Glow Boys

[1998] 16mm film to video

14m colour sound

To be shown alongside Interview with a Nuclear Contract Worker

A study of the psychological state of the contemporary British nuclear industry. The film dramatises original research undertook over the course of a year. The script is developed from the pitch black humour of nuclear contract workers Waller met whilst travelling across the UK, from Wylfa in Anglesey, to Sizewell in Suffolk. This is a survey of a strange marriage between the maintained decrepitude of post war science and a highly sophisticated, but undermined PR campaign. Nothing had changed since Lindsay Anderson surveyed Britain in O'Lucky Man or Britannia Hospital, 25 years earlier.

One PR campaign declared:

BNFL- Where Science Never Sleeps

hilariously suggesting itself to be prone to anxious insomnia. The text is fused with sibilant alliteration, its literary origins in Homer's Aeneid, describing sea snakes approaching the fall of Troy as 'sanguineae superant undas, pars cetera pontum pone legit sinuatque immensa volumine terga.fit sonitus spumante salo; ', translated literally:

'their necks held high amidst the waves and their bloody crests tower over the waves, the other part skims the sea behind and arches its huge back in a coil'.

- its sibilance foretelling the fall of Troy. Next to the reactor, in the surrounding designated nature trail, a sign commands:

Take Nothing But Your Time
And Leave Nothing But Your Footprints!

as if they were evaporated in proximity to an atom splitting blast, on the way to entering some para Newtonian temporality. Inside this chaos work Glow Boys or Jumpers; contract workers who borrow friends' ID's in order to clock hours beyond the limits of designated radiation dosage. These workers travel from reactor to reactor to carry out radioactively 'dirty' jobs, such as welding ducts and loosening valves in tight spaces.

The reactor is situated in its own temporal realm, a 24 hour operation where shift workers retire each morning to eat oversized breakfasts and drink with local witches, where days and nights are substituted for hours and money.

For more information on the subject visit : http://www.metafilter.com/102084/glow-boys-nuclear-janitors-dying-for-a-living

CAST: Douglas Park, E.J. Waller, Grahame Fox, Kealan Doyle, Bernd Bucker, Mark E. Smith, Michael Howarth, Joolia Cappleman, Paul Rattee.

Produced by Tom Sheahan and Red Star Films

Funded by British Film Institute, Southern Arts, The Arts Catalyst