Nuclear reaction fear in land of the Wombles

Is a nuclear cloud about to envelop Wimbledon? The police have been alerted to an explosive classified advert in the magazine of the Radio Society of Great Britain, home of wireless hams.

“Christopher” is seeking a 1kW linear amplifier. “I want to use the output to see if I can initiate a thermonuclear fusion reaction,” he writes. “The experiment is to put a tube of low pressure hydrogen in the inductor of a tuned circuit and excite it with 1kW of radio energy to ionise the hydrogen and see if it will start a fusion reaction. The experiment is quite dangerous and it may be difficult to stop the nuclear reactions once they start.”

Giles Read, technical editor of RadCom, the magazine concerned, says: “Physicists have assured us that this experiment cannot possibly result in a fusion reaction. At best, the hydrogen will ionise, producing a pink colour – pretty but harmless.”

Christopher, from Wimbledon, has been conducting experiments of this nature, without success, since 1967. But he only needs to be right once.

— President Obama will surely bring forward his visit to Britain after being nominated for hero of the year in the Shockwaves NME Awards. Unlike his chief rival, Noel Gallagher, Obama is a genuine Grammy Award winner, for best spoken-word album. Meanwhile, George W. Bush, John McCain and Gordon Brown take on Amy Winehouse and Pete Doherty for the villain prize.

— Rory Bremner was reluctant to sign up for the BBC series Who Do You Think You Are?. He told Radio Times: “I had two fears: one, that I’d discover my father had been at Auschwitz, but as a guard; and the other, that they would find nothing remotely interesting about my family and would make a film about Geoff Hoon instead.” The history of the Hoons is, as yet, a story untold.

— Life was so much easier in the Swinging Sixties. The Bootleg Beatles have been forced to scrap plans to play on the roof of 3 Savile Row on Friday – recreating the Beatles’ final concert 40 years ago – after Westminister Council refused permission for the gig. The faux four had hoped to cybercast the event.

Without a “final” concert the Bootleggers seem doomed to continue performing their tribute act for a further 20 years.

— Chelsy Davy braved the world for the first time since she split with Prince Harry as she walked to lectures in Leeds yesterday. Perhaps the weekly “big student night out” will lift the 23-year-old’s spirits tomorrow

The Face: Martin Harvey

He once fell flat on his face during a performance of Giselle, but 31-year-old Martin Harvey seems to have found his feet. Not only has he scooped the Spotlight Best Male Dancer Classical Award at the National Dance Awards, held at Sadler’s Wells yesterday, but he can now be found swaying like Swayze at the Aldwych Theatre. Having made his name in roles such as Onegin during 11 years with the Royal Ballet, Harvey stunned the dance world last year when he left for an acting role in the West End – playing Dirty Dancing’s dashing Johnny Castle. “I’d been training my voice so that I could move towards acting, and I ended up landing the first role I auditioned for. They took a chance on me,” he said.

Harvey also tried television and film before joining the Royal Ballet, but he thinks he’s cracked it in the theatre. “I’ll be doing this for the foreseeable future,” he said. “It feels like what I was designed to do.”

Postscript

— Tom Cruise’s financial advice could be about as reliable as his new Hitler bomb-plot blockbuster, Valkyrie. Tom Hollander, his co-star, told Cruise on set that he was nervous about buying a new house. “He [Cruise] went, ‘What? You’re gonna pull out, what’s that? Buyer’s remorse before you’ve even bought?’.” And I thought, ‘Oh yeah, I am such a loser. I should be more like him’. So I rang my solicitor and said, ‘Buy it, buy it, it’s fine, Tom Cruise said buy it’. And then, about a fortnight later, the Western economy collapsed.”

— “I cannot stress to you enough just how powerful a role socks play in incentivising people,” Peter Jones, the Dragons’ Den denizen tells Q. “Take a look at these (Paul Smith, hooped, garish) babies. How could you not be inspired by socks like these?” If you say so.

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