There's tragedy and then there's design shows...

IN May 1952, BOAC Hermes flight 251 was lost, low on fuel, 1,300 miles off-course, and flying over one of the most inhospitable places on earth.

The Meet The Ancestors special, Desert Rescue, wasn't, as you might expect, an investigation into what happened. There was no mystery about the fate of passengers and crew - the pilot was forced to crash land in the middle of the Sahara desert. The 40 passengers, including a mother and baby, emerged more or less unscathed. The crew suffered a few, apparently minor, injuries.

The programme intercut between a reconstruction of the flight, which lost its way through human error, with film of a 2002 expedition to the crash site to find the aircraft remains.

Chief Steward Len Smee provided a lucid, vivid commentary on both the crash and its aftermath, while remarkable photographs showed the survivors and aircraft after the crash. All the sand reminded you of the seaside, although their ordeal was anything but a jolly holiday.

Days later, and despite being spotted and supplies dropped, the survivors still hadn't been rescued. Eventually, their only choice was to trek 15 miles across scorching desert, where temperatures reached 50 degrees centigrade, to the nearest oasis.

The journey was expected to take 15 hours, but a sandstorm delayed progress. Smee defied the others to carry on, reaching the oasis and guiding rescuers back to the suffering survivors.

The modern expedition wasn't so lucky in locating the fuselage of the crashed aircraft. They learnt it had been "cut up and cast away by opportunist entrepreneurs" two years ago, after lying virtually intact in the desert for 48 years.

What gave the documentary its emotional core were the stories of two expedition members. One was Richard Gurney, who was the baby on the flight. Having survived the crash, his mother was killed in a road accident a year later.

Olwen Haslam was the widow of co-pilot Ted Haslam. The head injury he sustained in the landing was more serious than anyone knew, and he died after reaching the oasis. His death was movingly recalled by Smee.

Olwen first visited his grave in the oasis ten years ago. Now she returned there and saw the crash site for the first time. She introduced Gurney to Bedouin villagers, some of whom had helped Flight 251 survivors half a century ago.

All this made the housebuilding trials and tribulations of John and Terri Westlake seem petty. In Grand Designs, they bought "a grotty little house in the middle of nowhere that has splendid views". They demolished the house and built their own - a box-shaped building clad in timber and with one wall composed entirely of glass.

The usual problems arose such as not enough money, not enough time and, after viewing the finished two-bedroom house, not enough room, if you ask me.

There were times you couldn't help thinking they might have been more sensible to give the "complete disaster of a house" already on the plot a makeover and avoid a lot of heartache. The view would still have been the same.