Mesmeric, chilling ... an atomic tale that was truly mind-altering

One of the unintended consequences of sending so many BBC crews to the Glastonbury Festival this year may be that, tripping off their heads in Somerset, a cluster of TV producers hit on a psychedelic history format.

The current buzzword in broadcasting is HD, or high-definition. But

Atomic: Living In Dread And Promise (BBC4) wasn’t so much HD as LSD.

This month marks the 70th anniversary of the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and nagasaki in Japan. Apparently in a chemical haze, the brains at BBC4 decided the best way to commemorate this wartime tragedy was to chop up government information films, newsreels, B-movies and stop-motion science footage, and hurl the fragments at the screen.

There was no narration, just a spaced- out prog-rock soundtrack written for the documentary by the Scottish band Mogwai. They sounded like Pink Floyd but without the guitar solos or the vocals — two reasons, perhaps, why Mogwai get asked to do TV instead of international stadium tours.

Like a student smoking pot, the clips veered from wide-eyed earnestness to Pythonesque giggles at first. We watched amoebas dividing and multiplying under the microscope, while a schoolmarmish voice warned us that, ‘mishandled, nuclear fission can be very dangerous’.

Then a man rode by on a bicycle and threw himself off the road into some bracken to avoid being hurt by a nuclear blast. A moment later, an impossibly young Michael Aspel was reading the news and telling us about ‘civil defence’, which was Sixties government jargon for what to do if the Bomb dropped.

Gradually, this whirl of halfconnected pictures became quite mesmerising. The juxtaposed snippets told their own story.

A decent post-war chap with a pipe and cardigan was painting his windows with whitewash, while his wife built a nuclear bomb shelter by leaning a door against a wall and stacking it with sandbags.

The picture cut to the aftermath of ‘Little Boy’, the uranium bomb that fell on Hiroshima. not one brick was left upon another. We didn’t need a voice- over to point out that whitewash and sandbags wouldn’t do the trick.

The most moving segment focused on the Aldermaston anti-nuclear marches, when crowds of ordinary Britons — factory workers, teachers, housewives pushing prams — hiked 52 miles from the Atomic Weapons Research Institute in Berkshire to Trafalgar Square.

One elderly man was sobbing as he told the camera he’d marched in support of the General Strike in 1926 and would never forgive himself if he didn’t march again, to save the world for his grandchildren. Half a century on, it is oddly touching to see a political demo that wasn’t just an excuse for looting — thousands of people who believed in something more than smashing a shop window and swiping a pair of trainers.

This hallucinatory TV format could work well in other genres. BBC1’s nonsensical action-drama The Interceptor, for instance, would have made a lot more sense if it were cut into a million bits and glued together at random, with the dialogue replaced by synth music.

Another series trying out oddball approaches to documentary is Experimental (C4), in which scientist Tim Shaw and stuntman Buddy Munro attempt to explain the physics behind viral video clips on the internet.

Trouble is, they used up their best stunts in episode one, especially when they played tennis on a biplane’s wings, and built a flying saucer powered by fire-hoses.

This week it was another goofy trick with a hose, and a race against a London Undeground train, the kind of challenge Top Gear was doing years ago.

The duo are striving for the same sort of laddish banter that Clarkson and Co perfected. It isn’t convincing: Tim refers to Buddy as his ‘payload’, which is a nerdish way of implying that, if the stuntman gets hurt, the scientist won’t really care.

But unless you’ve got a physics degree, it’s not a joke to make you howl with laughter. And, if you do have a physics degree, you must know all this stuff about forces and velocity already.