Ben De Pear, Channel 4 News Foreign Editor, blogs on the end of the Chilean miners rescue and how it was received by a younger than expected audience.
Ben De Pear, Channel 4 News Foreign Editor, blogs on the end of the Chilean miners rescue and how it was received by a younger than expected audience.
On Tuesday night along with millions around the world I tried to stay up to watch the mine rescue.
I fell asleep on the couch around midnight after speaking at length to our team there; when at 12.30 I woke to see engineers re-cabling the capsule with some sort of ratchet, and the mines minister announced a 2 hour delay, I reluctantly went to bed.
At 0615 I was back on the couch. The Bolivian was stepping into the capsule. Above his wife waited surrounded by the behelmeted good and grand of the Chilean government. They ran the highlights I’d slept through almost on a loop.
The first hero (brilliantly coined Buzz Lightyear by our cameraman in Chile Dai Baker) dropping in through the roof. A moon landing in reverse, with the same stuttering TV pictures. The first man up. The hugs and kisses and celebrations. I was transfixed.
A few minutes later my five-year-old son, who’s never willingly watched TV news joined me. He stared at the screen and asked me what was happening?
Normally when Channel 4 News comes on he is whisked to bed; if its a foreign story that leads it’s often about Afghanistan and not appropriate, if the TV remains on with a domestic or political lead then he’s not interested. “This…is….soooo…boring” is his normal reaction.
This was different. There are 33 men (he loves the number), at the bottom of a mine, basically a really long hole like in Fantastic Mister Fox, I explain.
They were down it because that’s how you get gold. The roof collapsed; like in Fantastic Mister Fox when the farmers are chasing them. They’ve been there for 66 days. The miners above got the longest drill in the whole world with a TV camera on it on a really long cable like the Hoover and they guided it “by remote control”, another two word combination he loves.
The Navy made that space capsule and they put it on a really long metal rope and now they’ve dropped it down the hole. He gets his Lego men and a Lego winching string and dangles it from the couch to the floor.
“What the hey-ck” he says. He’s transfixed. He eats his breakfast for the first time in front of the TV, and gets dressed for school. The commentator says that one of the men, like my son, is diabetic. “How did they get his injections down there?”
Oh yeah – before they dug the big hole-or the hole just big enough for people to come up standing up, they had a little hole like a tube. They sent bottles of water, sweets, sausages, games and the man’s diabetic kit down it. “What the hey-ck” he says.
That night for the first time he watches Channel 4 News. He watched an exuberant Jonathan Miller explain the rescue and the joy. The next morning he watched it again.
At school his friend Jimmy is now known as Jimmy Sanchez after the youngest miner rescued. The kids want mini rescue capsules.
Last night we watched the piece from Wednesday again and then Thursday and Fridays’ offerings with the first and exclusive TV interviews with a miner and then the first with Buzz Lightyear.
I explained how our team there; Miller, Producer Sarah Corp, Cameraman Dai Baker and dropping in at the last moment like Buzz Lightyear, our editor Chris Shlemon, were living in camper vans and it was cold at night and hot during the day, and how they had hardly slept and kept on working.
“What the hey-ck” he said. What the hey-ck indeed.