"Edge of Darkness" tapped into a cultural zeitgeist of concern about nuclear power and nuclear warfare in the early to mid 1980s. In 1980, current affairs programme "Panorama" broadcast "If The Bomb Drops", a documentary that examined how well prepared Britain was for a nuclear attack; in 1983, "The Day After" an American TV movie about a nuclear war aired, as well as seeing the release of the feature film "WarGames", showing the 'no winner' outcome of nuclear war; in 1984, the BBC broadcast "On the Eighth Day", a documentary about the effects of a nuclear winter and "Threads", a drama about a nuclear attack on Sheffield while 1985 saw the first screening of Peter Watkins' nuclear war television film "The War Game", banned on television since 1965. "Edge of Darkness" also rode on a wave of preoccupation with the secretive nature of the State in both fact (e.g. "This Week'"s “Death on the Rock” (1988) about the deaths of three Provisional IRA members in Gibraltar and "Secret Society" (1987) about undisclosed matters of public interest which led to the sacking of BBC Director General Alasdair Milne) and fiction (e.g. the films "Defence of the Realm" (1985) and "The Whistle Blower" (1987) and the television serials "A Very British Coup" (1988) and "Traffik" (1989)).