Talking Pictures TV are showing the Champions just now. I haven't seen most of those episodes since they were shown originally and it's great fun to watch them again, so many years after. Some of my childhood favourites look slow and amateurish when you see them again but The Champions stories are mostly still amusing, nicely imagined, well acted, brisk and very entertaining. There's a special frisson in reseeing those moments that have been lurking just below the surface in my memories (hmm... just how did The Champions help to shape my world view?).
We've just watched episode 23, The Night People. It was great fun and I learned something. The setting, a distinctly unhospitable Cornish village and its nearby gothic castle combined with the white-robed acolytes, white witch, corn dollies with pins stuck in them to give it a distinct Hammer horror vibe. Even better that these elements were combined with uranium and atom bombs; a heady brew indeed.
Spoilers follow! Douglas Trennick, the ancestral lord of the manor is disappointed that his uranium mine is now worthless because the USSR and the Western powers have been signing test ban treaties and the like. So he sets out to forge and distribute a fake USA-UK agreement on developing nuclear weapons, hoping that the Russians will think it's real, the arms race will reignite and his uranium mine will be worth loads of money again. His eccentric ('white witch') wife offers some spooky window dressing that is used to keep inquisitive locals away. A hare-brained scheme at best but it makes a very amusing story. Mrs Trennick (Adrienne Corri) should have had a spin-off series of her own.
I thought a uranium mine in Cornwall was just one more of the story's more implausible ingredients but it turns out there was such a thing, South Terras mine near St Austell. It operated from 1870 to 1930. There is an excellent account here. Uranium was often a by-product of copper or tin mining but at South Terras there was a seam of uranium-containing minerals so it made sense to concentrate on the extraction of the substance. Uranium was valuable even before radioactivity was discovered, for instance in glass production. Later on radium was extracted from the mine, presumably for mostly medical purposes. It seems, however, to have suffered from poor management and the proposal of a new Anglo-French scheme in 1912 involved among the English sponsors "...the usual histrionic nobleman whose part it is to shed a phosphorescent lustre on the title page of a prospectus" - sounds like an ancestor of Douglas Trennick.
Uranium mining there ceased many decades go but the mine is still interesting. In a scientific article published in 2017 we learn that residual uranium has not leached away in the way that might have been expected, for chemical reasons that may help to prevent uranium seepage from other disused mines and nuclear installations.
How interesting to find this element in a Champions storyline. Was one of the scriptwriters from Cornwall?
