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Nicola Roberts embarks on a personal journey to discover The Truth About Tanning

As part of ´óÏó´«Ã½ Three's Dangerous Pleasures season of hard-hitting and thought-provoking documentaries exploring the darker sides of what some people will do for fun, Nicola Roberts goes on a personal journey to explore the culture and consequences of tanning among young people in the UK, and the extremes to which they will go to get the perfect tan.

Since shooting to fame in 2002 as a member of Girls Aloud, Nicola has had to deal with life in the spotlight. Everyone seems to have an opinion about her fashion, hair and naturally pale complexion.

Nicola meets people from both sides of the debate; young women whose love of tanning is an addiction, who use sunbeds four-to-five times a week, and people from the tanning industry who claim that, used responsibly, sunbeds can make one feel happy and healthy. She also meets girls in their early teens who face pressure from their peers to conform and be tanned.

Nicola reveals how she overcame an early reliance on fake tan to gain a gradual sense of confidence in her own skin; she also shares thoughts on the subject with Girls Aloud band mate, Kimberley Walsh.

Nicola meets top dermatologists and cancer experts who reveal the risks to which tan addicts are exposing themselves and visits hospitals where some of the estimated 120 under-40s who die from skin cancer each year are treated. Skin cancer is the most common cancer in under-35s in the UK.

Nicola also meets the families of those who have died from melanoma and those who are now pushing for a change in the law to protect the young from the tanning industry and regulate salons.

IV

On the night of 12 January 2006, intruders broke into the house of Joan Root in Naivasha, Kenya. Within minutes, the 69-year-old film-maker-turned-conservationist was dead, peppered by bullets from an AK-47. Was it a revenge attack by illegal poachers, angry at Root for stopping their activities? Was it a cold-blooded murder by a disgruntled former employee whom Root had recently let go? Or was it something more bizarre? This film, by award-winning film-maker Henry Singer (The Falling Man), tells her story.

In the Sixties and Seventies, Joan and Alan Root cut dashing figures as adventurous wildlife film-makers. They pioneered new techniques to document the wonders of their beloved Africa earning Oscar nominations and world-wide celebrity. When their marriage broke down, Joan retreated to their house on the shore of Lake Naivasha and began to play a dangerous game. After first challenging Kenya's burgeoning flower industry to stop polluting the lake, she then created a vigilante group to arrest the illegal poachers who were emptying the lake of fish. But when one of the poachers died after a bloody fight with Joan's foot soldiers, she was forced to abandon her crusade to save the lake she loved. By then, she'd entered a world of intrigue and corruption from which she couldn't escape and which would ultimately cost her her life.

Singer's film doesn't just profile a fearless environmentalist and her battle to save one of Kenya's natural jewels; it also opens a window on the uneasy balance between the developed world's wish to preserve Africa's environment and the continent's desperate need to develop.

Murder On The Lake won the Green Award for best film on an environmental issue at the 2009 Sheffield International Documentary Festival.

FW