More tantrums, please! And call it Heathrow: Flying Off The Handle

FEUD OF THE NIGHT: As Bananarama reunited on Tonight At The London Palladium (ITV), their ex-producer Pete Waterman told me he’d be there — even though they famously banned him from the studio. ‘I’ll be wearing my tin hat,’ he said.

Heathrow: Britain’s Busiest Airport Confessions Of A Junior Doctor

Some people will try anything on. A female passenger was loudly demanding to be allowed on board her flight, in Heathrow: Britain’s Busiest Airport (ITV), with 80lb of ‘hand luggage’.

Her personal items were heaped so high that she needed a baggage trolley to shift them. This wasn’t luggage, it was a mobile hoard, which included her reading matter for the plane — a bundle of documents that could fill a library shelf — and a shoulder-bag big enough to swallow a Spacehopper.

But for sheer bloody-minded awkwardness she couldn’t match the Indian gentleman who had missed his connecting flight to Dublin, owing to the fact that the plane he was supposed to catch had just left . . . from Gatwick.

Claiming to be incapable of understanding what the problem was, he hectored, blathered, bullied and wheedled in an effort to obtain a free ticket.

Paying for it himself was out of the question, he insisted: how could he, when he’d come from a land of poverty to ‘the richest country in the world’?

Work is currently under way to build a third runway at Heathrow, but perhaps what it really needs is a gigantic catapult, to fire people like this chancer straight back where they came from, with an almighty twang.

Dealing with him was the unenviable job of the airport’s Passenger experience manager, Sue, who has spent 23 years sorting out strops and meltdowns. To get rid of him, she ended up reaching into her pocket and loaning him a tenner, to help him buy a ticket. That’s money she won’t see again.

The last problem passenger on her shift was a young woman in hysterics because her flight was delayed. The girl had just spent a ghastly gap year in Nepal, and this delay had sent her blood pressure higher than the Himalayas. They say travel broadens the mind, but more often it just narrows the arteries.

Sadly, these vignettes made up only a small part of the show. It seems there’s a documentary set at an airport, or on a cruise ship, or on a stretch of motorway, every night . . . and most of them are padded with interchangeable scenes featuring maintenance men.

Segments about the plumbing are apparently mandatory, though there can’t be anyone who enjoys that. This series would be far more entertaining if it just followed unflappable Sue as she pacified the passengers. It could be called Heathrow: Flying off The Handle.

Some of the young medics on Confessions Of A Junior Doctor (C4) weren’t even born when Sue started her job. Almost all the more senior levels are made up of men: the programme revealed that just 11 per cent of consultant surgeons are women.

one exception to the rule explained why: 32- year- old trainee Kayla, who had left her toddler son with his grandparents in China so she could study in Britain, said that her male colleagues were all egomaniacs. To stand any chance of getting noticed, she believed she had no choice but to dress, talk and act like a man.

But all the natural emotions of a mother were torturing her. She felt crushed by guilt that her little boy was not with her, and her videochats with him only made the longing worse.

The male staff semed to suffer none of same emotions. one said blithely that he coped by being ‘a terrible parent’, as though this was something Kayla might like to try.

That’s dreadful advice. I’d ask for a second opinion — and not from a surgeon. They clearly make rotten family therapists.