Heathrow - Britain's Busiest Airport
Apols if my criticism was somewhat blinkered.
I think my disappointment centred on the usual dumbing down for the Xfactor generation.
There were some great air to air shots to be had but these were merely a glimpse. Perhaps following the brilliant work of ATC threading an A380 through the London TMA didn't cut the mustard ? Apologies if this was covered in part 1, I can only comment on Pt2 and what we were greeted with was the usual pastiche of human misery and misfortune.
We kicked off with "The Missing Child Round",always a good initial attention grabber seeing a Customer Service Assistant par excellence mobilise the troops to locate said child, this of course was followed by a hero moment when a fellow member of staff forensically tracked down said child 20 yards away.
"I was only doing my job" he said somewhat sheepishly as a microphone was forced down his throat, embarrassing for him (...and indeed us).
We moved onto an irate chap who turned up late and subsequently vented his spleen on camera, then some hilarity was introduced as we moved to the Bangladesh Biman check in area where a world record attempt at trying to cram 48,000 pieces of luggage onto a 777 "appeared" to be underway !
We of course need the "animal interest", so if the bird scarer was a bit dull, cue the introduction of the Alpaca, a somewhat amusing creature at the best of times made all the more so by watching Heathrow staff trying to manhandle 20 of the beast around the apron, as I mentioned previously the duller moments were interspersed with some superb imagery and of course the gap filling opportunity to reinforce those subliminal messages.
"full to bursting"
"an aircraft takes off or lands every 60 seconds"
Sadly for the Heathrow spin police I suspect this was lost on an audience more interested in what could go wrong next and of my goodness did it.....enter stage right the first flight of the BA787 Dreamliner to Kuala Lumpur.
Willie Walsh must have been apoplectic as some skilful editing coupled to a troublesome starter motor on a 3rd party fuel truck provided what can only be described as comedy gold.
With time ticking by and the narrator enforcing the need for "precision planning" and the criticality of an "on time departure", the somewhat chirpy cockney fuel truck driver breezily announces ......
"the fuel truck has broken down under the wing" or words to that effect.
As if this didn't sink in with the audience we then cut to the now somewhat jittery but ever smiling push back team leader....
"it seems the fuel truck won't start" he confirms in case we missed it earlier !
Fortunately the rapid response engineer is called and after much fiddling driver number 1 who reported the initial incident confirms that the rescue engineer
quote " ........doesn’t have a bloody clue"
Quite how the team leader managed a smile at this point is beyond me, as I suspect he wished he was in Kuala Lumpur himself, the camera consistently panned back and forth to him and his able assistant for a remedy that was out of their hands.
We now cut to some skilful editing with the pilot suggesting
"a lot of people have paid many 000s to be on this flight so we need to go on-time"
The narration of course becomes ever more sombre probably as dark as the mood at BA HQ by now !!!!
Eventually all ends well but for 10 minutes it was excruiatingly painful !
Maybe my propaganda observation was harsh, possibly more Dads Army than Big Brother !