Season 1 • Episode 13
LatestAsh convalesces after a near-fatal accident while defusing a mine. With his mobility severely impaired, he is to be reassigned to light duties away from the bomb disposal unit.
Danger UXB is a 1979 British television series developed by John Hawkesworth and starring Anthony Andrews as Lieutenant Brian Ash, an officer in the Royal Engineers. The programme is titled and partly based on the memoirs of Major A. B. Hartley, M.B.E, RE, Unexploded Bomb - The Story of Bomb Disposal, with episodes written by Hawkesworth and four screenwriters. The series chronicles the exploits of the fictional 97 Tunnelling Company which, as a result of thousands of unexploded bombs in London during the Blitz, has become a bomb disposal unit. As with all his fellow officers, Ash must for the most part learn the techniques and procedures of disarming and destroying the UXBs through experience, repeatedly confronted with more cunning and deadlier technological advances in aerial bomb fusing. The storylines were primarily military, with a romantic thread between Ash and an inventor's married daughter, and other human interest vignettes.
Acting
Andrews' trembling composure masking terror
Direction
Hawkesworth's agonizing real-time defusal scenes
Production
Period-accurate bomb designs from actual memoirs
Creator
John Hawkesworth
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
The UXB jargon and techniques came directly from Major Hartley's classified memoirs, declassified just for production.
Hawkesworth later admitted he structured episodes around the fuse mechanism reveals, treating each bomb as a locked-room mystery with no detective.
GB
