Apocalyptic grimness lightened by the blackest of farce

Adam Nagaitis as a doomed Soviet fireman in Chernobyl (Sky Atlantic)

Reviewed This Week

Chernobyl: Sky Atlantic

Line of Duty: BBC One

Ireland’s Favourite Folk Song: RTÉ One

On May 3, 1986, my wife, who was pregnant with our second child, was at the races in the Phoenix Park. It rained all day, and when that rain fell it carried down radiation from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine.

Though 2,500 kilometres away, the explosion of the reactor’s core on April 26 had sent ...