One Night In Bhopal (BBC1); Bruce Lee: Martial Arts Superstar (five): IT was the world's most devastating industrial disaster, but how much do you really know about the poisonous gas leak 20 years ago in the Indian city of Bhopal that killed 8,000 and left over 200,000 injured?

I suspect most people's knowledge extends no further than those basic facts already outlined. This documentary was valuable in filling in the gaps of what appeared to have been an accident waiting to happen, by using archive footage, reconstructions and survivors' testimonies to tell the complete story.

The tragedy happened two decades ago but the effects are still being felt. Since then, thousands of people have died of gas-related illnesses. Currently, one person dies every day from the effects of the gas.

Union Carbide, the American corporation that ran the plant, has never accepted responsibility for the disaster. The company did, however, fund a hospital in the Indian city. Some might consider they owe the people of Bhopal rather more.

The US multi-national, which had hundreds of factories in 40 countries, opened the Bhopal plant to produce insecticide, or "medicine for plants" as the Hindi translation put it.

It was made with "liquid dynamite", a chemical called M.I.C., which was fine when cool but not when hot or exposed to water.

Most alarming was the complete lack of emergency procedures for the thousands of Indians living in the shanty towns close to the plant. A medical officer who raised fears about safety measures had her concerns ignored.

The problem was compounded when the company introduced cost-cutting measures to combat poor sales of the insecticide. A third of the workers were fired, production scaled down and safety checks made less frequently.

That night in 1984, four of the key safety systems failed and clouds of poisonous gas were sent over the sleeping city. The result was chaos and panic. Nobody knew whether to shelter indoors or run for their lives. Whole families were wiped out, babies crushed to death and many bodies never identified. Victims of the gas continue to suffer from poor co-ordination, memory loss, paralysis, partial blindness and impaired immune systems.

The programme also revealed that a few months before the Bhopal tragedy, an internal safety report for the American M.I.C. plant warned of just such a calamity.

Like Bhopal, Bruce Lee is a name that people recognise without actually knowing much about him. We know him as the Asian martial arts star who had a international hit with Enter The Dragon but died young.

Bruce Lee: Martial Arts Superstar traced the rise to fame of "the little dragon", who'd made 20 Chinese films before he was 18. It also told, surprisingly, that he was the Hong Kong cha-cha champion of 1958.

He fought against tradition by revealing martial arts secrets to outsiders and changing the face of action movies. The tragedy was that he collapsed and died before the film that would make his name in Hollywood, Enter The Dragon, opened in cinemas.

Published: 02/12/2004