Inside Story - Season 9 / Year 1990

The last time they gazed on Japan they were watching the most horrific single event in the history of war - the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima.
Forty-five years later the American airmen who dropped the bomb return to see the city they annihilated. This remarkable film tells their story as they retrace wartime steps across the Pacific and come face to face with survivors of their nuclear attack.

In October 1957 a fire was discovered inside Reactor One at Windscale. Until Chernobyl it was the world's worst reactor disaster. But the fire had one hidden benefit. It stopped the secret and severe contamination of West Cumbria.
Two years before the fire, officials denied that any radioactivity was leaking from the Windscale reactors.
Today, men and women who worked at the site tell Inside Story the truth: that leaks from the reactor severely contaminated the area for many years and subjected local people unknowingly to radiation. Our Reactor Is on Fire tells, for the first time on television, the chilling story of obsessive secrecy and unsafe technology which ended in atomic disaster.

As Gorbachev draws back the iron curtain, western ideas and lifestyles are changing the Soviet Union. Not all of them are positive: there is a growing vice industry in the country's major cities. Soviet police claim there are 10,000 prostitutes in Moscow alone. The shops are empty and most women's lives are unrelentingly drab; more and more young girls are drawn by the 'high life'. A foreign currency prostitute can earn 1,000 roubles for one 'trick' - five times the national monthly wage. Inside Story goes under cover with the police and the women themselves tell their story.

Black sportsmen and women, wearing British colours, are winning more gold medals, setting new records and scoring more points, goals and runs than ever before. Some claim this is evidence of a natural black aptitude for sport. Others argue that sport provides the best opportunity for people often discriminated against. This revealing film challenges both views and asks: does the best man always win - whatever his colour?

Three thousand people have been killed in the Natal province of South Africa during the last three years in a bitter struggle for black political power. The fighting between the African National Congress and Inkatha, Chief Buthelezi's political organisation, threatens to destroy any prospect of peaceful change in South Africa.
Using the emotional testimony of people caught up in the conflict, this film reveals a systematic campaign of violence by Inkatha, supported by the South African police.

The Broadwater Farm riots and the murder of PC Keith Blakelock in October 1985 led to a ten-week trial and life sentence for three young men - Engin Raghip , Mark Braithwaite and Winston Silcott. All three convictions were based on uncorroborated confessions obtained by the police in the absence of solicitors. There were no witnesses and no forensic evidence.
Charles Wheeler examines the murder investigation and the ensuing trial, and questions whether any of the three should have been convicted.

Most of us shudder when we see a rat. Nearly all of us call for help. Ratcatchers are the men who come to answer our calls and soothe us.
Those calls increased by 20 per cent last year. City rats live in our sewers. Here they multiply in a nice warm environment and we throw away an ever increasing amount of waste which sustains them and their young. From time to time they break out of the sewers bringing disease and destroying property. Some even appear in our toilet bowls. Inside Story follows Hackney's 'ratcatchers' as they cheerfully seek the little animals we all hate.

Ten years ago the workers at the Gdansk shipyard went on strike, an action that was 1 to lead eventually to the fall of the Polish government. It was a long and bitter struggle, fraught with danger and personal sacrifice. From Gdansk, Inside Story uncovered secret police film and the strikers' own video record of those turbulent events.

'Our Kev' says the fresh wreath laid year after year on her son's grave by a still bitter Phyllis Freeman.
Kev was one of the 95 people who die every week on our roads. The driver was fined £400 for driving carelessly. Inside Story asks whether that is just.

Doctors around the world are monitoring and participating in torture. Inside Story talks to them, to the tortured prisoners and to the campaigners risking their lives to clean up the medical profession.

For 18 years George Blake served as a senior MI6 officer. In 1952 he became a double agent, betraying MI6 operations and personnel to the KGB. Over nine years, during the critical period of the Cold War, he destroyed most of M16's activities in eastern Europe. His conviction in 1961 and spectacular escape bequeathed a legacy of speculation, intrigue and outrage - the stuff of a John Le Carre novel. But fiction gives way to fact in this unprecedented documentary. For the first time the KGB's most devastating agent in Britain answers his accusers - and reveals some astonishing secrets to reporter and producer Tom Bower.

Howard Marks was an underworld myth: drugs trafficker, fugitive and Oxford graduate famous for his impersonations of Elvis Presley. For years, he eluded the law. His wealth and charm were legendary. He was untouchable: a middle-class outlaw. He came to obsess and repel Craig Lovato of the US Drug Enforcement Administration. Lovato determined to track him down. The key would be Lord Moynihan, an exiled peer who ran massage parlours in steamy Asian cities. He was persuaded to betray his old friend Howard Marks by recording their private conversations on a hidden tape recorder. This would be a manhunt like no other.