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The Airzone Solution When was it made? 1993 Who made it? BBV What format was it on? Initially VHS thought
Reeltime Pictures. Then a high street release and finally a DVD release in
recent years. Familiar faces Jon Pertwee, Peter Davison, Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, Nicola Bryant, Michael Wisher, Nick Briggs, Alan Cumming and (apparently) Gary Russell.
Familiar names It was written by Nick Briggs and directed/produced by Bill Baggs. The music was by Alistair Lock.
The blurb
In a nutshell… Peter Davison is making a documentary questioning the practices and effectiveness of Airzone – the company the government has contracted to clean up our air. For this is "five minutes in the future" and pollution masks are the norm for anyone wanting to go outside. The weather forecasts spend as much time on toxic levels as they do on clouds and a sleazy government has entrusted the private sector to clean up the mess they caused.
But Davison’s character
dies during a fact finding trip to Airzone’s headquarters – a fact which
is felt through the ether by McCoy and Baker. Suddenly, the cuddly
weatherman is transformed into an anti-Airzone environmentalist on a
mission. Is it any good? It is very good. Very good indeed. It was shot on a tiny budget – and most of that must’ve gone on the impressive cast – but you wouldn’t know it. Shooting on location in real offices and real houses gives it an authenticity which spending money on sets probably wouldn’t have achieved. The story is strong – big business profiting at the expense of the nation’s health and wellbeing is something that has been done before but it is done very well. It’s so well thought out – all they need to convey the pollution covering our towns and cities are a few cyclists’ masks. Why use special effects when conventional props can be so much more effective? Briggs, through economy of characters, reduces the government, the Airzone Corporation and the secret service to just three people and they are so well cast that the play doesn’t seem as lop sided as it might. Because you essentially have four lead good guys (the four Doctors) plus Nicola Bryant.
Killing Davison’s character off after ten minutes and restricting Pertwee to cameo walk-ons means the bulk of the story is left to Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy. The latter is very up and down – much as he was in Doctor Who – and ranges from very good to very bad, often within a single sentence. Colin Baker on the other hand shines magnificently. He transitions from cuddly, doesn’t-take-anything-too-seriously weatherman to a man prepared to kill in cold blood to get answers in a series of entirely believable shades.
The only real weakness in the plot is the way Davison, McCoy and Baker are psychically linked. McCoy’s character gives some kind of an explanation but his ramblings about nature "finding a way" don’t really convince. I think the gist is that the earth is facing such severe threats that it somehow becomes sentient, picks three people more or less at random, lets one of them die and then allows the dead one to send cryptic messages to the other two. I know some corners had to be cut to tell the story in a shade over an hour and I’m willing to overlook it as the rest was so good but it was a weak device which would’ve scuppered a lesser production. There are also some
fantastic retro computer screens on display for those of us who like to
marvel at how primitive things were before Windows 95 took over the world.
Anything for the BBC to object to? Not the BBC, no. It doesn’t go anywhere near anything even vaguely Doctor Who-ey (with the exception of Nicola Bryant playing yet another character called "Miss Brown"). Viewers might be a little surprised to hear several "shits", the odd "bollocks" and one or two other naughty words. They are also a couple of rather disturbing images involving Colin Baker and nudity but that’s about all.
Did it help fill the void? Released in 1993 – the thirtieth anniversary year – this became almost the de facto 30th Anniversary Story after the collapse of the Dark Dimension. And while it isn’t quite that (and is almost certainly better than the Dark Dimension would’ve turned out) it is Pertwee, Davison, Baker and McCoy saving Britain from an evil corporation just like the old days. Pertwee’s old days at least. And McCoy's shirt is a nice tribute to the 1970s.
Would it work on TV? It would – the production values are very high, the story would engage a television audience and there isn’t any continuity to put people off. The themes are more or less valid today. We may have moved on from poisonous air to worry about carbon emissions – because the public can only be trusted with one environmental concern at a time and it must be dumbed down to a catchphrase like "carbon footprint" or "the ozone layer" – but everyone breathes and everyone knows what it is like in a busy town centre on a warm day. One or two of Nicola’s outfits are a bit too 90s and the thing would almost certainly have to be filmised but there isn’t any obvious reason why this couldn’t go out on one of the less shallow BBC channels today. Back in 1993 it wouldn’t have looked out of place as a primetime BBC2 play of the week.
Production 5/5 Entertainment 4/5 Whoishness 1/5 Overall 4/5
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