This three part drama about a rabies outbreak in Scotland was based on a novel of the same name by Nigel Slater, and broadcast by the BBC in the summer of 1983. Despite Britain being rabies free since the early 1920s, it's hard to explain the fearful hold the disease still had over the UK in my youth; suitably chilling public information films produced in that period warned you of the horrors posed by importing potentially rabid animals from the continent, whilst it proved to be an ongoing concern for the protagonists in Terry Nation's post-apocalyptic TV series Survivors. So pressing was this threat that comedian Sarah Millican - just a couple of years senior to me - has since recalled how her father taught her as a child the best way to kill a dog, just in case! Tapping into this fear with disturbing aplomb, was The Mad Death.
When a cat owner decides to smuggle her pampered feline into the UK (from France - where else?!) she has no idea of the damage and tragedy she's about to unleash. The cat had got into a scrap with a rabid fox prior to leaving home and it's now a carrier for the zoonotic disease which eventually moves to its first human victim, in the shape of Scottish-based US businessman Tom Siegler (Ed Bishop - yup, not even UFO's Commander Ed Straker is safe here!). Gradually succumbing to the nightmarish death throes of rabies - a fear of water, an inability to tolerate any draught near his throat, weirdly surreal and erotically menacing dreams (though to be fair, that might just be a symptom for Siegler; a randy get who has already passed the disease on to his mistress) - and dies in a hospital isolation room where the cause of death is confirmed as rabies.
A containment plan is immediately launched and the head of the strategy is veterinary officer, Michael Hilliard, played by Richard Heffer. Heffer was a very popular actor at the time, but it's hard to see the reason for his appeal here though. It's really not his fault though (indeed, I have enjoyed several of his performances elsewhere), it's really a flaw in the writing. You see, Hilliard is your typical 1970s disaster movie hero and by that I mean he's an incredibly dated cliche that now shows up the inherent silliness of The Mad Death. He isn't just a divisional veterinary officer and expert on rabies, he's also a Maverick divisional veterinary officer and expert on rabies - one who wears a permanent scowl, is having it off with Dr Anne Maitland (Barbara Kellerman - you can't really blame him can you?) behind her partner, Johnny Dalry (Richard Morant) of the landed gentry class, and is irked that the rabies outbreak has postponed his commencement of a new and cushy job in Brussels. Indeed, so pissed off is he that he initially turns down flat the opportunity to contain an outbreak that has already claimed two lives (one of which is a teenage girl!) because he doesn't feel his brilliance has been properly recognised by the bureaucrats he has had to work for and he's no time for the public relations exercise such a duty requires. In short, Hilliard is a bit of a prick and Heffer really struggles to make him attractive to this viewer at least. It's down to Jimmy Logan's genial, cigar chomping Scottish minister Bill Stanton to convince Hilliard to stay in the UK and, with the help of Maitland and a minor comic relief character in the shape of portly, bumbling Bob Nicol (Paul Brooke), curtail this threat before more deaths occur.
Of course Hilliard's work faces a bigger challenge than locating and destroying all infected animals and that's the horrified reaction his pragmatic and hard-nosed programme from this nation of animal lovers. The greatest challenge to the kind of dick swinging that Hilliard employs? Why, a mad cat lady of course - the distinctly unhinged and eccentric spinster Miss Stonecroft (Brenda Bruce), who lives in a rambling old pile in the sticks and shares it with a host of cats and dogs who are soon infected. Aghast at the quarantine and murder on display, Stonecroft seeks a twisted kind of justice that could not only scupper Hilliard's work but spread the disease even further.
The Mad Death is a good example of the kind of unsettling, leftfield dramas that the BBC would make in the early '80s - the kind that had the tradition, commitment and feel of a Play for Today but would teeter on the edges of horror and science fiction. However, anyone expecting a kind of 'this could happen any day now' chilling experience so expertly crafted in the daddy of all these dramas - Threads - will be disappointed in The Mad Death, though that's not to say that it doesn't occasionally capture something of those knowing moments of character sleepwalking to their doom and a growing sense of dread. In reality, The Mad Death is something of a stablemate of the BBC's excellent adaptation of The Day of the Triffids, the aforementioned Survivors, and that other BBC Scotland drama, The Nightmare Man. There is however a streak of silliness that runs through it that unintentionally puts you more in mind of the great pastiche of such programmes, Garth Marenghi's Darkplace. By the time we reach the concluding part, which features deeply repetitive sequences of dogs being tracked down and shot on the Scottish hillsides, the jealous Dalry debating whether to shoot them or Hilliard, the rival for his affections, and Dr Maitland being kidnapped by Miss Stonecroft, who has gone the full Hitchcock and decided to keep her as her new 'pet', and I was both rolling my eyes and chuckling. Still, there are enough moments of 'look away now' gruesomeness and a PIF style unsettling atmosphere to offset these.
Nostalgia wise, there's much that stands out from The Mad Death and I'm not just referring to a wonderful sequence in which a stray rabid dog finds its way into an East Kilbride shopping centre full of long-ago folded high street names like John Menzies (the store is soon evacuated, lending an eerie zombie apocalypse style atmosphere to the scenes and a touch of mad action as the off-road fan Dr Maitland takes her Land Rover around the deserted precinct!) either; there's a scene at the very start when a dog bites Hilliard's daughter during a day at the beach and no one does a thing about it. Hilliard doesn't approach the dog's owner (who is of course Miss Stonecroft - neither character aware at this point of what lies around the corner and how their fates are ultimately entwined) to rebuke her or raise the matter, it's just taken as a matter of course that, if you go to pet a dog off it's leash, you take the chance of being bitten. I can't imagine that happening now.
Tense, but a little sensationalist and cheesy too, The Mad Death is nevertheless a good example of the kind of drama that British TV doesn't really make any more and an indicator of one of the nation's now near forgotten concerns. It also possesses a genuinely unsettling and disturbing title sequence, which features an unseen child whispering the lyrics to the hymn All Things Bright and Beautiful over images of nature that seem to belong in the 1970s adaptation of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. There's a nice suitably early 80s synth score from Philip Sawyer (formerly of the Spencer Davis Group) used throughout too.
The Mad Death is now available on DVD from Simply Media.
