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Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Sound of Shooting Stars by Heather Allen Shooting stars. T he canteen at Shepperton Studios on the outskirts of London, where much of Britain's TV is filmed, is a surreal place to spend a lunch break. Today it's even odder, for joining the cast of men in togas, zombies and people you might vaguely recognise from The Bill are Bono, Heather Mills, Pete Doherty and Jordan popping by to pick up a Diet Coke or a skinny cappuccino. They are not the real celebrities, of course, but the cast of the third series of Channel 4's mockumentary show Star Stories. Today is no ordinary day, though, because today Princess Diana dies. There is tension around the set as this pivotal moment in British history is recreated. Recreated that is with a couple of tiny differences; it's a little unlikely that Henri Paul had a vodka optic fitted next to his driver's seat or that moments before her death Diana had to deal with Prince Philip on a moped warning Dodi Fayed: "Get your paws off her you bloody A-rab." "We're basically just taking the piss out of stuff that's already happened," says actor Kevin Bishop, who's cunningly disguised as Elton John in full 1980s gear. "The stories are written, nothing we do hasn't happened otherwise we couldn't legally do it. We just change things a little bit." It's Star Stories' seemingly slightly shoddy production values that provide much of its humour, although like Phoenix Nights and The IT Crowd there are plenty of hidden jokes in the props (a glimpsed copy of Jordan's biography is retitled What I Fucking Did). Sets and locations are far from accurate while the costumes, wigs and impressions are all slightly off and sometimes based on someone else entirely. This means that Steve Edge's Freddie Mercury could be confused with Prince Charles if it wasn't for the vest and 'tache, while Bishop's Elton is really an "angrier, older and gayer" George Michael. "If we did it as Jon Culshaw it wouldn't work," says the show's creator and co-writer Lee Hupfield. "It's funnier if Dec from Ant & Dec is like John Gielgud in Arthur and the whole geordie thing is all an act." Hupfield (producer of the first Big Brother series) got the idea for the show while watching Hysteria: The Def Leppard Story, a Canadian TV movie with Montreal doubling as Sheffield, serious actors attempting Yorkshire accents and lines such as singer Joe Elliot saying to drummer Rick Allen, after he lost an arm in a road accident, "I know a million guys who'd trade places with you. Hell, they'd give their left arm." "In one scene there was a poster of David Bowie on the wall," remembers Hupfield, "and the young Joe Elliot turned to it and said, 'One day I'm gonna be bigger than you, David Bowie.' So there was that and there was the whole hilarious Jude Law wife-swapping story in the press every day. So I put the two together." Take That have become such fans of their Star Stories portrayal that they now incorporate it into their live show with Howard conversing with his bandmates in the howl of Chewbacca. It's unlikely Heather Mills will be as enamoured with her show (especially the scene where she lays down at the side of the road and sacrifices her leg to an oncoming police bike). "I had an awkward moment the other night," says Dolly Wells, who plays Mills and the ghost of Diana, Princess Of Wales. "I was at a party and Heather was there. I had to leave because I didn't want to meet her and find out I liked her." Bishop, who has just returned from filming Elton John singing "I like ladies/I think they're really great" to the tune of I'm Still Standing is less worried about what the celebs might think. "It's brutal," he says. "But I do think any of them can watch it and think, 'Oh God that's awful … but it is true, though.'" Actor Harry Peacock — who plays a preaching, sanctimonious Bono in what's likely to become the stand-out of the new series (at Live 8 the U2 singer lectures the crowd on energy efficiency, warning them "Standby is pure feckin evil") — agrees: "Star Stories is like a modern version of Carry On really. It's very British, they don't get it in America. The only time I felt guilty was doing Gazza." Much as he'd like to raise some cash it's unlikely Gazza could sue for Peacock's depiction of him because he really did carry a talking plastic parrot around Newcastle … although he possibly wasn't wearing his England kit at the time and sobbing over Heather Mills's absent leg. The sound of shooting stars. For centuries some people have been claiming they can hear meteorites - not the loud bang of an explosion when the objects strike the ground, but a bizarre fizzing, crackling noise as the fireballs hurtle through the air hundred of miles away. In 1719, Edmund Halley noted that observers up to 300km away from a huge fireball reported hearing hissing noises. But since sound takes about five seconds to cover a mile, Halley realised it was impossible for the witnesses to have heard sounds from the fireball as it passed over, and dismissed the reports as "the effect of pure fantasy". Witnesses of fireballs continued hearing strange hissing and crackling noises. The sounds could not be heard by everybody: one person would say they heard noises while the person standing next to them heard nothing at all. Scientists continued to dismiss those who heard noises as delusional. Then, in Australia, Dr Colin Keay of the University of Newcastle in New South Wales became interested. He discovered that eyewitnesses to a fireball over Sydney had described a variety of hissing, popping and crackling noises. He realised that if the sounds were heard instantaneously, they must travel at the speed of light. The only way this could happen was if they were caused by electromagnetic waves. But just how meteorite fireballs produced electromagnetic radiation, and how people managed to hear them if they did, was a mystery. Meteor scientists had tried to measure electromagnetic radiation from fireballs before but had found nothing. There was, however, one frequency range in which scientists had not looked: the very low frequency, or VLF, range of radio waves. Intriguingly, these frequencies are in the range of human hearing. By looking at how sunspots produced electromagnetic radiation, Keay suggested a way in which fireballs could produce VLF radio waves. The hot gas in a fireball's wake, which produces its bright trail, is electrically charged and when it twists and turns it wraps up the Earth's magnetic field lines into a magnetic spaghetti. Keay's calculations show that this twisting of field lines produces VLF radio waves. But even if that was how the radio signals formed, this still left Keay wondering how people could hear them. The only thing to do was to test his theory on people, and Keay measured how intense VLF electric fields needed to be before volunteers could hear them. For most people the fields had to be very strong: thousands of volts per metre, to electrically stimulate areas near the ears. Three volunteers were much more sensitive, however. "The two females had afro hairstyles and the male long soft hair," says Keay. "Their hair was acting as a transducer converting the electrical energy of the VLF by vibration into sound." The effect is called "electrophonics". Keay also experimented on himself. "Naturally I was the first test subject," he says. "But when I underwent the same test again I found my sensitivity had dropped considerably." Why? "The answer was I was not wearing my glasses." Keay's experiments suggested that the electrophonic sounds heard by witnesses of fireballs are triggered when radio waves produced by the fireball make objects near the listener vibrate. This neatly explained why one person heard noises while another did not - it was all a matter of their surroundings. Even their spectacles and hairstyle could make a significant difference. Researchers studying meteorites are now cashing in on the phenomenon. Thousands of meteorites fall on the Earth's surface each year. Many are fragments of asteroids and provide a valuable record of how our solar system formed. But people are rarely there to watch them fall and then work out exactly where they have come from. "Most meteorites are found hundreds or thousands of years after they fall," says Phil Bland of Imperial College London. "However, what planetary scientists would really like is meteorites that were observed to fall, so we can backtrack their paths to exactly where they came from." Bland and his team are now making the most of Keay's fireball VLF radio idea to help detect and track these objects. They plan to record not only the light but the radio waves coming from meteorites. Using three or more autonomous observatories, the location of the meteorite fall will then be calculated by triangulation to within about one square kilometre. "We are about to test our first observatory in the Nullarbor Desert [of Australia]," says Bland. "The outback is perfect: it is flat and has little vegetation, making meteorites easier to find, and it usually has clear skies." The team then hopes to install two more observatories, giving them coverage of 300,000 sq km, and within two years they expect to more than double the number of meteorites with known orbits.

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