The harrowing truth behind Britain’s nuclear bomb tests
When the nuclear explosion came, an unlucky 13 minutes into A British Guide to the End of the World (BBC Four), it was vividly described. “A white flash seemed to come through the back of my head,” recalled one eyewitness. “I could see the bones in my fingers. Heat shot through my body. It wouldn’t have taken much more for me to combust.” “It was like the creation of another sun,” added another. “An evil, angrylooking thing.”
Opening the channel’s Cold War season, this outstanding film in the venerable Arena strand charted the UK’S mission to secure its status as the world’s third nuclear power.
It began with the muscularly named “Operation Grapple”, a series of hydrogen bomb tests in the South Pacific between 1957 and 1958. The troops shipped there were mostly conscripted national servicemen who thought they’d arrived in paradise – until they had to sign the Official Secrets Act ahead of a live detonation.
Self-shot footage showed them shirtless in the tropical sun, fishing, playing football and setting up a tiki bar on the beach. This innocence was about to be shattered. Officers and indigenous people were moved off
Christmas Island but the squaddies were left out in the open as human guinea pigs.
The blast incinerated everything for miles around. Glistening black rain fell as they began their clean-up, still not wearing protective clothing. They waded through water covered with “a crust of dead birds” and ate fish they found floating in the ocean – only later realising they were radioactive.
Focus shifted to the home front and our planning for an event that thankfully never came. This was a story of technical innovation, pluck and paranoia, punctuated by moments of typically British black humour. When a flat-capped man on the street was asked about his Armageddon preparations, he shrugged: “You’ve had it, ain’t ya? Them bombs ain’t messing about.”
The documentary was harrowing, yet stylishly made. Unafraid of silence – a rare quality on TV nowadays – director Dan Vernon let the hitherto classified footage do the talking. When voices were heard, it eschewed conventional narration in favour of first-person testimony. Split-screen images and a discordant soundtrack conveyed the era’s unsettling chaos.
The story had a heart-rending twist in its tail, as the Christmas Island soldiers revealed what happened after they returned home: trauma, infertility, tumours and children born with rare forms of cancer. A poignant end to a powerful film which was devastating in every sense.
Was it “end of the world” theme night? Is this a sign of impending apocalypse? Eerily similar of title but starkly contrasting in content was The End of the F***ing
World (Channel 4), the second series of the Bafta-winning black comedy about two star-crossed teenage runaways. Its 2017 debut run was well-received on Channel 4 but became a full-blown international hit when it streamed on Netflix.
In a comeback double bill, we rejoined the story two years on and met a new character, Bonnie (a brilliantly blank performance from Naomi Ackie, impassive but somehow expressive). It was audacious to dedicate an entire episode to a stranger but we soon discovered that this nihilistic outsider had a mysterious connection to protagonist Alyssa (Jessica Barden).
The second episode found Alyssa rebuilding her life in the Forest of Dean following the shooting of her lover James (Alex Lawther) – until a bullet with her name on it (no, literally) arrived in the post.
Meanwhile, gunned-down James was disappointed to find that he’d survived the cliffhanger. “It was a fitting end,” he deadpanned. “A doomed love story. A perfect tragedy. And then I didn’t die.”
Writer Charlie Covell and director Lucy Forbes conjured up a distinctive fictional world, combining retro flourishes (brown Ercol interiors, torch song soundtrack, references to Polaroids and fondue) with a sense of millennial angst and the stylised storytelling of a graphic novel. Not surprising, as it was originally based on cult comics by American author Charles Forsman.
The result was bleak but dry, wry and hopelessly romantic, like Badlands relocated to Seventies suburbia. The series is stripped across the schedules for four nights, promising to surprise and beguile as much as the first.
A British Guide to the End of the World ★★★★★ The End of the F***ing World ★★★★