ABSTRACT
On Friday, after the splashdown, a good idea was almost wasted in Bird's Eye View of Great Britain (BBC-2). The old-literary commentary and the bumper sound effects were overridden, fortunately, by the beauty and strangeness of the land seen from the air. What came nearer to spoiling it was the rush towards the end: south of the Pennines and east of Wales is a large country, and the need to look, to seem to be looking for oneself from an unexpected new viewpoint, was chipped away by wrong timing: the strength of the view from the helicopter crammed down to a coach tour. Yet what could be seen, earlier, was so fine and so impressive that I felt like writing to ask for a series of helicopter programmes, taking each region as it came. It would be less expensive and less dangerous, anyway, than a repeat performance of that unforgettable view of the hanging and shadowed Earth.
