7/7: The Angels of Edgware Road
Channel 4, 7pm

It certainly didn't make light Sunday-night viewing, and was probably a depressing way to round off a weekend, but watching Channel 4's documentary about some of the heroes of the terrorist bombings of July 7, 2005, was compelling TV.

There were no cheap, naff reconstructions, no staged gory images. Survivors simply told their stories straight to camera, unflinching, with more detail at times than perhaps we were comfortable with. Near the start of the programme, the short piece of footage from the mobile phone of a passenger in the train next to the one that was blown up in a tunnel just outside Edgware Road Station explained a lot.

The screams were clearly audible and perhaps it wasn't so surprising after hearing that to understand why Tim Coulson felt compelled not just to walk to safety from his carriage, but to smash his way into the bombed train and try to help those who lay injured and dying. Tim told of how one man died in his arms - and this, instead of spurring him on to rush from this hellhole, only served to make him more determined to save someone else.

Perhaps the biggest question raised in this programme was about human nature and religious beliefs. What individual differences are there in people that would have one use their beliefs to blow up a train, killing themself and many of those on board, and another to use their faith to aid their fellow humans in the face of such terror?

Alison Sayer, we learned, had been blown out of the train with the force of the blast. She had smashed into the tunnel wall and had come to rest on the tracks. Tim's explanation of what had happened to Alison was like he was describing something out of a movie, too awful to comprehend. His reasons for staying with her, as many others started to leave the tunnel along the tracks, were understandable.

Jason Rennie, too, stayed behind to help 50-year-old David Gardner, who was losing blood from his wounds that would eventually lead to his left leg being amputated. Susannah Pell used her scarf as a tourniquet to help a young man she heard crying out from the bombed carriage next to the one she was in. She climbed over corpses to get to him, ignoring the shrapnel embedded in her own face. She could walk, after all.

For me, though, the most heart-wrenching tale was that of Jackie Putnam, who guiltily stepped past the bombed carriage, seeing only the dead as she glanced in, not taking in those crying out for help. Jackie could think of nothing but getting home to her two daughters - and admitting this, for me, was as brave as any of those who stayed behind to help.

Later this week, Channel Five will screen 100 Best Disaster Movies. We've each probably watched one of them and oohed and aahed at the horrific and heart-wrenching scenes as people are crushed, bones are broken and loved ones die. None of us ever thinks it will happen to us. None of those in this programme did either - and, like us, none of them had a clue how they would respond.

The programme ended with a touching reunion between David Gardner and Jason Rennie, the man who saved him mainly by talking to him as they lay on the floor of the bombed-out carriage. The irony of it wasn't lost on David - on a transport system where people barely look at each other, never mind talk to one another, he'd made a friend for life.

In an age when the media reports crimes every day, and we don't seem to talk to our neighbours any more, this film went some way to reassuring you that, should a crisis arise, faith in human nature is not yet lost.