“Only radioactive waste?”

Dr Del Shaw (Ian Bannen) is a member of Doomwatch, the trendiest of all government agencies (in 1972), set up to combat pollution wherever it may be (so clearly a runaway success, then).

He’s on his way to Balfe, an island off the south coast of England, where strange things are afoot. And ahand. And particularly aface. Although more of that later. We already know that the kids aren’t alright on Balfe – a dead one has been carried through a village in the opening credits.

But don’t worry, Dr Shaw will get to the bottom of things, if he has to wear every knitted fisherman’s cap he owns in order to do so.

You’ve got to admire a man who chooses his wardrobe based on his transportation and eventual destination. Perhaps he thought that the frankly rather camp hats, chunky knitwear and shapeless wellies would enamour him to the famously reclusive islanders. But if he did, he was wrong.

He may be “only staying for a day”, but it’s a day too long for this miserable bunch of low-browed individuals, who give him a shunning and general shouting-at worthy of any 1960s Cornwall-set Hammer film. So he does what any rational person would do in this situation – he starts shouting back.

When that doesn’t work, the now-royally-pissed-off Shaw tries the police station, where he’s told about a boarding house nearby (he’s just been told by everyone else there’s nowhere for visitors to stay on the island). What’s more, he’s not the only guest at the boarding house – say hello to Miss Brown (Judy Geeson), another outsider, but one the locals like because she’s the school teacher. Despite local approval, Brown is nearly as angry as Shaw, the pair immediately not hitting it off in a way that suggests “badly handled meet-cute”. Perhaps it was his opening gambit, which has to go down as the least sexy chat-up line in the history of cinema (“Is the food always so awful on this island?”).

Never mind the food, Shaw – take a look out the window, because there’s upsets a-plenty going on around the village. Old men are being led forcibly up the road, there’s shady figures lurking behind every tree, everyone seems to be suffering from a similar facial disfigurement (you might call it Bannenitis, given the makeup has the unfortunate effect of making them look a bit like the leading man), and it feels like every attic has some moaning unfortunate locked up in it.

In case you were wondering, Shaw has been despatched to the island by Doomwatch (“The pollution people?” asks Brown. “Anti-pollution, I hope” he replies with a grin, doubling down on the shit flirting) to investigate a potential leak into the sea of some kind.

He continues his investigation by taking photos of the villagers in the street without asking, which goes down as well as you’d expect. In fact, it goes down about as well as you’d expect such behaviour to go down anywhere, at any time, not just on an island where people are suffering from a disfiguring disease. But there’s something quite funny about how affronted he is by their perfectly reasonable reaction to his snap-happy shenanigans.

In between visits back to Doomwatch HQ (where everyone’s doing a fantastic job of standing around in white coats with clipboards, doing “science”), Shaw finds the island more and more unwelcoming, despite his protestations that he’s only trying to help these ungrateful bastards. He gets attacked by a dog (overdubbed by Bannen growling “get out of it!”), is belted over the head with a stick, and is consistently shouted at by a clearly not up-for-it Brown.

But Shaw is not a man to allow any of this shit to distract him from the job at hand, which is now to understand why the fish the islanders eat as their main diet are so massive, and whether this might have something to do with the disease from which many of them are suffering.

Before you can ask questions such as “is it right for an anti-pollution organisation to fly everywhere in helicopters?” and “if the fish around Balfe are so freakishly big, why aren’t they selling them to the mainland?”, Shaw has discovered that, yes, pollution is to blame. Pollution mixed with dumped radioactive waste.

Dumped radioactive waste on its own being absolutely tickety-boo, obviously.

Yup, this is the first ecologically-themed film where something is bad because it doesn’t register on a Geiger counter. Go figure.

Poor Shaw is now on an emotional rollercoaster as we head towards a thoroughly downbeat ending. On the one hand, he really enjoys his rides in the helicopter (aw, look at his little lumpy face). On the other, he gets pelted by potatoes when it turns out his doctoring skills don’t actually extend to anything medical. Then it looks like he might actually be thawing the frosty Miss Brown. But meanwhile, those locals are getting more and more aggressive and table-upending.

Doomwatch is a proper oddity – there’s some remarkably timely messages in there, but they’re hidden somewhat by the early 70s fashions (belted cardigan, anyone? No?) and a meandering plot which, in the end, doesn’t go anywhere. But it’s always fun watching Ian Bannen lose his shit, and this at least happens quite regularly throughout.