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The Whistleblowers is an unusual example of a British television conspiracy drama. Developed by Tony Marchant for ITV as a competitor to the BBC’s Spooks, it centred on ordinary people struggling with the ethics of reporting malpractice in state or corporate institutions. This was invested with verisimilitude through advice from the whistleblowing charity Public Concern at Work, though kept in tension with generic expectations of the conspiracy thriller. Unlike most British conspiracy dramas, The Whistleblowers was not a serial but a procedural with stand-alone episodic conspiracies, creating a vision of conspiracy not as escalating crisis but as ‘standard operating procedure’.

COVID-19 may have forever changed our world. Given the limited space and air circulation, potential infections on public transportation could be concerningly high. Accordingly, this study has two objectives: (1) to understand air circulation patterns inside the cabins of buses; and (2) to test the impact of different technologies in mitigating viruses from the air and on surfaces inside bus cabins. For the first objective, different devices, metrics and experiments (including colored smoke; videotaping; anemometers; pressure differentials; particle counts; and 3D numerical simulation models) were utilized and implemented to understand and quantify air circulation inside different buses, with different characteristics, and under different operating conditions (e.g. with windows open and shut). For the second objective, three different live prokaryotic viruses were utilized: Phi6, MS2 and T7. Various technologies (including positive pressure environment inside the cabin, HEPA filters with different MERV ratings, concentrated UV exposure with charged carbon filters in the HVAC systems, center point photocatalytic oxidation technology, ionization, and surface antiviral agents) were tested to evaluate the potential of mitigating COVID-19 infections via air and surfaces in public transportation. The effectiveness of these technologies on the three live viruses was tested in both the lab and in buses in the field. The results of the first objective experiments indicated the efficiency of HVAC system designs, where the speed of air spread was consistently much faster than the speed of air clearing. Hence, indicating the need for additional virus mitigation from the cabin. Results of the second objective experiments indicated that photocatalytic oxidation inserts and UVC lights were the most efficient in mitigating viruses from the air. On the other hand, positive pressure mitigated all viruses from surfaces; however, copper foil tape and fabrics with a high percentage of copper mitigated only the Phi6 virus from surfaces. High-temperature heating was also found to be highly effective in mitigating the different viruses from the vehicle cabin. Finally, limited exploratory experiments to test possible toxic by-products of photocatalytic oxidation and UVC lights inside the bus cabin did not detect any increase in levels of formaldehyde, ozone, or volatile organic compounds. Implementation of these findings in transit buses, in addition to the use of personal protective equipment, could be significantly valuable for protection of passengers and drivers on public transportation modes, possibly against all forms of air-borne viruses.

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This article examines the 1990s adventure series Bugs (1995–99), whilst also exploring broader transformations in British television thrillers and nostalgic programming. First, I position the series’ origin as a response to the popularity of 1960s adventure series repeats on the BBC in the 1990s. I argue, that the nostalgic impulse of Bugs itself did not manifest in visual terms, as in more conventional 1960s pastiches, but was instead at a narrative level. The series dispensed with contemporaneous trends towards more psychologised characters and serialised narratives in favour of a self-consciously ‘retro’ rejection of ‘depth’. Yet I also explore other ways in which it adapted the adventure series for the 1990s. These included reworking the spy agency as a small business enterprise for the ‘dotcom’ age, reinventing alienating surveillance technology as the user-friendly gadget, glamorizing neo-liberalism through exoticizing London’s redeveloped Docklands, and presenting terrorism as a leading existential threat for the post-Cold War era. I argue that whilst Bugs represented a dead end for an ‘innocent’ model of nostalgic drama, through many of the latter characteristics it stands as an unacknowledged influence on a later generation of stylish, issue-led ‘War on Terror’ thriller series.