Atomic smitten

THE most revealing moment in this dreary documentary comes when the blaze which threatens to turn the Lake District into a Chernobyl sized no-go zone is doused by volunteers from the local cinema.

Staggering. Have you been to the Odeon recently? Try asking your average back row teen at American Pie 3 to shove up so you can find your seat without getting a tray of nachos and cheese sauce poured over your head.

Fifties Britain was a different place, of course. Back then tiny Seascale put on a rapturous welcome for thousands of keen, ruddy types who were determined to enter the history books by setting up Windscale, the country's first nuclear plant.

Hailed as Britain's atomic age heroes, the atom men, or simply the atomics, the young scientists rolled into the Cumbrian outpost like The Beatles in tweed jackets. Strident fellows with side partings as rigid as their upper lips were stiff.

One of them, now a pipe smoker in a gentleman's club blazer, recalls: "This is the way science was - you did it because it was fun."

Nuclear physics a barrel of laughs, eh? Must be great at parties this one.

And so our game geeks set to work. "Gung ho, Queen and country stuff", says one. The project was built on a strict budget, to an unrealistic timetable and with a "make do and mend spirit", admits another.

But before you can say "sticky back plastic", they've made a lump of plutonium.

Something goes wrong, inevitably. But that doesn't happen until an hour of the way through this slow, repetitive, boring documentary. Why is it 90 minutes long? A few years ago this would have squeezed into one hour, max. TV bosses obviously think it makes economic sense to screen half-edited schedule-filling behemoths like this - a triple science lesson I could do without at nine o'clock on a Monday night.

Thankfully, the disaster in the show's title doesn't come to pass and a truly horrific catastrophe is avoided when the blaze in Windscale's reactor is tamed.

The rest of the show documents the fall out, political not nuclear - thanks mainly to the punters from the back rows at Singin' in the Rain.

Much better is Extraordinary People: The Boy Who Can Never Grow Old - a profile of Duchenne muscular dystrophy sufferer Stuart Wickison, a 19-year-old who has been told he won't live beyond his mid 20s.

The rare genetic disorder has left him wheelchair bound and completely dependent on 24-hour help from family and the staff at his specialist college, but he's determined to enjoy himself while he can.

"I'm not here to suffer, I'm here to make an impact," he says at the start of the show.

He and his mates - six fellow Duchenne sufferers - have vowed to cram as much excitement into their lives as possible.

'We all have this desire to lose our virginity - to experience the ultimate pleasure," says Stuart, but while he's at home with the books so he can ace his A-levels, his crew are on the pull in Woking town centre, oiling their wheels with Bacardi Breezers.

The real star of the show is his classmate Simon, a tattooed Metallica fan with a peroxide Mohican. He leads the boys into town on his flame red electric wheelchair.

After a few drinks, they fail to pull, fall out, and head for home. The voice-over says they want to live like normal teenagers. From what I remember, you're already there lads.