Tony Robinson's Titanic Adventure (C4)

The Man Who Captured Nessie (C4)

BOTTOM of the sea, baby, bottom of the sea," cried Hollywood director James Cameron, subverting his famous "top of the world" cry after winning an armful of Oscars for Titanic.

Cameron is a Titanic nut. He's spent the past decade exploring the wreck of the so-called unsinkable ocean liner on the bottom of the North Atlantic.

He's made 35 dives in his sub, spending 300 hours exploring the remains of the Titanic with robotic cameras peering into every nook and cranny of the fast-deteriorating vessel.

For some reason - one that was never made clear - he invited Time Team and Blackadder's Baldrick, Tony Robinson, to accompany him on his final dive. The aim was to go deeper than ever before, investigating the Turkish baths, wireless room and first class cabins.

It was easy to share Cameron's feelings as he sighted the wreck after a two-hour descent. "There's Titanic, pretty cool, eh?," he said.

There was much talk about what sounded like "rusticles" that are forming on the wreck and eating away at it. In 100 years, the Titanic will be no more than iron ore deposits on the sea bed.

There was something eerie about floating around the wreck with the robotic camera as your eyes - seeing dinner plates, the well-preserved Turkish baths and a clock that had stopped at the moment the cabin filled with water.

It's a case of look but don't touch. Some people think artefacts should be salvaged, others that the wreck and its victims should be left in peace.

Cameron has now called it a day. He will dive no more to the Titanic wreck - "the perfect ghost ship emerging out of the murk", as he described it.

Frank Searle was obsessed with another underwater phenomenon, Nessie the Loch Ness monster, taking a series of remarkable photographs in the early 1970s.

His activities put him at odds with rival monster hunters staking out the banks of the loch. Then in 1984, after devoting 14 years of his life to Nessie, Searle disappeared never to be seen or heard of again.

The Man Who Captured Nessie discovered that he came from London's East End, served in the Army and worked as a greengrocer.

Nessie, it appears, wasn't his only interest. He had a series of what he called Girl Fridays to assist him. One, Lieve Peten, recalled that her duties involved sleeping with Searle as well as looking for Nessie. No wonder the other loch-side monster hunters got upset, especially after he upgraded from a tent to a caravan and built his own tourist centre.

When he left, after being accused of faking his photographs, other Nessie hunters shed no tears. "He left to the regret of no-one," said another monster hunter.

The programme traced him to a bedsit in the North-West, near Blackpool. But it was too late - he'd died six weeks previously. Like Nessie, he'll remain an enigma.