Adrian Sweeney I found this very watchable, in fact rather more-ish. Dystopian SF thriller series made in 1977 and set in 1990. In a run-down Britain a lot like the real late 70s extrapolated, journalist Edward Woodward tries to stop a nasty and repressive government becoming a flat-out totalitarian one and has a Pimpernel-style sideline in helping people escape abroad. Parts still strike a chord and raise a cynical smile today ('to safeguard freedom' MPs are exempt from the draconian laws inflicted on the rest of the nation, for example.) Connoisseurs of retro-futurism will enjoy things like a car-phone the size of a small fruit machine but the landscape is largely grey and 70s brutalist (and the phone is in an Austin Princess.) There are some good future-shock jokes - 'Oxfam are raising funds for us in India' and we've sold off the Crown Jewels (both only a matter of time.) One thing they got vastly wrong but which must have been a daring act of lese-majeste is that there is a King on the throne only 13 years in the future. Woodward and friends are likeable and the situations are interesting. There's wiggle-room and a vestige of due process in the repression; things are just short of Orwellian, iron fist in velvet glove, in a way that also rings true: fascism (actually extreme socialism) with a saccharine smile in a polite British face. It's how it would happen or some might say did. The hero has a Deep Throat mole in the civil service, and his would-be squeeze is a woman high up in the security apparatus who may be trying to be human or may be using him for her own ends; this could have been schlocky or camp but their relationship is an entertaining mix of the cerebral and the playfully flirtatious. It's not just them who have charm and humour and appear to like each other, something missing from the dead-eyed robots on TV now. We care about even minor characters; as a result things get awfully tense at times. Modern TV drama commissioners, please take note. (Also that there's a whole universe of untapped possibilities outside child abuse, terminal disease and serial killing.)That said, it gets darker as it goes; Woodward has some splendid victories but is sometimes powerless to help people, and ultimately it's less an adventure series than a shrewd and at times pretty grim study of the misuse of the levers of power - often 'soft' power - all the ways that freedom can die without people actually being shot (no need to imprison people when you can stop them from working; if you don't toe the line your wife and kids will suffer too) and how people variously knuckle under, go along to get along or courageously and self-sacrificingly resist. Anyone living in communist Eastern Europe would have recognised all of it; and similar pressures are to some degree still at work here, now. There are nice touches such as the surveillance room in the baddy HQ looking like a Benthamite panopticon, or a haunting moment dramatizing how poison in the political world seeps into our private ones when a dissident neglects his child because he's obsessively watching the news.

hamlet-16 This series about an authoritarian Britain very much in the model of 1984 was timely in 1978 but even more so today.With the overwhelming presence of CCTV, attempts to control the internet and the reluctance of the UK government to abide rulings that it destroy DNA samples of innocent persons picked up by the police but never charged or found not guilty in court cases and numerous reductions in civil rights because of "terrorism" etc. the scenario at the heart of "1990" is well and truly with us.No wonder this series is not available on DVD ...the powers that be would be terrified of it!

aejm I remember this one as a kid as well.It was very creepy .. I remember in hindsight being totally terrified by this one ... in retrospect I still don't quite understand what my parents were thinking, letting me watch all of this type of stuff as a kid ...Some of my most vivid memories are of shows like this and Secret Army etc.1990 as anyone reading this will know, is based on 1984, in which Edward Woodward plays a journalist. Unfortunately, I cant remember exactly what happens, although I still have a vivid memory of some of the scenes: Edward Woodward (Kyle I believe the character was called) meeting his informant in a little beat up car; the guy in charge fleeing when the government starts breaking down.They do bring these programs out on DVD eventually. Capital City is out now, and they have recently released the 1977 BBC adaptation of Dracula in the US (I also saw that as a kid !!!). Hopefully we will see it soon.

Tim "1990", along with "The Guardians", represents great British "political" sci fi from the 1970s. I heartily agree with the previous commentator who looked forward to a "1990" DVD reissue. Let's hope they do a double with "The Guardians".The real innovation of the show was not the police state future conjured up, that's been done before, but the fictional dictatorship's use of "Authorised Systematic Harassment". This amounted to essentially the use of all the mundane irritating rules and regulations we are familiar with today, in a systematic, targeted and tyrannical way.1990 was a lot more innovative and chilling than modern movie treatments like "V".