Season 5

1984 · 8 episodes

Episodes

1Testing, TestingQ.E.D. looks at how ordinary things are put through extraordinary tests. It's a world of crashes, bangs-and worse. Tests like 'dropping the lift', 'blowing up the pop bottle', 'turning over the petrol tanker' and 'exploding the custard powder'. Virtually everything made by man is tested. To check that it does what it's supposed to do. To see what happens if it breaks and above all to make sure that it doesn't kill you.
2Handful of LightMaking the blind see for 14 has to be a bargain. And an artificial leg for a one-legged cyclist costing not much more must be good value too. It happened in Rajasthan in northern India when Q.E.D. went to film a mobile hospital. Five operating tables in a schoolroom. Boy scouts leading in the patients. Sparrows flying in and out through the 'theatre' windows. An Indian version of M.A.S.H. But Jumna walks once more - and Fatima can see again.
3In at the Deep EndIn a hyperbaric chamber at Comex in Marseille: an experiment to see how ultra-deep divers function at depths where 'hydrox' - an atmosphere of hydrogen and oxygen is substituted for the nitrogen/oxygen mix that can no longer be used.
4The Quest for Mastermind's BrainMagnus Magnusson stumps International Mastermind Chris Hughes by asking him what his brain looks like, split down the middle. Not one to take 'Pass' for an answer, Mastermind sets off on a quest that takes him from computerised brain-waves to the discovery of Pluto and a spell inside the most extraordinary brain-camera in the world.
5The War of Words Down UnderThe War of Words Down Under with Anthony Clare BUGA UP is the provocative name of an organisation in Australia that is devoted to defacing adverts, organising street happenings and infuriating the tobacco companies. They're not anti-smoker, just anti-cigarette sponsorship and ads. If we oppose drug pushing, they argue, then we should oppose cigarette promotion too. Australia is producing a movement of angry men and women - led by doctors who are prepared to break the law.
6Ray of Hope'It's a PanGalactic Federation Star-ship, Captain!!' 'Activate force wall. Fire Z-Ray 3!!' The laser's popular image has always been as a death ray. But so far, in the real world, it has never achieved that fictional promise. Since it was invented 25 years ago, it has been just almost everything else - a bloodless scalpel, a precision welder, a source for ultra-fast light communication. But now, at last, fiction may become reality as the superpowers square up to set the laser on the warpath....
7A Walk on the Wild SideAlley cats. Footloose and fancy-free. Streetwise moggies playing to the rules of evolution. Competing in the game of the survival of the fittest. Enter the Council Cat Catcher - playing to different rules. London's wild cats face new control measures: life doing porridge; a neutralising snip of the castrator's scissors; death in the gas chamber. Fair do's? Well take a walk on the wild side with Q.E.D. before making your mind up.
8Pozzuoli: Death of a CityQuestion: who would ever live in a place where there are 25 earthquakes a day? Answer: 30,000 Italians in the city of Pozzuoli on the coast near Naples. For the last 15 years their city has been rising over three inches a month. Go away for a week's holiday and your house could be an inch higher when you come back. Now the pattern is changing; the earthquakes are becoming larger ... and the people are starting to leave. After all, Pompeii and Herculaneum are just down the road.