Waking the Dead – Hyperdrive – Atom – 15 Aug 2007

The first recording today starts with the end of Traffic Cops. There’s a trail for DanceX and another Eastenders trail.

Then, the second part of Waking the Dead – Cold Fusion. After the chemical attack on Felix, the team are put into quarantine.

Spence has arrested Clifford Day, the private detective who was running surveillance on the anti-nuclear groups in 1988, but as he’s on the phone telling Boyd what’s happening, a sniper starts shooting at them, hitting Day in the chest. Spence manages to get him to a car and escape, while still under fire.

The sniper is totally cosplaying as Hitman 47.

Boyd lays out his suspicions to Grace and Stella. “We’ve got the Anti-Terrorist Operations, they turn up, Drake heads them. 18 years ago, Drake headed the Atomic Energy Constabulary. He ran informers and agents. Clifford Day worked for him. His blood turns up at Cherry Tree Farm. McQueen worked for the AEC. He was the arresting officer. They are all here. What do you think?” “You’re not paranoid” says Grace. “Thank you.”

With no one else to turn to, Boyd calls McQueen, Spencer’s old AEC partner. I do like the way all these pieces are being moved into place. He tells him that Spence is in trouble, and gives him the location.

Commander Drake of the Anti Terrorist Squad arrives. He’s very keen to talk to the team face to face, despite the airborne toxic event in the building. Almost as if he knows it’s not dangerous. Not that I’m suspicious or anything. And he was so nice in Star Cops.

Felix’s friend Harry quizzes Stella about their discovery of the command history on the hard drive. “Well, for someone who says they know a lot about computers… you do realise you were going down the route of deletion?” “Oh, yeah. I was distracted. Boyd came in. I had to rush.” Sure. There would have been on-screen warnings about this. Just, it looks like you were trying to corrupt it. That’s not true. You got data from it, didn’t you?” She’s so cagey here. I feel so betrayed.

Drake questions Boyd. “Tell me, has, er… has anything out of the ordinary happened in the last 24 hours?” “You mean apart from the chemical attack?” “Yes, apart from that.” “No.” “That was a test of your co-operation, Peter. I’m sorry to say you failed.” Boyd really doesn’t trust this man at all and I’m right behind him. But at least he gives Boyd the good news that the substance in the book was “essentially benign”.

McQueen has got to Clifford Day’s house, and it’s teeming with police. There’s not much information to be had.

Rather conveniently, Clifford Day used to be a GPO Engineer. For those of you who aren’t as old as me, the GPO was the General Post Office, and they ran the UK’s telephone network, before it was sold off as British Telecom. In my first job I remember finding a GPO branded modem in a cupboard. It was probably 300 baud, and it was the size of a large toaster, and all made of shiny steel too. Anyway, back to the story, as Day helps Spence fix the phone exchange so they can make a call out.

Grace and Boyd talk about his suspicions some more. She’s been looking at Day’s record. “1979, conspiracy under the Data Protection Act, bugging offices of the Anti Nazi League. And the arresting officer, CI William Drake.” That’s great. We’ve got a connection on court record.” “Yes, Drake argued leniency, quote, “..was thought to have been manipulated by racists keen to exploit his undoubted prowess in electronics and surveillance”.” “We know from McQueen that Drake was into that.” “Yes, but how do you go from surveillance to double murder and mutilation?” “No idea, but Drake must have used Day to run Penny Coulter. Drake knows that if Day finds out we’re re-opening the investigation, he’s going to start bargaining, so he’s going to get hold of Day and… get rid of him before he squeals.” “So poor old Spence was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Spence and Day get a phone working, and call the unit, but Drake answers the phone. Since he used to be Spence’s boss, he trusts him and tells him where he is. Drake promises to get officers to the scene. But instead he contacts the hitman who was after them, and tells him to go back to the office building where he now knows for sure they are.

“I’m sending the exact location… e-mail to your PDA.” We’re so close to smartphones being everywhere but it’s still flip phones and PDAs. I had one of these Compaq iPaqs when I was at the BBC, ostensibly to try to get a mobile version of h2g2 working. Never really got anywhere, they were still so limited. Looked cool at the time, though.

Spence gets Day to tell him what happened at the house that night. Day is unrepentant about the work he did. “We sent more criminals down in a year than you will in your whole career. So just you pay me some respect and get me out of here.” But when Spence asks him who “We” was, Day tells him that he was working with Spence’s partner, Tom McQueen. He was the one who cut off Jackie Holmes’ face.

They’re interrupted by the arrival of the hitman. He shoots Day, Spence grabs him and they grapple. Shots are fired, Spence gets the gun and kills the hitman, but he’s been shot in the leg.

Stella confronts Drake. She’s appalled at what she’s done because she trusted him. He tries to tell her it was necessary. “Don’t give me that end justifies the means crap” she says. “It’s not crap, it’s an unpalatable truth. One I thought you’d grasped.” He reaches out to touch her face. “Oh, Stella. My…” “I’m not your Stella. Not any more.” “I need you to keep your nerve, Stella. If Boyd knew about all this, he’d understand if I could just give him the full picture.” “So why don’t you? I’m going to Boyd.” “Fine. What will he do when he finds out he’s got a spy in his own household?” This whole story is tearing me apart.

Grace is trying to find out any connection between Stella and Drake, and the match she finds (through a very unconvincing search system) is a Sergeant Colin Goodman – Stella’s father. Grace talks to Stella and is told that Drake was Stella’s legal guardian, and helped her and her mother financially when they moved back to France.

Stella finally tells Boyd everything. That Drake contacted her to ask for her help. “He said the foreign blood wasn’t the killer’s but someone who’d done a lot of covert work for the police and, er… could I help him remove the evidence.” “And that was enough for you to betray us?” “I didn’t see it like that then. I have no excuse but that I trusted him.” “Even when he asked you to destroy evidence?” “Yeah. I had no reason not to believe him. He was like a father to me.”

One of Drake’s men asks Boyd for “a log-in code for Spencer Jordan’s PC”. I’d hope Boyd wouldn’t know that. What kind of security are they running? But during the exchange, Boyd learns where Spencer is, and, with Stella’s help causing a distraction, heads out of the door,

Drake calls McQueen, and gives him Spence’s location.

Boyd is intercepted before he can get out, and Drake talks to him. He tries to explain why he does what he does. It’s all a bit fascistic to be honest. “Let me tell you something. There’s no sensation like it, when you look into the eyes of your enemy and you watch them realise that you will do anything. You play by their rules and watch them slowly realise they’re finished. It’s what I do. It’s what I’m good at. And now the front line’s here, our city. That’s all I have.” Boyd makes the only move he thinks will work – using Drake’s relationship with Stella. “She broke the law for you and now she will suffer because of you. What are you going to do about that?” “What can I do?” “I will do everything in my power to make sure that no action is taken against Stella. If you promise to help me find Spencer Jordan.” Drake lets him leave, and goes with him.

Stella apologises to Felix, but Felix is not yet in any place to be forgiving. Stella says “I thought I was doing the right thing. I didn’t want… Sorry. Trite as that sounds.” “Yeah, you’re right. It does sound trite.”

McQueen finds Spence, who’s tried to crawl away. It’s not a happy reunion. “I didn’t really know you at all, did I?” says Spence. “Course you did. You just chose not to look.”

Boyd and Drake arrive in time to delay McQueen killing Spence. “I’m not going down, Bill. Whatever happens, I’m not going down.” Drake tries the fatherly approach. “Come on, lad, give me the gun.” McQueen says “Don’t call me lad” and shoots him in the head.

Spence tries to shoot McQueen but McQueen shoots him first, then Boyd grabs Drake’s gun and shoots McQueen. The episode ends on something of a cliffhanger as Boyd comforts Spence as he calls for an ambulance. Grim stuff, but one of the best stories of the series.

Media Centre Description: Police drama series based around cold cases. The Anti-Terrorist squad has the team’s HQ under lock-down, and the team are kept quarantined until the substance that knocked out Felix can be identified.

Recorded from BBC ONE on Wednesday 15th August 2007 20:58

BBC Genome: BBC ONE Wednesday 15th August 2007 21:00

There’s a One Show trail, and an ad for these new fangled podcasts that everyone seems to be talking about.

Then the recording ends with the start of the Ten O’Clock News.

The next recording starts with some Weather. There’s an ad for The Clinton Years, and a trail for BBC News 24 online.

There’s also a trail for a new series of Saxondale that I hope I recorded. Greg Davies appears, as does Matt Berry.

Then, another episode of Hyperdrive – Dreamgate.

Henderson and York confiscate a Dreamgate device from an alien ship. “It amplifies neural signals, allows the wearer to remotely enter the dreams of anyone for miles around. Only the most illegal piece of consumer electronics in the galaxy.”

Henderson tends to dream about his favourite TV show, Captain Helix.

Henderson finds out that York has been using the Dreamgate to enter people’s dreams. So Henderson tries it as well. Teal seems to dream mostly about Henderson.

Jeffers’ dream seems to be incomprehensible.

Vine’s dream is that he owns a pub in 1995.

They stay too long in the dream, drinking, so Vine wakes up and they can’t get out. They try to contact his subconscious by doing “Cotton Eye Joe” on the karaoke machine.

Vine gets a message, so the crew have to enter the dreams to find York and Henderson who’ve gone full 1995.

Jeffers is delighted to find Street Fighter II. “These were all destroyed in the retro gamer massacre back in 2054.”

On the way back they go through York’s dream.

Media Centre Description: Sci-fi comedy set in 2151 that follows spaceship HMS Camden Lock as it goes about protecting British interests in a changing galaxy. The crew discover the Dreamgate, one of the most dangerous devices in the Universe, which gives its owner the power to infiltrate other people’s dreams without their knowledge. Henderson and York wander into Vine’s dream of a pub in the mid 1990s, but when Vine wakes up they become trapped inside his head. Can the rest of the crew bring them back from 1995?

Recorded from BBC TWO on Wednesday 15th August 2007 23:18

BBC Genome: BBC TWO Wednesday 15th August 2007 23:20

After this, there’s trails for Tribe and The Restaurant.

Then the recording stops with the start of Ratcatcher.

The last recording today starts with the end of Wainwright Walks.

There’s a trail for Stephen Fry – Secret Life of a Manic Depressive.

And for a documentary about the Wolfended report, Consenting Adults.

Then, the second part of Atom – The Key to the Cosmos. Professor Jim Al-Khalili explains that studying the atom has given us insight into the whole universe, even letting us calculate the total number of atoms in the known universe. “It’s one followed by over 70 zeros. That’s a trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion, trillion atoms.”

He visits the Curie institute where Marie Curie did her research into Radium, and where her notes are still radioactive, 100 years later.

Radium was used in all sorts of products, like bath products, Eau de Cologne.

He explains how Ernest Rutherford became the first true alchemist, when he discovered that Radium in a sealed bell jar would produce small amounts of hydrogen by splitting the nitrogen atoms in the air into one oxygen atom and one hydrogen atom.

Hooray, he’s using snooker balls to explain the idea of protons in a nucleus. It’s not quite ping pong balls like Tomorrow’s World of yore, but it’s close enough.

Here’s the world’s first spectrograph, which was able to show different lines for different weights of atom so it was possible to compare the weights of different atoms. And this showed that Rutherford’s model of the atom with protons in the nucleus was wrong, as the atoms (apart from Hydrogen) were all much heavier than they should be. There must be something else that’s providing the weight.

in 1932, James Chadwick built a device that could detect the unknown particles that were the missing piece of the atom – neutrons.

Now the problem was to explain how a nucleus of protons and neutrons could possibly work, given that two positively charged protons should repel each other. The answer was a new type of force, the strong nuclear force, which he illustrates with magnets wrapped in velcro.

Otto Hahn and Lise Meitner. Hahn bombarded uranium with neutrons, hoping to chip fragments of the atom, but when he analysed his results, he found barium, a much smaller atom than uranium. It was Lise Meitner who realised that rather than chipping off small fragments, the neutron was splitting the uranium atom into two smaller atoms, Barium and Krypton, and they also calculated that it released a huge amount of energy. They had discovered nuclear fission.

Research into nuclear physics, hugely accelerated because of the Second World War, led to more discoveries, like the stability of atoms peaking with iron. And it was discovered that iron just happens to be one of the most abundant atoms in the universe.

This led Fred Hoyle to theorise about how the heavier atoms are created. The processes in starts have enough heat and pressure to fuse the lighter elements, and the larger stars, and then exploding supernovae, could produce the heavier elements. Based on this picture, Fred Hoyle is being played by Ian McNeice.

But one thing Hoyle’s theory couldn’t explain is where all the helium in the universe came from. Another physicist, George Gamov, figured the helium must have been made much earlier, in a much much hotter environment – the Big Bang (a name coined by Hoyle, who hated the idea and wanted to make fun of it). I like the way this picture of the two of them makes it look like a remake of Sapphire and Steel.

The clinching piece of evidence for the Big Bang was discovered by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson in New Jersey, using this old radio telescope. “Before Penzias and Wilson could begin their experiment, they had to make sure they got rid of all the background noise the antenna was picking up. It’s a bit like the hiss on radios in between stations. They spent the best part of a year checking all the equipment and the electronics. They even got down on their hands and knees inside the dish to scrub it clean of what they called white dielectric material, which was basically pigeon crap. But even after all this, there was still a faint persistent hiss they couldn’t get rid of, and it was there whichever direction the antenna pointed. There was only one viable explanation. The noise was the sound of radiation, the afterglow of Gamov’s Big Bang. Here at last was final proof that Gamov was right.” Regular readers might remember that Penzias and Wilson featured as characters in the Stephen Hawking biopic, explaining their discovery.

Al-Khalili ends the programme with a line that must surely have been partly inspired by Carl Sagan’s programme Cosmos – I guarantee a young Jim Al-Khalili would have devoured that programme when it was first shown (like I did). Sagan’s line was “We are all made of Star Stuff”. Al-Khalili takes this and gives it just a very slightly cynical spin. “Romantically, you could say that we’re all made of stardust, but the truth is also that we’re all just nuclear waste.”

Media Centre Description: The second in Professor Jim Al-Khalili’s three-part documentary about the basic building block of our universe, the atom. He shows how, in our quest to understand the tiny atom, we unravelled the mystery of how the universe was created – a story with dramatic twists and turns, taking in world-changing discoveries like radioactivity, the atom bomb and the Big Bang, as the greatest brains of the 20th century competed to answer the biggest questions of all – why are we here and how were we made.

Recorded from BBC FOUR on Thursday 16th August 2007 02:58

BBC Genome: BBC FOUR Thursday 16th August 2007 03:00

After this, there’s another trail for Stephen Fry’s Weekend – they’re really pushing this.

Then BBC Four closes down.