Geiger Sweet,
Geiger Sour:
19 Tales From The Radiation Age

100 years of radiation and its effects - from the first x-rays to the Chernobyl disaster.

The innocence of x-rays didn't last long - but for that untroubled time radiation was a magic cure-all, used to remove unwanted hair (which it did, along with great clumps of the wanted kind), to fit children's shoes, even to energise enfeebled virility by means of radioactive jock-straps.

After the Manhatten Project and the Atom Bomb, wield a lie detector around the subject and that erratic tick soon crowds to a constant screech, triggered by the politic evasions, and the fingers-crossed predictions of risk.

"One wouldn't be responsible if one didn't know," says a scientist, uncomfortably responding to the accusation that terminally ill patients had been given experimental plutonium injections.

A Film by PAUL YULE