Like many other ex-RAF old duffers with handlebar moustaches who read the Daily Mail, I've often imagined that school science these days is rather boring - not enough explosions - as a result of an obsession with safety.
So imagine my delight at being sent this instructional video made with Cleapss, the body that advises schools on health and safety in science (www.qurl.com/pop). You get to see the bloke from Cleapss bung some rubidium, and then some caesium, into some water. Students of my obsessive tenacity will recognise the relevance of this: when I first busted Sky's science show Brainiac for faking their caesium and rubidium "experiments" by using stage explosives one of the reasons they gave was that for safety reasons some experiments might not be practical to do for real.
And yet here is a video from Cleapss giving advice to teachers on how to use caesium and rubidium, in the classroom, to do what Brainiac couldn't manage to do on telly.
Now, in this genuine video, there's lots of light and phutting, but nothing like the exploding bathtub of Brainiac's cheap fake stage explosives. Could this be an isolated fluke? After all, Sky say that although Brainiac fake things, they "assure viewers that the science behind the stunts is factually correct". Brainiac faked putting two grams into water. The sensible people at Cleapss used a pretty small amount.
But meanwhile, last week's hero - that bloke who bought a kilo of highly reactive sodium off eBay to chuck in the lake in his garden - has gone one better. Theodore Gray decided to use five-gram chunks of these two highly reactive metals, a lot more than Brainiac, well, didn't use.
If you watch his videos (www.qurl.com/phut) you will see plenty of light and phutting, and all kinds of interesting stuff, but no cheap fake plastic explosion like on Brainiac. And why not? Because although caesium and rubidium are technically more reactive than sodium, he explains, in reality, sodium can give you a bigger bang for your money, because the atoms are smaller, so you get more atoms per gram, and therefore the same sized lump makes more hydrogen. Theodore says: "It's a pity that Brainiac felt they needed to perpetuate a myth by faking it, when the truth is even better: common everyday sodium beats out those high-priced exotic elements."
I've got a list of other stuff from Brainiac that looks fake to me. I gave Sky two examples. It took them a week to look into them, and the result is that they now refuse to say whether these experiments were faked or not.
· Ben Goldacre recently won the Science Writers award for best feature, as well as being named best freelancer in the Medical Journalism awards. Last week he also received the Healthwatch award for "significant steps in improving the public's understanding of health issues"
· Please send your bad science to email@example.com