Rarely has archive footage been so revealing as that in Cosmonauts (13 October), a 90-minute documentary about the Soviet space programme; but the revelations in the clips only served to the incurious nature of the film as a whole.  Here, for the first time, were rockets exploding on take-off, the voice of a doomed space explorer crashing to a horrible death, and grainy film of bodies on the ground with the rescue crew trying fruitlessly to revive them. Here also were new interviews with legendary spacemen and engineers. The most frequent of these was a Georgy Gretchko, a red-faced, shock-haired old man who looked like a potato farmer. In 1957, he had worked all night on the Soviets’ only computer to create the trajectory for Sputnik, the first artificial satellite. At 7 a.m. h