Bosh! Big Jet TV blows all other storm coverage away

The felt roof off the neighbour’s shed blew clean away. An unknown number of tiles crashed into the patio and smashed into a hundred pieces. A trampoline landed in my mum’s garden, smashing through the greenhouse windows as it did so.

But did any of this really happen? No one saw it. No one heard it, either; 80mph winds ripped through half the country, but a reasonable chunk of said country knew almost nothing of it, because they found themselves glued to their laptops, watching a gloriously excitable man called Jerry, shouting at the undercarriage of jumbo jets as they made their furtive, wobbly way onto the Tarmac at Heathrow.

The YouTube account Big Jet TV Live has been a major player in the aviation nerd business for quite a long time, but Storm Eunice was its moment in the big time. When the winds peaked at noontime, there were more than 200,000 people listening to Big Jet TV big dog Jerry Dyer’s exaltant cries of “bosh!” as the planes queued up to drop in to the gale and take their chance at glory.

Frankly, it had absolutely everything. Television sports executives who have been asked to explain the seemingly neverending popularity of darts will always put it down to the perfect simplicity of the spectacle. In or out of the bed. Hit or miss. The fraction of a millimetre margin between triumph and disaster, coming at you, on repeat, over and over again. The purest distillation of what it is to love sport, the complexity stripped away until all is left is hyper-concentrated adrenaline.

And this was what Big Jet TV had too. Except that every arrow weighed a couple of hundred tonnes and an unknown amount of fragile human life or death, blowing about in the hell sky over Hounslow. And in Jerry Dyer, it also had its very own Sid Waddell.

Storm Eunice vs Heathrow Airport was like watching Michael Atherton vs Allan Donald at Trent Bridge in 1998. Each minute bringing a new payload, new terror, new jeopardy, not to mention plenty of patriotism.

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“Go on the Brits! Go on the Brits! … Here come the Russians; let’s see if the Russians can handle it.”

The Russians, in the end, could handle it, but not everyone could. Sympathy must be extended to the pilot of a Qatar Airways A380, whose first aborted landing attempt was followed a matter of seconds later, by an Emirates A380 dropping on to the runway with no problem at all. “Bosh!”

Qatar Airways did land in the end but it took a full three attempts spread over almost an hour. By the time of the second attempt, the plane’s passengers will certainly have spent quite some time within phone signal range, so it seems likely their international shame was not a mystery onboard. As if the pressure of 200,000 viewers was not enough.

Jerry Dyer, it must be said, completely aced his moment in the big time. It was a spectacular performance. He juggled the inevitable dozens of media requests while live on his own channel, which was, if nothing else, a clear window into the life of whoever finds themself the story of the day. “I don’t care about television and radio interviews,” he said at one point. “I care about my viewers.”

He would also, at one point, explain to a persistent producer from Channel 4 News that, “this isn’t a TV studio, it’s a field,” though they did get their interview in the end.

Of course, it hardly needs pointing out that none of it was really a matter of life and death. If landings could not be made, the planes would simply be diverted elsewhere, as any regular holiday maker to Europe’s windiest airport, Madeira, can tell you. (I happen to have a few in the family. They know quite a bit about Lisbon, despite never once having booked to fly there.)

But the jeopardy is real. Success or failure, Qatar Airways third attempt would have been its last. Should it have failed and headed off elsewhere then that’s potentially several hundred hotel rooms that would need to be paid for, not to mention the humiliation.

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It is also tedious but nevertheless true to point out that if the man-made climate emergency is to lead to more catastrophic weather events of this kind, it is arguably unfortunate that, on this evidence, the stock response will be for a nation to become instantly enraptured at the goings on at Europe’s busiest airport, where the worst storm in 30 years is not deemed sufficient to prevent the breathtaking landing of a new aeroplane roughly once a minute, for six straight hours. “Look at the rudder action on that!”

As I type this, the neighbour’s gutter has come down too, and is now cartwheeling through the air, perhaps in search of his old friend, the shed roof. Once upon a time, such things might cause neighbours to come together. Not any more. I don’t suppose we’ll ever discuss the subject.

The real community’s online, huddled around their devices, drinking in the thrill of those wonky jumbos, but mainly just watching Jerry Dyer’s finest hour.