An interesting World in Action I did then, it was probably before your time. The Americans had one of these special sort of spy aeroplanes that were continuously going around up in the sky, very, very high up. And I don’t know how we got to know this, but it had to be refuelled, and it was refuelled right on the edge of the Mediterranean, at a place called Palomares. I mean, way up in the sky. And for whatever reason, things went wrong and the plane came down – but it was also carrying an atomic bomb. And the person who was running World in Action at that time was – well, I think he started World in Action, obviously with the powers-that-be in command at the time in Granada – Tim Hewitt, a very vibrant, enormous man, there is no other way of describing him. And he said, “Brian, you speak Spanish, don’t you, a bit?” And I said, “Yes, a bit.” “Well, get yourself off to Alicante, and then get yourself to the fishing village of Palomares and see what you can get.” And where the bomber came down, I think the bomber landed in one of the melon fields there, so I got a very good cameraman who said he’d come. And off we went.
I remember we got to Palomares, there was a lot of hustle and bustle and a lot of American troops around, and the wreckage from that bomber was across this very big field of melons. And Louie Wolfers was the cameraman. Lovely guy. And he and I crawled right across the melon field to where the wreckage was of the plane. The atomic bomb was still in the Mediterranean. And when we got up as close as we could. We started filming. And lo and behold, they got us! The Americans. Luckily, luckily… I mean, we just had a… I don’t think it was a hand-wound Bolex. But it was sort of a very small camera for those days. And I had a very small tape recorder, so I was able to make basic recordings of the atmosphere, etc. And luckily, the very small reels of film fitted nicely into my trousers, as it were, into my pants in fact. The crucial two rolls. And the commander was furious that we’d been doing this. I can remember he sort of picked me up – I’m not a terribly big guy – sort of shook me and said, “Now get yourselves out of here.” So, we got out quick, but we had the two crucial reels of film of the wreckage. Then, quite unbelievably, some weeks later Tim went off to Australia, Tim Hewitt, he started putting the film together. I’ll never forget this. He came in one Monday morning when… I don’t know if World in Action later continued… we always had that Monday meeting where we decided basically what we were going to do next week, and a few weeks after as it were. And Tim said, “I think they’re going to get that bomb out of the sea. Brian, off you go again and see what you can get.” And we went back to Alicante. The bomb was in the sea. At the time, still they hadn’t got it up. And we had to get out to where the American fleet was, all the ships they had there to pull this bomb out of the sea. And so we decided to get a yacht. So, we went down to one of the sailing clubs and we got ourselves a sailing boat. It so happened that the woman’s boat to whom it belonged was a very pretty girl. I don’t know, early 20s. And we asked her if she’d mind, when we got near to the fleet – well, she was probably in her bikini already – would she get into a bikini and just sort of be obvious on the bough of the boat. Sat there. And you know, we sailed through these ships. And there was the cameraman – Mike Boltby was his name, just the kind of guy one needed for that type of sort of exercise – with a lovely lass on the bow of the boat, laughing as well. Because he was filming. And so we did. We got this. We put the film together. And it, yes, it did all right, I think. In fact, I know it did.