BRITAIN’S NUCLEAR BOMB: THE INSIDE STORY, BBC4, 9pm
DESPITE telling the story of how Britain created its nuclear bombs, this documentary is often strangely charming. I believe I even chuckled a few times.
It begins with the frantic race to build a nuclear bomb before the Nazis. Britain gladly transported its scientists to America to work on the Manhattan Project, but soon they were frozen out.
America wanted to keep its atomic secrets, so the Brits had to go home and build their own bomb. The government insisted on it, it was the only way for a ruined Britain stay at “the top table”. There had to be a nuclear bomb “with a bloody Union Jack on top of it”.
There are fascinating little anecdotes here, like the fear that the British bomb would fall up rather than down when dropped from a plane, and how its plutonium was transported to London in an old Vauxhall which broke down, with the car having to wait for assistance with its box of deadly radioactivity glowing quietly on the backseat.
MADELEINE MCCANN: 10 YEARS ON, BBC1, 9pm
EVERY now and then a story pops up in the news claiming exciting new leads in the search for Madeleine – but nothing ever comes of it.
At this late date, 10 years on from her disappearance in Portugal, can these stories be based on anything sturdy, or is it just an attempt to keep her in the public eye and flog a few newspapers?
This documentary is presented by Richard Bilton of Panorama, who has been covering the case from the start, so he has a depth of knowledge that the tabloids and the increasing wave of McCann trolls and blogging conspiracy theorists lack.
Bilton returns to Praia da Luz to assess the different methods, directions and conclusions of the Portuguese and British investigations, and meets some of the men who have been questioned by the UK detectives.
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