n 1971 Ian Waterman was a butcher on Jersey. He was nineteen, newly qualified and working flat out to make a go of the business. Then suddenly he went down with what seemed to be gastric flu. But it wasn’t. He became wobbly and weak. Within days he had collapsed and was in hospital, unable to move or feel his body. He has never regained that feeling, yet against all the odds, he has made an appar
Super Size Me is an Academy Award-nominated 2004 documentary film, directed by and starring Morgan Spurlock, an American independent filmmaker. It follows a 30-day time period (February 2003) during which Spurlock subsists exclusively on McDonald’s fast food and stops exercising regularly. The film documents this lifestyle’s drastic effects on Spurlock’s physical and psychological well-being and e
The documentary film “Big Bucks, Big Pharma” pulls back the curtain on the multi-billion dollar pharmaceutical industry to expose the insidious ways that illness is used, manipulated, and in some instances created, for capital gain. Focusing on the industry’s marketing practices, media scholars and health professionals help viewers understand the ways in which Direct-To-Consumer pharmaceutical adv
Sicko is a documentary film by Michael Moore. The film investigates the American health care system in 2007, focusing on its health insurance and pharmaceutical industry. The film compares the for-profit, non-universal U.S. system with the non-profit universal health care systems of Canada, the United Kingdom, France and Cuba.According to the movie Sicko, almost fifty million Americans are unins
Can polluted air on board planes damage your health? This episode of Panorama talks to pilots who have almost passed out at the controls and passengers who say they've been made ill by toxic fumes. The air breathed on airliners is drawn past the engines. It can become polluted by any leaks of engine oil.'Fume events' are rare but there are no accurate figures of just how many occur each year. Pa
This documentary looks at the secret world of our dreams. In a series of cutting-edge experiments and personal stories, we go in search of the science behind this most enduring mystery and ask: where do dreams come from? Do they have meaning? And ultimately, why do we dream?What the film reveals is that much of what we thought we knew no longer stands true. Dreams are not simply wild imagining
Susan Polgar is the world's first female chess grandmaster. But she wasn't born with her brilliant brain - it was created by the unique experiment that dominated her childhood. From the age of four her father trained her for up to six hours a day at chess alone.Growing up in the early 1970s, no woman had ever held the title of chess grandmaster. It was widely believed that female brains weren'
This documentary looks at the fact that perhaps one in every hundred people experiences a blending of the senses.Imagine if every time you saw someone called Derek you got a strong taste of earwax in your mouth. It happens to James Wannerton, who runs a pub. Derek is one of his regulars. Another regular's name gives him the taste of wet nappies. For some puzzling reason, James's sense of sound
If you’re reading this any time after lunch and you’re not dead, well done. You have, in the words of Professor Russell Foster, a chronobiologist, “survived the most dangerous part of the day”. Chronobiologists study the body’s various internal clocks. In this documentary, specialists reveal, among other things, that you are three times more likely to have a heart attack between 6.00am and noon, w