Facing Davy Jones’s locker, and who do you call? Mum, of course!
HELPING HANDS OF THE WEEK: Is this the friendliest ever Great British Bake Off (C4)? All rivalry seems to be forgotten, as contestants urge each other on, pitching in to make sure everyone finishes on time. Let’s hope they’re still friends at the final.
All the nice girls love a sailor. It’s as true today as it was a century ago, when music hall star Hetty King used to dress up in naval uniform and belt out the line for her racy, crossdressing act.
How the Edwardians would laugh at today’s millennials who think they invented ‘gender fluidity’.
There’s always been something about a chap in uniform that gets an audience’s pulses racing, which is why so many documentaries are fascinated by the forces and emergency services.
Yesterday’s schedules included Canny Cops on BBC1, following the police in Durham; Fighter Pilot on ITV, charting the combat training of RAF heroes; and even C5’s Inside The Tower Of london, featuring some portly but resplendent Beefeaters.
But sailors have always been this island nation’s favourite, none more than the volunteer navy of the Royal National lifeboat Institution [RNlI]. Their daring rescues make endlessly impressive viewing on Saving Lives At Sea (BBC2), now into its fourth series.
Other emergency reality shows such as Ambulance pad out the drama with banter between the life-savers, joking around between jobs. There’s no time for that in the RNlI: whatever they’re doing, the pager can go off at any time — in the middle of the night, during dinner or, as we saw, halfway through a training exercise.
One minute the Salcombe lifeboatmen in Devon were on a mockup mission to save Dead Fred, their mannequin, from a life-or-dummy crisis. The next, they were speeding out to sea, answering a desperate appeal from a fisherman whose boat had caught fire.
Sailor Joe, nursing his rickety old vessel towards the boatyard, was so stricken with panic when he saw flames leaping from the hold that he didn’t think to call 999 — and rang his mother instead. luckily, she had the sense to raise the alarm with the Coastguard. Thank heaven for mums, eh?
Bodycams and video lenses fitted to the inflatable rescue boats do a great job of capturing the action. Often the picture is blurred with sea spray, but that simply gives us a better idea of the difficult conditions faced by the crews.
Two of the call-outs were especially tense, saving a woman and her dog from the Thames, and dragging a young man from the mud of the Sheerness coastline, racing against time as he slowly froze to death.
We never found out what happened to Dead Fred though. Fingers crossed it wasn’t a case of ‘mannequin overboard!’.
There were no uniforms in the Amsterdam ‘coffee shop’ or drugs den where High Society: Cannabis Cafe (C4) was filmed — though two of those sampling marijuana were former coppers.
Ex-detectives and old mates Ronnie and Des got together to see if they’d been missing the point of joints for all these years. It was like Gone Fishing with spliffs instead of rods, two pals having a chuckle about old times. The experiment went badly awry when Des suffered a ‘whitey’, a drug-induced drop in blood pressure that left him close to collapse. Talk about asking for trouble.
TV execs are excited about cannabis at the moment. last week Dr Javid Abdelmoneim was getting stoned on BBC1 in the name of dubious science.
This show had fewer scientific pretensions, though it did make a half-hearted attempt to find out whether getting high could ease the pain of multiple sclerosis. Mostly, it was just couples trying weed for the first time together and having a heart-toheart, while the cafe staff eavesdropped.
First Dates On Dope, in other words.