Life-saving heroes who console themselves with a big girlie cry
THE QUESTION of ‘What would you do?’ if any of us encountered a person in peril is an enduring one at dinner parties. While most of us would love to think we’d be heroic, we’re probably kidding ourselves.
Saved (ITV) looked at the people who, when faced with the choice, chose to risk their lives for a stranger rather than walk away.
When retired engineer Neville Powell set out for a drive in the countryside on the weekend of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee celebrations in 2002, the plan was to admire the Sussex Downs. Instead, he encountered a car engine on fire in the middle of the road.
The engine had been thrown from the vehicle that teenagers Peter and Adam were driving after they spun off the road into a ditch. To make matters worse, the boys’ car was on fire and Peter was trapped — impaled by a wooden stake from a fence that had gone through the rear window, the driver’s seat and his torso.
Neville described his decision to try to rescue them as ‘ a chemical reaction’. With the aid of another passer- by, he was able to tear the doors off and pull Peter’s entire seat out before the car exploded into flames.
Fourteen years on and Peter and Neville are close friends. Peter lost an arm in the accident, but still said whenever anything good happened in his life he found himself thinking: ‘Thanks to you, Neville.’
Just as lucky to be alive was keen sea fisherman Dan Ward from Swansea. Despite having checked the weather before heading off, he got into difficulties when his kayak overturned in strong currents.
Aware that holding onto his kayak was pulling him further out to sea, Dan let it go, but his attempts to swim back to shore were fruitless. After an hour in the freezing water he was considering removing his life jacket for a swift ending.
When surfer Steve Lewis learned a man was in trouble at sea, his first reaction was ‘What an idiot!’, but his second was: ‘What if it was me? I wouldn’t want to be alone out there.’
He paddled out to Dan, who had severe hypothermia and managed to drag him back to shore.
As programmes go, it is hardly the most original concept, but what made Saved so charming was that, rather than being gung-ho about their actions, the two heroes couldn’t believe they had it in them.
As Steve said: ‘It was the bravest thing I’ve ever done, but I still had a good girlie cry afterwards.’
When it came to the participants of The Secret Life Of The Family (C5), there was no such bravery, but an awful lot of bone idleness.
Six families had their homes fitted with remote cameras so we could see how they lived behind closed doors. By the end of the hour-long first episode, we had discovered: teenagers are lazy, the women do most of the housework and small children are messy. Hardly revelatory.
At the Demirel family home in Kent, mum Jill spent most of her time shouting and then couldn’t understand why her three children were so noisy. The Cooper parents attempted to bribe their children to do chores.
At one stage they were paying their offspring so much (to do jobs badly) that it would have been cheaper to employ a cleaner.
The premise of last night’s show was that the women of the house would attempt to get their lazy children and slob husbands to help out more. Hus, the man of the Demirel household, reluctantly agreed to strip some beds, but not before warning his wife: ‘ Don’t blame me if it all goes wrong.’
You may wonder what could possibly go wrong when making a bed? Well, another dad, James Bunt from Bristol, took 42 minutes to carry out this task and somehow incurred a flesh wound from changing a pillowcase.
The voiceover by Outnumbered star Hugh Dennis was jolly and irreverent, but other than that, The Secret Life Of The Family was an hour-long bore-fest.
And, in removing the need for film crews, C5, whose schedules are already dominated by cheap reality TV, has managed to cut costs (and quality) even further.
CHRISTOPHER Stevens is away.