If I were in the left hand chair up front, i'd get the bird down on the first available runway or M1 junction 24 regardless of my fuel state.
I did the same thing and thought... regardless of distance plane can go... get that bird down pronto!!!!! Lol.
Perhaps not directly relevent to the tests, but might be an interesting topic for conversation... I'm not sure that you
would always want to aim for the nearest runway in this situation.
If an aircraft encounters trouble at cruise altitude somewhere over England then its likely to have
a lot of options as to where to land. Often the nearest suitable airfield will be the best idea, but not always. Usually in an emergency it will the be the pilot's choice rather than the ATC provider. Sometimes the aircraft might need to burn off fuel as it may be overwieght for landing (a transatlantic passenger flight will take off with a lot more fuel on board than it can safely land with). In other instances, for instance if there were a total loss of power, then a further afield runway might present a more controlled descent profile for a gliding aircraft. Where there is a bit more time to play with and options are available other factors might also come into play such as the availability of appropriate maintenence facilities at various aerodromes - there's little point landing a problematic a/c at an airfield that isn't equipped to fix it if it can safely reach an alternative that is. Finally (and this is where the ATCOs might get a say) it could also be worth thinking about how much of a problem an a/c is going to cause if an emergency landing leads to runway closure - if an a/c can safely make and land at either Heathrow or Stansted then you are probably going to want to send it to Stansted, purely because if the worst case scenario occurs and a runway needs to be closed you are going to cause less disruption (and less of a resultant safety issue to other birds in the sky) by directing the a/c to the less busy runway.