The Night People

As a boy The Champions was one of my favourite TV series. Their origins at the hands of a mysterious ancient civilisation on the Tibetan plateau, the super-powers, the benign but secretive Geneva-based Nemesis, the nuclear submarines, atom bombs, spies - all catnip to a geeky Cold War kid. No doubt Alexandra Bastedo also had some impact :-).

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?

Total eclipse of the Moon

"This is a very rare event. It only happens every 400 years," said the glossy lady on ITV this morning. "Oh, dear," I said - or maybe something worse. "Text them!" said my wife. But I had to press on with the day so I hope somebody else commented.

Lunar eclipses are visible somewhere on Earth most years. Statistically that means we can see one in Britain on average once every year or two. Sometimes we'll see them in successive years and sometimes we might have to wait two or three years. In 2011 we'll be able to see lunar eclipses on 15 June and 10 December, but then we'll have to wait until 2015.

So, what's this "every 400 years" about? Well, it is apparently more than 400 years since the last time a total eclipse coincided with the winter solstice. This is a coincidence of so little import that nobody has yet bothered to work out when it will happen next but it certainly isn't a recurring event every 400 years. It is equally valid to get excited because a lunar eclipse falls on your birthday, on the birthday of Sun Myung Moon, or on a day when American Werewolf in London is being shown on TCM. But I'm not sure that poor Kate Garraway appreciated any of this and somebody glancing only briefly at that channel - like myself - could easily have come away with the impression that lunar eclipses in general were extremely rare events. I'm really not sure if this was her own impression.

I shouldn't complain; it's great to see a celestial event receiving this much attention. But it's hard not to feel uneasy at some of what gets said on these occasions, and the degree of cosmic ignorance that gets revealed.

Anyway, regardless of which day it falls on, a lunar eclipse is a beautiful and only slightly unusual sight and you won't have to wait 400 years to see the next one.