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`On 3 August 1991, the Oceanus left South Africa on a holiday cruise with 580 passengers and crew on board,' a stern voice-over gentleman tells us as we see a ship in an unhealthy position in Mayday: Deadly Playground (Channel 4, 9pm). `They had to abandon the boat in a storm. Now it's about to sink . . . the sea, so benign in the sales brochures, so tranquil in the harbour, is quick to pounce on any human error.' Indeed it is, as this documentary, a grim record of naval catastrophes, shows us. People who merrily fork out loads of cash to cruise the seas with dreadful singers and so-called `comedians' to provide their nightly entertainment know not what risks they are taking. Some ships sail under a `flag of convenience' with ill-trained staff, many of whom can only babble in foreign tongues when disaster strikes. Matters would be in a yet sorrier state were it not for the efforts of the pioneers shown in Horizon Special Longitude (BBC2, 9.30pm), for until 200 years ago there was no sure way of knowing the position of a ship on the high seas. In 1714, Parliament offered a reward of pounds 20,000 to whoever could establish a way of finding longitude at sea and prove it on a testing voyage to the West Indies. One bonkers pair, Whiston and Ditton, proposed a line of ships anchored across the Atlantic firing guns at regular intervals. Finding longitude had, as the caricaturist Hogarth observed, become `the work of madmen'. However, John Harrison, the local carpenter in the Lincolnshire village of Barrow, although lacking in formal education, was no loony. He realised that to know longitude one must know the time and he set about building a timepiece far more efficient than anything yet produced by the world's great centres of clockmaking.