Chris becomes the emergency third pilot
The show’s Your Plan B idea had found one of its biggest assignments yet. Two British Airways pilots were due to train in a Boeing 747 simulator and normally needed a third pilot for the long-haul exercise. When that person could not make it, Chris was sent to the airline’s flight-training centre at Heathrow to fill the empty seat.
Chris had prepared in the only way he considered appropriate: he watched Top Gun for the first time and arrived carrying sunglasses. The real pilots explained that long-haul flights used additional crew so one person could rest while the others remained in the cockpit. Chris immediately decided that professional job titles were not enough and tried to assign everybody Top Gun-style call signs. One pilot reluctantly became Maverick, another Goose and Chris chose “Beaver” for himself.
The simulator impressed him immediately. The cockpit controls were those of the real aircraft and the projected view reproduced Heathrow closely enough to include the terminal and surrounding roads. Scott, listening back in the studio, found it alarming that somebody could train in something that convincing and then progress to carrying actual passengers. Chris found it thrilling.
Captain Beaver takes off
Once in the pilot’s seat, Chris asked whether the professionals really knew what every button did. They did. He was then given the much simpler job of getting the aircraft moving and taking it into the air. Before departure he made sure imaginary passengers had switched off their mobile phones and added his own version of airline language, including a confident “cross-check”, regardless of whether it was normally the captain who said it.
With guidance from the pilots, he opened the throttles and pulled back. The 747 left the runway successfully, although Chris quickly started asking whether he could slow down as everything began happening faster than he expected. Once level, he relaxed enough to bring out the sunglasses and ask whether the simulator could be changed from night to day. A switch transformed the view instantly and allowed Captain Beaver to complete the look.
His first landing was surprisingly good. With instructions coming from the pilot beside him, Chris lined up with the runway, responded to the simulator’s height calls and got the aircraft onto the ground. He became smug enough to suggest that perhaps the professionals should be worried about their jobs. They responded by adding cloud.
The clouds expose the difference between Chris and a pilot
With the runway hidden, the confidence disappeared. Chris tried to judge where the airport should be from the instruments, but when the simulator was paused and the cloud removed he discovered the runway was nowhere near where he thought it was. He attempted to distribute responsibility across the “team”, which amused the pilots after his earlier certainty that he could replace them.
One final night landing gave him a chance to recover. This time he did reach the runway, but the aircraft hit it hard enough for the camera image to shake. Scott said it was the kind of landing which would earn boos rather than applause from passengers. Chris concentrated on the essential fact that the aircraft was on the ground and everybody would theoretically have survived.
The passenger announcements were almost as difficult. Chris began one by telling everyone they were flying near London and that landmarks could be seen on either the left or right, then lost track of where the aircraft actually was. The pilots let him keep talking, and Chris ended the exercise delighted that he had genuinely taken off and landed a simulator used to train airline crews. It was a spectacularly elaborate solution to somebody needing a last-minute Plan B.
Scott finds television presenters who genuinely dislike each other
Scott’s other fascination was the awkward improvised chat between television newsreaders and weather presenters. He found an American example from Philadelphia which went far beyond the usual strained joke. News anchor Nicole and weather presenter Carol appeared to genuinely dislike one another, and their on-air exchanges became progressively less disguised.
One complained about receiving only reluctant applause, another refused to engage with a monkey joke during a handover, and a later “bananas” gag was dismissed as obviously wasted on the weather presenter. Eventually the exchange became an open argument about somebody pulling a smug expression, followed by a pointed joke about regretting a final glass of something.
Scott and Chris loved how closely it resembled a scene from Anchorman. They briefly tried to manufacture the same hostility between themselves, but decided the problem was that they actually liked each other too much to make it convincing.
Sara Cox dreams of a gap year on Real or No Real
Sara Cox joined Scott for Real or No Real. Pirates really did use eye patches to keep one eye adjusted to darkness so they could move below deck more effectively, despite Sara’s alternative theory that body parts simply fell off more often in the olden days. The capital of the Caribbean island of Saba really was called The Bottom, which immediately made Scott and Sara want to take an immature tour of places with rude-sounding names.
That turned into an imaginary gap year, complete with beaches, braided hair and the problem that Scott was probably rather too old to announce that he was “finding himself”. A proposed battery made from flying-saucer sweets soaked in lemon juice was false, as was a story claiming Miranda Hart had celebrated the end of filming by downing a whole tub of Onken yoghurt.
Sara won 20–10. Scott then returned to an unfinished piece of Real or No Real business: PSY had previously drawn a special round, and the real PSY was due in the studio on Monday. Before then Scott wanted a north-east tribute version, “Tyneside PSY”, to complete the joke. The search was on for somebody with the suit, sunglasses and Gangnam Style moves to match.
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