Tonight's TV
Plane sailing?
Big, Bigger, Biggest (Five, 8pm);
Hotel Babylon (BBC1, 9pm);
Horizon (BBC2, 9pm)
WHEN Croydon Airport, near
London, was the country's
main airport in 1920, pilots
were flying by the seat of
their pants as they found
their way home using landmarks.
"Oh, there's the Tower of London, left
hand down a bit. And isn't that
Buckingham Palace? Turn a bit to the
right". That sort of thing.
A collision on April 7, 1922, made them
think again. New technology, using radio
bursts from the aircraft, enabled people at
the airport to establish the flight path.
That was the birth of air traffic control.
Then, Croydon had about 60 flights a
week. Today, Heathrow handles up to 100
flights an hour.
Big, Bigger, Biggest won't do anything to
appease those opposing airport expansion,
but will send aviation enthusiasts into
orgasms of delight with its endless list of
facts and figures about Heathrow's
Terminal Five.
The new terminal cost billions to build,
but the construction was far from plane
sailing, with 19 years of work going into the
three huge terminal buildings.
The programme uses the terminal to
trace the history of airports, explaning why
and how such aspects as runways, baggagehandling,
terminals, moving sidewalks and
control towers have developed to keep pace
with developments in flying.
As aircraft have grown bigger and
passengers increased, so airports have had
to change.
That includes using a new kind of
concrete underfoot to support the new
seven-storey tall Airbus A380, and
developing personal rapid transport, which
means driverless pods - that's robot taxis to
you and me, ferrying people around
airports quickly and efficiently.
The terminal also has an amazing
automatic baggage-handling system. Run
by robots, it has the advantage of not taking
a tea break and can move your bag from
check-in to plane in less than 15 minutes.
In the tradition of Five's programmes on
moving big buildings, we see the control
tower being built on the edge of the airport
and then moved into position in one piece
on three transporters designed to carry a
space shuttle.
Passengers on the aircraft taxiing to the
terminal must have thought they were
seeing things as the tower moved across the
tarmac in front of them at 2mph.
LET'S hope none of the passengers is
booked into Hotel Babylon, the BBC's
glossy and glamorous, but ultimately
tedious and unbelievable, drama series.
New manager Jack (Lee Williams) is told
he needs to be part conman, part showman.
At present, he's total drip. Faced with
John Barrowman at full throttle as a
director filming at the hotel, he'd do best to
run and hide in the nearest cupboard.
His staff are uncontrollable. The barman
goes around doing De Niro impersonations,
although I agreed with the verdict that
"You sound like a Spanish Mr Bean".
Amid all the corny chaos, the storyline
about the dying girl unable to tell her
nearest and dearest seems woefully out of
place.
HOTEL Babylon is a show you watch
and instantly forget. Horizon's
documentary How Does Your
Memory Work? offers a more serious
examination of memory loss.
John, born prematurely and whose
memory circuit never fully developed,
cannot bring his past to mind. He relies on
his mother and photographs to remind him
of his past.
His condition means he is trapped in the
present. Unable to draw on the past, he
can't look to the future. Think how
inhibiting that is.
Genevieve's memory was affected by an
assault. She is given drugs, not to erase the
trauma, but to tone it down and let her to
get on with her life.
Sixty-year-old John is shown on his daily
run. He looks normal enough, but seven
years ago he was diagnosed with
Alzheimer's. "The future - forget it," is his
advice.
Outwardly, he is fine but his wife tells
how it affects every single thing in his life.
He can't even get a glass of water. If he
remembered where the tap was, he wouldn't
remember how to turn it on.
His wife brings home the situation as she
likens him to a tree with Dutch elm disease
- dying from the inside out.
10:14am Tuesday 25th March 2008
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