Flight into Danger

A promotional poster for my Flight into Danger documentary, created for me by Andrew-Mark Thompson

I can’t say for certain when I first heard of Flight into Danger. I am reasonably sure, though, that it must have been in the book The Doctors: 30 Years of Time Travel by Adrian Rigelsford, which I would have purchased with saved-up paper round money sometime in the mid-1990s, probably from The Works discount bookshop on Montague Street in Worthing – which in my memory often used to have remaindered copies of those Boxtree books.
 
The Doctors is fairly well-known as a book with a lot wrong with it, and I certainly wouldn’t now recommend it to anyone as a serious or reliable source of information. But nonetheless, in spite of all the much-catalogued flaws of the book and its author, I do have a certain nostalgic affection for it. One of the things I liked was the way in which, like the infinitely superior Doctor Who: The Sixties, it brought in background information about some of the wider television context and history important to the creation of Doctor Who – information which was often hard to come by as a nineties tweenager in a pre-internet household.
 
And one of those bits of context and history was a brief mention of Flight into Danger, and the part it played in Sydney Newman ending up working in the UK.
 
So I’d known from that point what an important part of the story of the creation of Doctor Who it was. Therefore, it was something I came back to many years later, in 2022, when I was working on my book which eventually emerged as Pull to Open – telling that origin story and trying to place it in the wider background and context which I’d long found so fascinating, and which I thought other people might do as well.
 
I therefore did quite bit of research into the play, and particularly how it was received here in the UK, when writing the chapter about Sydney Newman’s background and career and how he’d ended up coming to work in Britain and eventually at the BBC. It was clear that Flight into Danger was indeed very important to all of this, but I also found it a fascinating subject in and of itself – not least, of course, because its part in Newman’s career was only one aspect of the play’s afterlife.
 
In case you didn’t know – and I feel if you’re reading this blog entry that’s exceedingly unlikely, but here we go anyway – Flight into Danger ended up, via its movie remake Zero Hour!, being remade as Airplane!, one of the most famous comedy films of all time.

 

But there were other stories which sprang from it, too. Its star James Doohan going on to become famous as Scotty in Star Trek. It starting Arthur Hailey’s professional writing career, beginning his journey to becoming a multi-millionaire bestselling novelist. And also, the fact that Flight into Danger was just so enigmatic. You couldn’t get it anywhere – it’s not on any streaming service, it’s never had a home media release, and I later discovered it hasn’t been repeated on television at all since 1982. The television history of Canada certainly seems to be a very under-researched subject compared to those of Britain and the US. Added to that the gravitational pull of Airplane! having pretty much blotted out the original source material from history, and it became something I wanted to know much more about.
 
So, even though it wasn’t strictly necessary for the Newman chapter in Pull to Open, while I was working on the book I approached the CBC archives and enquired whether it would be possible to purchase a copy of Flight into Danger directly from them for personal research purposes. I hadn’t expected any kind of positive response, but to my surprise they actually agreed to sell me a copy – for $300. Certainly the most expensive fifty minutes of television I have ever purchased!
 
But it was well worth it, and of course having actually seen the play and owning a copy of it made me want to both look into it more and try to tell its story more widely. At the time of Doctor Who’s 60^th anniversary in 2023, when Pull to Open had come out, I actually tried pitching a Flight into Danger article to some of the broadsheets, convinced that the joint Airplane! origin story and Doctor Who angle would make for an interesting story which most people wouldn’t know about. But sadly, none of their features editors agreed with me!
 
That, then, seemed to be that. But the idea of doing more on Flight into Danger always nagged at me a little, in the background, because I thought it was a story worth telling and one which I could do a decent job of doing so.

 

Towards the end of last year I realised, of course, that April 2026 would see the 70^th anniversary of the play’s original broadcast, and I decided to have a go at doing something through my work at the BBC. I didn’t know exactly what form it might take, but I knew that I would be able to get something out, even if it was just a short package for CNS, the part of the BBC which provides material on national stories and interesting feature items to the BBC Local Radio stations.
 
This all gained more impetus when I discovered that Corinne Conley, the co-star of Flight into Danger, was not only still alive but still performing – I came across a recent YouTube video of her taking part in a poetry reading. After emailing the producer of that particular production, I was able to establish contact and she agreed to record an interview with me at the end of last year about her memories of Flight into Danger, via Zoom from her home in California.
 
Having one of the stars of the actual programme made the whole idea feel so much more alive, and I could feel the thing coming together in my head. Despite having no actual commission to do anything for anyone, I was still confident I could get find some sort of outlet, probably via BBC Sounds, and my confidence built when I was able to record interviews with all of the other guests I’d wanted – Airplane! co-director David Zucker, Sydney Newman biographer Graeme Burk, film and TV expert Melanie Williams, and pilot Emma Henderson.
 
It turned out that Flight into Danger’s writer Arthur Hailey had been from Luton, so I was able to produce a short, 20-minute audio documentary for my BBC East colleagues at BBC Three Counties Radio, for their Secret Bedfordshire series on BBC Sounds, thanks to their Sounds producer there Jane Killick. I was also able to do an accompanying BBC News Online article, and a more specialist feature for the History of the BBC website – for which I was able to access some of the files relating to Flight at the BBC Written Archives Centre at Caversham.

 

All of this has finally gone online over the past few days, and gratifyingly seems to have gone down well with those who are interested in such aspects of television history.
 
And yet…
 
It still doesn’t feel finished, somehow. I still think there is so much more that could be said about Flight into Danger, greater detail which could be gone into. Something longer to be written.
 
So I have started having a poke around… a deeper dive into the research… Putting a few bits of prose together.
 
Because I think that my next non-fiction book may have to be the story of Flight into Danger. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it almost certainly will be – if, that is, I can persuade anybody to publish it!
 
But before I do that, I’ll have to get the thing written first…