Humanity has faced destruction in a thousand increasingly horrible ways in print and on screen since John Wyndham's fine novel, The Day of the Triffids, was published in 1951. Most recently and cataclysmically, the world (with the inestimable help of Tom Cruise) fights an apparently impossible battle against the tripods in Steven Spielberg's film, War of the Worlds.

This 1981 BBC TV production of Wyndham's take on humanity in peril, newly released here on DVD by ABC and Roadshow Entertainment, appears thoughtful and almost apologetically low-key by comparison. Wyndham's chief protagonist, Bill Masen, played here with slightly bemused stoicism by John Duttine, is no Cruise.

But Masen at least knows what he's up against: he's worked as a biologist on a triffid farm and has firsthand experience of this plant's astonishing attributes, including its potentially lethal sting. When, in a spectacular display of celestial pyrotechnics one night, almost all of humanity is struck blind, Masen is in hospital with his eyes bandaged, in the final stages of recovery from a triffid sting.

Masen discharges himself into a London that, curiously, has become near-deserted overnight and meets a variety of other characters who have, for one reason or another, kept their sight.

Emma Relph plays socialite Josella Playton for whom, after some rude initial surprises, the catastrophe is liberating. Masen's rival, Jack Coker (played with engaging self-assurance by Maurice Colbourne), always has sound reasons for voicing a dissenting opinion.

With society destroyed, much of the plot deals with the differing ways in which groups try to rebuild it: anarchy is on the doorstep, but further away are feudalism, totalitarianism and different democracies, modified according to group morality.

Wyndham's book is deservedly a classic and this 1981 BBC production is faithful to the text.

Today's viewer might wearily anticipate the egg-carton-and-kitchen-foil approach to set construction and special effects typical of the 1980s Doctor Who, but there's none of that here. Even the triffids look plausibly orchid like.

This reviewer found the background music a dated irritation, but the real annoyance is that the program is presented in its original six 25- minute episodes, complete with opening and closing credits for each, so there's cause for plenty of fumbling with the remote control during the 157-minute program.

About the man

British science fiction author John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris was born the son of a barrister on 10 July 1903. After trying a number of careers, including farming and the law, he found his niche in advertising and writing short stories. His first major novel, The Day of the Triffids, was published in 1951 and introduced the disaster theme that characterised much of his writing - and established a link with an earlier master of the genre, H.G. Wells.

Wyndham's most productive period came in the 1950s, at the height of the Cold War, and his stories reflected some of the anxieties of the time, when humanity's destruction at its own hand seemed imminent.

Wyndham has absorbed his share of criticism, with science fiction author Christopher Priest characterising him as "the master of the middle-class catastrophe", while Brian Aldiss said some of Wyndham's books were "totally devoid of ideas". For his part, Wyndham avoided what he described as "the adventures of galactic gangsters", preferring instead to present the citizens of an idealised village-green Britain with apocalyptic challenges that invariably posed intriguing moral dilemmas.

Carnivorous plants were the cause of change in The Day of the Triffids, sea monsters in The Kraken Wakes, physically perfect children able to combine their brain power in The Midwich Cuckoos.

Before his death in 1969 Wyndham combined his wealth of names into a variety of pseudonyms, including Lucas Parkes and John Beynon.

Altogether, he wrote 10 novels and a dozen collections of short stories.