EDGE OF DARKNESS

I've been watching again the old 80's British drama series Edge of Darkness this weekend.  Five episodes I think. 5 hours!

I loved it the first time round and again this time. I first saw it about 15 years ago, when I got it on DVD after reading about it. I was a latecomer.

It was first shown on British TV in the winter of 1985, an appropriately dark season for the series. It was then shown all over the world so you may have seen it.

Interestingly its original working title was Magnox, a word you don't hear much anymore. Like Fast Breeder and Meltdown, its a word from a different time when the subject was hot.

Edge of Darkness is a nuclear thriller, an eco-drama. It concerns the nuclear power industry in the UK in the 1980's and its links to American nuclear companies. 

At the heart of it is the relationship between the main protagonist played by the late lamented Bob Peck and his daughter, initially alive and then dead. She's shot point blank on the doorstep.

Her murder and her father's compulsion to solve it drives the series on towards its dramatic conclusion.

For fans of intrigue and espionage it has everything: a dangerous business, dodgy unions, damaged coppers, the CIA, Scotland Yard, MI5 and industrious thorough investigation leading to the ultimate truth come what may.

The mini-series was later remade into an American movie in 2010 starring Mel Gibson but I haven't seen that.

It won't have spawned any merchandise, comics or any toys as it wasn't for kids really, but Edge of Darkness was borne out of that same late cold war paranoia that also gave us The Watchmen comics in 1986 and other dystopian visions like the Nature of the Beast in 1988, all of which revealed that perhaps there was something rotten at the very core of the Nineteen Eighties.

Nothings changed there then!

Have you seen Edge of Darkness readers?