It’s often said that knowledge is power, so why do I feel increasingly powerless the more I learn? Take Skies Above Britain (BBC2), a new five-part series that aims to inform us about the 600,000 people travelling over our heads each day, yet chiefly succeeds in convincing me to never again leave the house without a hard hat.
It’s the kind of show where words such as “crowded”, “chaos” and “high-speed metal coffins” are tossed casually into the voiceover as if they’re no big deal. I may have imagined that last one, but still.
The series begins inside National Air Traffic Services (Nats) in Swanwick, where many of the planes taking off and landing in the UK are supervised. Who knew such things happened in a sleepy village near Portsmouth rather than at the airports themselves? Makes sense, I guess, but it certainly reinforces the idea these high-speed metal coffins (sorry, planes) carrying actual humans really are just dots on a screen.
Each person working at Nats has to juggle 15 planes at once, but at least Juliet Kennedy, operations director, was on hand to reassure us. “All the stuff coming in is above all the stuff coming out,” she explained, positioning one hand above the other, “and their job is to make that happen” – she reversed her hand positions – “without this happening.” At this point she started wiggling her hands around, and to be honest I didn’t even want to find out what that meant.
She wasn’t finished, though. “We’re a superstitious bunch,” she said, as the camera panned to a figurine dangling from the ceiling. “It’s a guardian angel, guarding the controllers and making sure we’re able to look after the skies.”
Enough! Get me out of here! Preferably to somewhere more reassuring, such as, erm, the RAF Typhoon counter-terrorism base. This is where a select group of pilots who have been on £8m training courses are primed and ready to leg it on to hi-tech planes to deal with any unidentified craft in British airspace. When Nats can’t get a plane to communicate with them, we rely on this lot to sort it out by scrambling jets in a matter of minutes. Once there, they trail them for a bit then waggle their wings theatrically, before flying up beside them and revealing their massive missiles like some kind of aggressively militaristic mating call. If this doesn’t work, then the prime minister makes a call on whether or not to blast them out of the sky. Theresa May is on holiday right now, and Boris Johnson is in charge. Just a thought.
The show did its best to ramp up the drama, but actually there was precious little. The unidentified plane that wandered into Gatwick’s flight path and forced the cancellation of all arrivals turned out to be piloted by a plonker. The plane trailed by a Typhoon that refused to respond turned out to be a training exercise. Boring. Although probably for the best, no matter how much the start of the third world war would have made for a more exciting hour of television.
There was less nerve-jangling information shared in the latest series of Great Canal Journeys (Channel 4), in which Timothy West and Prunella Scales partake in genteel canal trips around Europe. Episode one saw them venturing through Venice’s canal network, where great coffee and even greater culture awaited. But the show also touched on Scales’s worsening dementia. West is worried that she is starting to lose her confidence and hoped Venice, a place they visited decades ago, would bring back happy memories for her. Sure enough, she was soon surprising him by reciting the libretto from The Barber of Seville. The whole charm of this show rests not on their destinations but rather on the fact that, now both into their ninth decade, the couple are clearly still in love and possessed of a thirst for life. Thirst is a good word for it, actually.
“Oh, look!” says Scales, spotting a bottle of wine left in the fridge of their boat. “I think we had better set off first,” suggests West.
About two minutes later, Scales is at it again, asking: “Are you allowed to have some wine at the wheel?” Apparently there is a famous Venetian phrase: “For every 4km of canal you will need a litre of wine.” So it’s perhaps unsurprising that, later on, we see them lost and stuck under a bridge. The skies may be safer than I feared, but the canals are full of wine-swilling pensioners running amok. I’m quite tempted to buy a houseboat and join them.
