Just as the out-of-time hero is expressing his disgust with the appalling world, the Vice-President in charge of Los Angeles (Barry Sullivan) lays into him and points out reasonably that this future is the fault of his generation who drove gas-guzzlers and held conferences on pollution without actually doing anything about the problem that has driven the few survivors underground. It’s hard to see how else something like this could have been fit into a drama strand in 1971 (or even now), but Wylie takes care to give the prophetic warning some bite that makes it more than a surreal dream. It must have been a disorienting watch for viewers at the time, though the despairing fall of the plot – the hero is doomed to be crushed by the world of the future – is a strong indicator that a reset button will be pressed in the finale, which finds Howard waking up from his detailed dream and a Wizard of Oz bit with Lewis as a contemporary cop. Made about the same time George Lucas was working on the feature-length version of THX 1138, with which it shares some themes, LA 2019 also has parallels with the dystopian look of Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green. Barry, Spielberg’s first leading man, later had a significant bit-role in his War of the Worlds. This was Steven Spielberg’s first feature-length TV work, and it’s either a testimony to his golden boy rep that he was given a plum show over more experienced hands or a fluke decision to dump the weird script on the kid in the corner in the hope that he might understand it. He blacks out in 1971 but is woken up in 2017 – by Geoffrey Lewis in a gas-mask – and hauled into the underground complex which has replaced the city after a global eco-doom that began when pollution killed off all the algae in the sea, creating a shroud of toxic gas that reduced the Earth’s population to about three million souls living in dystopian bunkers with child-rearing (and post-natal abortion) out of Brave New World, eternal surveillance out of Nineteen Eighty-Four and a bunch of satirical-nightmarish new licks from veteran s-f writer Philip Wylie (who scripted this ‘very special episode’ of the ninety-minute contemporary drama series, The Name of the Game).

Magazine publisher Glenn Howard (Gene Barry), driving back from a conference on the threat of pollution, is overcome by smog in the hills outside Los Angeles, and drives off the road.

Krokodil Tears by Jack Yeovil