The Eighties

Edge of Darkness is a British television drama serial, produced by BBC Television in association with Lionheart Television International and originally broadcast in six fifty-five minute episodes in late 1985.
By 1981, Kennedy Martin had written the first draft of what would eventually become Edge of Darkness – at this stage it was called Magnox (a reference to the Magnox type of nuclear reactor) and was about trade union problems in the nuclear industry. The script was given to head of BBC Drama, Jonathan Powell, who encouraged Kennedy Martin to continue its development. The script would go though many changes and revisions before reaching its final form.
It is well-known that writer Troy Kennedy Martin was greatly influenced by the political climate of the time, the aura of secrecy surrounding the nuclear industry and by the implications of the Gaia hypothesis of environmentalist James Lovelock
In 1985 Reagan and Thatcher were in power, the Cold War was ongoing and Col. Muammar Qaddafi was being accused of state-sponsored acts of international terrorism. Public concerns over nuclear war were higher than at any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis and far from believing that 'duck and cover' would succeed in saving our lives, the two previous years had seen The Day After and Threads on television.
On 23 March 1983 President Ronald Reagan announced the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) which, using ground-based and space-based systems, proposed protecting the United States from attack by nuclear missiles. One of the supporters of SDI was one-time US presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche, on whom Kennedy Martin would base the character of Fusion Corporation of Kansas owner Jerry Grogan.
The 1980s was also the time when many people worried about the risks connected with using nuclear power, and they opposed the building of new power stations. They worried about accidents such as those at THREE MILE ISLAND in 1979 and CHERNOBYL in 1986, and about safe ways of getting rid of radioactive waste. They also felt that the governments and the nuclear industry did not always tell the truth about the dangerous effects that nuclear power had on people and the environment. "Edge of Darkness" is the "son" of this culture of secrecy surrounding the UK's policy regarding nuclear power.
The inquiry into the construction of the Sizewell B nuclear power station and the concerns about the safety record of the Sellafield nuclear power plant led Kennedy Martin to conceive International Irradiated Fuels and its chief executive Robert Bennett.
The other major influence was the Gaia hypothesis, that the Earth is a single living system that self-regulates itself to maintain the optimum conditions for life, formulated by climate scientist James Lovelock and popularised in his 1979 book Gaia: A new look at life on Earth. In 1982 and 1984 two science fiction novels by Isaac Asimov, Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth, had the Gaia hypothesis as a central part of the plot. Kennedy Martin couldnīt resist the temptation and used the name GAIA for the environmental organisation Emma Craven was involved in and drew the notion for the black flowers seen at the serial's conclusion from a passage in Lovelock's book that describes a dark marsh grass that grew on the surface of the Earth trapping heat during a time when the planet was too cold to sustain life.
It was within this atmosphere Edge Of Darkness was filmed for the BBC by Martin Campbell.
The mini-series was first broadcast on BBC2 in six 50-minute episodes but due to the instant critical praise it received, it was repeated almost immediately on BBC1 in three 1hr40m episodes and repeated once again shortly after.