Best-selling air disaster documentary

Press, 17 April 1980, Page 15

Best-selling air disaster documentary

From

KEN COATES

in London “Collision Course,” a TV documentary about the in-flight collision of a Yugoslav holiday jet with a British Airways Trident over Zagreb in September, 1976, has become the biggest selling documentary in recent years for Granada Television/ Recent sales to New Zealand and France have brought the total number of countries which have bought the programme to 42. They include Australia, the United States, Belgium, Denmark, Holland and West Germany. “Collision Course” comes from Granada’s innovative drama-document-ary unit, which uses actors to re-create events of major import, from documents, transcripts and eye-witness accounts. It traces the events leading up to, and subsequent to,

the world’s worst mid-air crash.There were no survivors: 176 people died. The Yugoslav air traffic controllers were put on trial for negligence. “Collision Course” follows the course of that trial, and the efforts of a British lawyer to lay the blame where it belongs. Inadequacy in the system was the flaw, he argued, rather than human error. The documentary was largely based on transcripts of hitherto unpublished courtroom records, and the Zagreb air traffic control room was re-: created by Granada designers working from film shot in the room itself.

Anthony Sher plays the air traffic controller, Gradimir Tasic; and David de Keyser portrays Richard Weston, the lawyer who came to prosecute him, and stayed to defend him.