Episode 3 scriptwriter, and series creator Martin Jameson looks at the roots of the middle episode of Angst!

Once Radio 4 had bought the overall series pitch for Angst!, the task was to nail down the exact content for each episode. Producer Nicolas Jackson and I put together a list of potential themes for our BBC commissioning editor to choose from.  We had five episodes to play with, but twice as many ideas.

The day before we finalised this list, I saw a piece in the paper about a team at Portsmouth University who are developing an enzyme that can ‘eat’ plastic. A distant memory sparked, fizzing between some dusty synapses in the more moth-eaten recesses of my brain. It was February 1970. I was nine years old and for some reason my parents allowed me to stay up and watch the first episode of a scary new eco thriller called Doomwatch. The series opener, written by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis, was called The Plastic Eaters. It contained a terrifying sequence (well, terrifying to a 1970s nine-year-old) featuring a young, dandyish Robert Powell, a plastic eating virus and the interior of a passenger jet turning to goo. Which of those would have been the most terrifying, I shall leave for the reader to decide.

Plastic pollution now exists in a way that is surely beyond Pedler and Davis’s worst nightmares, and so, while I have different things to say, I hope I can be forgiven for using their seminal TV ep as the starting point for my own drama. It genuinely is an affectionate homage, not plagiarism – nor the revenge of a traumatised nine-year-old.

And thus, ‘a plastic eating enzyme gets out of control’ became the one line pitch to Radio 4 that sneaked in under the wire and made it into the series.

However, despite appearances, Plastic is only an eco-thriller as a means to an end. As with all the Angst! stories, we’re much more interested in ‘why’ and ‘how’ of our collective fears. So, while I hope the listener will enjoy the twists and turns of the story within a story within a story, at its heart, Plastic is conceived as a direct response to the absurdities of the series opener, Actors, asking the question: Which is scarier, the idea that we’re controlled by unseen conspiracies… or that there are no conspiracies at all?

Once again, we were blessed with a terrific cast. One of my favourite actresses, Rosie Cavaliero plays air accident investigator Judith Dutton and, after struggling to ‘find a voice’ for Scientist Matthew Treve, a few days into writing the script, the unmistakably ambivalent tones of Reece Shearsmith popped into my imagination. We knew he was prepping for the next series of Inside Number 9 so you can imagine how chuffed we were that he found some time to come and record with us. I think it’s a delicate and surprisingly sympathetic performance. I hope listeners will agree.

Oh, and today’s Easter Egg… a little more obvious, I think.