Edge of Darkness promises to be one of the best", wrote Celia Brayfield in The Times, "The central character is played by Bob Peck, who has the gift of looking tragic and intelligent simultaneously. [...] There was humour to lift the gloom and superb characterisation to flesh out the stock situation". Ruth Baumgarten, in The Listener, praised the serial as "a grandiosely ambitious and compelling piece of fiction". Speaking on the BBC's review programme Did You See...?, the writer Sarah Dunant said, "this is a very classy piece of television drama, on all levels, I think on the plot level, I think on the level of emotion and I think stylistically [...] it looks absolutely wonderful, it's shot like a feature film". Not so impressed was Byron Rogers, television critic of The Sunday Times, who initially hailed the series as one that "stayed in the mind and will stay there long [...] because of its portrayal of human grief" but later felt he was "beginning to find Edge of Darkness slightly irritating" and decried the final episode as "an insult to its considerable following". Aware of the critical buzz surrounding the show, BBC1 Controller, Michael Grade, quickly announced that the series would be repeated on BBC1, stating, "I think it will reach a wider audience and it deserves it", and so Edge of Darkness was duly shown, in double episodes, over three consecutive nights between 19 December and 21 December 1985, the fastest time between original broadcast and repeat in the BBC's history. These repeats were accompanied by a disclaimer that the Gaia organisation depicted in the programme was not connected with the Gaia publishing company supported by Prince Philip. It was a move that paid off – Edge of Darkness doubled its audience on BBC1 to 8 million viewers. Cultural significance 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