Amid the love and courage, why is Manchester’s top brass silent?
How DAMNING that neither Greater Manchester Police, nor the city’s Fire And Rescue Service, was willing to participate in a documentary investigating last year’s terrorist atrocity that claimed 22 blameless lives at a pop concert.
Manchester: The Night Of the Bomb (BBC2) included testimony from the handful of brave British Transport Police officers who battled to save lives in the aftermath, from the security forces who admitted they had missed crucial warning signs and even from the cowardly killer’s schoolteachers.
But no explanation was forthcoming from two of the emergency services that could have done most to impose order and evacuate the wounded in the minutes after a home-made device was detonated.
Police and fire crews were ordered to hang back, with paramedics, until the scene of carnage in the foyer of the Manchester Arena had been swept for secondary bombs.
No blame belongs to individual officers. The courage of Britain’s police and firefighters is beyond question. It’s the culture of red tape protocols and health-and- safety edicts that is responsible — that and the inability of those at the top to admit their mistakes.
This programme, marking the
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first anniversary of the attack, wasted little time on the contemptible killer. He was a drug user and an inadequate, filled with bitterness because young women ignored him. Nothing about him was noteworthy, except that he was born and educated in Manchester — a fact that still defies comprehension.
All that was good about the documentary came from the children caught up in the bombing, some of them surviving serious injuries. Every one was able to describe how excited they had been before the concert by Ariana Grande, and what a thrilling evening it was.
one girl told of her amazement and delight when the star saved her new hit for the show’s finale. These were children protected by their innocence, able to separate the magic of the performance from the horror of what followed.
That clear- eyed innocence also captured vivid impressions of the bombing itself. Emilia, 12, remembered the naive thoughts that rushed through her head when she saw her older sister lifted off her feet by the blast: ‘I thought she’s maybe jumped or she’s got superpowers to go that high. But I could see on her face, it wasn’t even an expression — it was just pure shock.’
Their love and courage is the lasting legacy of this hateful attack. As for lessons learned, we’ll have to wait for the top brass to accept some culpability.
A far more trivial type of denial afflicts architect George Clarke. He just cannot bring himself to confess when one of his bright ideas turns out to be idiotic.
This time, on Amazing Spaces Special: 24-Hour Build (C4), the boisterous designer and his excitable builder mate will were determined to erect a house in a single day and night beside a Snowdonia lake — honouring a welsh tradition called ‘ty unnos’ or ‘one-night house’.
They cheated somewhat, using pre- constructed timber A-frames for the cabin’s wooden skeleton and transporting the slate with motorised barrows. The weather didn’t help, though, with gale force winds and torrential rain.
But the truly daft notion was to try to create a cascade of water across the doorway of the house, by diverting a spring into a perforated metal gutter. It wasn’t so much a waterfall, more a noisy series of dribbles.
Did George not think that North wales was already wet enough?