A Very British UFO Hoax was not really all it should have been. Largely speaking it was going out at the wrong time, with kids who'd have loved it safely tucked up in bed and a few spurious "fucks" to signify it's being adult.
Effectively it's a slightly upmarket reworking of Scrapheap Challenge and those historical rebuild shows. A group of "experts" gather together to build a realistic looking UFO. In case we should ever forget that they worked on movies building miniatures and special effects, they sported a permament collection of James Bond crew T-shirts (although I wouldn't be seen dead in a Die Another Day shirt in case anyone thought I had something to do with the atrocious water-skiing CGI farce).
For something that was supposed to be kept secret, an awful lot of people got involved, and we had the usual "things going wrong" issues as the big day arrived. And there's another problem, the deadline is always a TV budget issue, not a real deadline. If you're trying to scare people in Avebury, you can do it any day of the week.
Come the big day, and they gather in some fields nearby with a chain of remote controllers ready to guide the balloon affair around. It didn't look entirely convincing if you ask me, and was nobody suspicious of the number of camcorder equipped people wandering around the vicinity and interviewing pub clientale after the event?
Footage duly appeared on Sky News and ITV News, although we didn't learn how it reached the TV channels. Did the producers place it, or did members of the public forward it themselves? We should have been told.
There weren't any real technical obsticles to overcome, as the thing was effectively a somewhat larger version of those hobby radio-controlled airships you can buy. Disappointing overall.
Posted by adambowie at October 9, 2003 01:49 PM