighty-Four explains that the rule of Big Brother follows a nuclear
conflict; in the 1970s serials, authoritarianism is a response to trade union
militancy, social unrest and the fear of anarchy). Half in this camp, too, was
The Prisoner (ITV, 1967-68). Fantastical and technology-obsessed though it was,
however, The Prisoner was - apparently - set in the present, and depicted not a
dictatorship but a ruthlessly efficient apparatus of oppression beneath the
veneer of democracy.
By the 1980s, however, the concerns of left-leaning television dramatists
were more immediate, specifically an aggressively right-wing and seemingly
immovable Conservative government under the premiership of Margaret Thatcher. A
series of political controversies, notably surrounding the trials of
whistle-blowing civil servants Clive Ponting and Sarah Tisdall and the attempted
(and partially successful) suppression of investigative journalist Duncan
Campbell's Secret Society series (BBC, 1986), exposed a growing culture of
Whitehall secrecy and an erosion of civil liberties which compounded existing
concerns about the Cold War and nuclear power. Such anxieties demanded a more
realistic expression, with a clearly defined present-day setting.
Continuing the techno-angst of earlier dramas, Bird of Prey (BBC, 1982) and
In the Secret State (BBC, tx. 10/3/1985) explored the arrival of the computer
age, with its vast potential for fraud, surveillance and 'counter-subversion'.
Both dramas presented archetypes of super-patriotism working within the inner
core of the State but quite prepared to undermine both government and citizenry
to pursue their visions of a greater Britain. A Very British Coup (Channel 4,
1988) took this idea further still, with the forces of the Establishment -
rightwing press, senior civil service, intelligence services - massing to
confront and even overthrow an elected left-wing government determined to carry
out a programme of unilateral nuclear disarmament.
Nuclear power - civil, not military - was the driving force of Edge of
Darkness (BBC, 1985), perhaps the definitive conspiracy drama and one of the key
television series of the 1980s. Troy Kennedy Martin's ambitious script captured
the decade's key concerns - State secrecy, the British-American 'special
relationship', unfettered global capitalism, the risk of an environmental
catastrophe - in a deeply satisfying package with strong mythic undertones.
As Thatcher gave way to Major, political conspiracy drama became less
fashionable, although 1992's BSE thriller, Natural Lies (BBC), indicated that
environmental destruction was a growing concern. But in 2003, the six-part
thriller State of Play (BBC) proved there was still life in the genre. With a
plot revolving around the multinational oil trade, political corruption, murder
and sexual intrigue, State of Play looked back to Edge of Darkness while
remaining determinedly modern and demonstrating that the New Labour government
could inspire the same kind of anxieties as its Conservative predecessors.
Mark Duguid
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