CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews Dover 24/7: Britain's Busiest Port - From spies to three million bananas, it's all in a day's work
Dover 24/7: Britain's Busiest Port (Ch4)
Talk about a logistical nightmare. The business of keeping our supermarkets stocked with bananas is enough to drive anyone . . . well, round the bend.
A single consignment of fruit from Ecuador can consist of three million bananas packed onto nearly 700 pallets. They arrive in the UK on a 140,000-ton container vessel so huge that it takes four nautical miles to slow down.
Once in dock, cargo operations manager Rob supervises two remote-control cranes that do the unloading.
Andy oversees their delivery to two vast ware-houses. Kev checks every pallet for damage. And another Andy ensures the bananas are kept at exactly 14°C, to prevent them from ripening too soon.
This entertaining portrait of efficient teamwork, in Dover 24/7: Britain's Busiest Port, reminded me of those short information films that used to run before the main feature at Saturday morning cinema shows.
The marvellous Talking Pictures TV channel (Freeview 82) airs one of these most days, a glimpse of postwar Britain under the Look At Life banner. Several are available on their website too, including one from 1967 called The Hidden Strength.
The first five minutes depict the Port of London at work — a very different business to the one in Ch4's Dover documentary.
One of the crates we see unloaded belongs to the Hudson's Bay Company, laden with furs from Canada. These join more pelts from Africa and Russia — including leopard and tiger skins, all to be sold at auction.
At the London Commodity Exchange, brokers trade in cocoa, ginger, spices, rubber and sugar, as well as ivory tusks, ostrich feathers and ambergris — a fragrant wax from the stomach of sperm whales.
When we hark back to 1967 now, we might think of the Summer of Love and Sgt Pepper, or perhaps LSD and the decriminalisation of gay sex. It's fascinating to see a different reality: mountains of big cat furs and the byproducts of the whaling industry.
Maybe in 60 years or so, the port activity in Dover will seem equally alien. Which bits will date fastest is hard to guess, though perhaps it will be coppers Mark and Joe on their rounds, checking the clifftops for spies on surveillance missions.
We didn't see them nick any foreign agents, but they did find one bloke gathering elderflowers for his homemade wine. Even in 1967, that didn't count as a major crime.
Back on the dockside, they dealt with a Romanian man with seven passengers in a five-seater car.
Barred from boarding a ferry, he was ordered to turn around and head back with half his family to his home in Birmingham — with a friend coming to transport the rest.
You might wonder why, when nearly 1,200 people arrived on the south coast via overladen dinghies on Saturday, we can't allow a Romanian family to travel in the opposite direction, simply because their car is a bit crowded.
I've given up trying to make sense of these rules. It's all bananas.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Reuters
21 minutes ago
- Reuters
Boisson lights up French Open, Sinner advances to semis
PARIS, June 4 (Reuters) - Wildcard Lois Boisson lit up the French Open on Wednesday when the home hope toppled sixth-seeded Russian Mirra Andreeva in straight sets to reach the last four, overshadowing men's world number one Jannik Sinner who cruised past Alexander Bublik. While Sinner stretched his Grand Slam winning streak to 19 matches after earning back-to-back titles at the U.S. Open last year and the Australian Open in January, Boisson, ranked 361st at the start of the tournament, thrilled the home crowd with a dazzling performance. Sinner will face the winner between three-time French Open champion Novak Djokovic, hunting a record-breaking 25th singles Grand Slam, and Germany's third seed Alexander Zverev in the last four. Sinner, who beat Bublik in straight sets, is the first Italian man to reach six Grand Slam semi-finals. The 23-year-old, who served a three-month doping ban before returning to action in Rome last month, raced through the first set after twice breaking the Kazakh, who had stunned fifth seed Jack Draper in the previous round. Looking to become the first man representing Kazakhstan to defeat a world number one, Bublik, who hit 37 drop shots against Draper, pulled out this weapon again in the second set. But Sinner broke and held to take it. Ever the entertainer, the 27-year-old Bublik delighted the crowd with an underarm serve but ultimately could do nothing to stop the Italian's march into the last four. Earlier Boisson became the toast of France after staging the tournament's biggest upset with a 7-6(6) 6-3 win over Andreeva, who had been tipped as a title contender, in an electrifying match that had the home crowd on the edge of their seats. The 22-year-old had stunned third seed Jessica Pegula in round four, but on Wednesday pulled off another major shock, beating Andreeva, who had not lost a set in the tournament. "Every tennis player dreams of winning a Slam - and for a French player, Roland Garros even more so. I'll go for it because my dream is to win the final, not the semi-final,' Boisson said. Andreeva, the 18-year-old sixth seed who was bidding to become the youngest female player to reach back-to-back French Open semi-finals in nearly three decades, quickly found herself chasing Boisson's fierce forehand. The underdog, who has been a breath of fresh air in the tournament with her no-nonsense power game and down-to-earth approach, looked to have run out of steam as Andreeva went 3-0 up but she proceeded to win the next six consecutive games. Andreeva repeatedly lost her temper and was handed a warning when she fired a ball into the stands in frustration. With the home crowd the loudest it had been since the start, chants of 'Lois, Lois' echoed across the Philippe Chatrier court, with the decibel level lifted even further because the roof was closed due to rain. Boisson, who will jump almost 300 places in the rankings next week, will face 2023 U.S. Open champion Coco Gauff, who came out on top in an error-ridden quarter-final against Australian Open champion Madison Keys with the pair littering the court with 101 unforced errors. With a total of 49 unforced errors in the first set alone they both struggled to hold serve and Gauff, a semi-finalist in Paris last year, wasted a set point before Keys, who reached the French Open last four in 2018, edged ahead with a tiebreak win. Gauff, who reached the final here in 2022 and is the youngest woman to claim 25 main-draw wins at Roland Garros since Martina Hingis (1995-2000), bounced back to win the next two sets. "So many unforced errors," Gauff, who also had 10 double faults, said to herself after sinking another easy baseline shot into the net. "I was just trying to be aggressive," the 21-year-old Gauff said. "Usually if you're playing too passive, in the end the more aggressive player is going to win. I knew in the second and the third that I had to try my best."
The Independent
22 minutes ago
- The Independent
Northumbrian Water to pay out £15.7m after sewage and water network failings
Northumbrian Water has agreed to pay out £15.7 million after failures in the maintenance and operations of its sewage and water network. Water sector regulator Ofwat said the firm will pay out the 'enforcement package' to local environmental causes and improvements to the region's water infrastructure. Bosses at the watchdog said its failures led to 'excessive spills from storm overflows'. It comes a week after Thames Water was fined a record £122.7 million after it was found to have broken rules over sewage treatment and paying out dividends. Ofwat said the enforcement package is 'greater than the penalty which would otherwise have been imposed' if it had fined the business. It also said the package agreed with the company means it will be spent on local improvements for customers, rather than being directed to the Treasury's consolidated fund. Northumbrian Water chief executive Heidi Mottram said: 'We agree with Ofwat's announcement that the financial settlement will be directed into speeding up our storm overflow reduction plans and in meaningful local initiatives via our Branch Out fund. 'This investment, which will come entirely from Northumbrian Water shareholders and will not be paid for by customers' bills, will enhance our ongoing efforts to support local communities and protect and improve the natural environment here in the North East.' Lynn Parker, senior director for enforcement at Ofwat, said: 'Our investigation has found failures in how Northumbrian Water has operated and maintained some of its sewage works and networks, which has resulted in excessive spills from storm overflows. 'The contraventions we have found at some of their sites will have had an impact on the local environment and customers and it is unacceptable. 'We are pleased that Northumbrian Water has agreed this package. 'We now expect them to move at pace to correct the issues our investigation has identified. 'We hope more companies will follow this example so that the public sees transformative change across the sector.' Northumbrian Water said in December last year that it plans to increase its average water bills by around 21% over the next five years.
Telegraph
26 minutes ago
- Telegraph
Enough is enough. Let Thames Water go bust
There comes a point in every corporate disaster when enough is enough and the plug has to be pulled. One such is Thames Water, which has sailed rudderless from one mishap to the next for over a decade now, with still no resolution in sight. Surprise, the latest hope of salvation – £4bn of new equity from the US private equity outfit KKR – has failed as comprehensively as all previous attempts to give Thames a viable future. After months of due diligence, KKR has concluded what must have been obvious all along – that the political and regulatory risks around Thames Water are just too big to be worth the candle. Water companies have in recent times managed the near-impossible feat of usurping the position once occupied by banks as the most hated corporate sector in the land. Campaigners such as the former Undertones singer Feargal Sharkey have raised the profile of the industry to the point where there is nowhere left to hide. Rising bills in combination with deteriorating water standards have made Thames and its nine, fellow privatised water companies into symbols of wider national failure. If KKR needed any further persuading of the folly of involvement with this nightmare of a company, the lambasting Thames recently received in the House of Commons for sewage spills and retention bonuses must surely have been the final straw. There's a price for everything, it is sometimes said, but maybe not with this industry, where to be an investor or lender is to be seen as the unacceptable face of capitalism in modern form. Good luck to the other bidders said to be circling Thames now that KKR is out of the way. They will no doubt eventually come to the same conclusion. In its current incarnation, Thames is holed below the water line. It's hard to see why anyone would want to take the tiller. The clamour for retribution is now so great as to render almost any form of investment completely unviable. I was an enthusiastic supporter of water privatisation when it was first mooted in the late 1980s. Back then, water standards were even worse than they are today. You couldn't even trust the drinking water, which would regularly fail European standards, let alone Britain's beaches or rivers. As publicly owned utilities, water companies had to take their place in the pecking order of public spending priorities, and it was inevitably a lowly one. Political pressure to keep bills low further starved the industry of the resources needed to meet increasingly demanding standards. For ministers, privatisation served a double purpose; not only did it promise much needed private capital for infrastructure renewal, it also meant that they would finally be shot of a seemingly constant source of political complaint. So desperate was the Treasury to get the water companies off the books that they were flogged off pretty much debt free, and in some cases with overflowing 'green dowries' to make them more attractive to investors. Sadly, it has not worked out well. The few water companies that have remained publicly listed enterprises haven't fared too badly, but the ones subsequently bought by private equity – including Thames Water – have been pillaged to destruction. Stripped down to the last lightbulb by rapacious financiers, they increasingly cut corners and are today in all kinds of trouble. What goes around comes around, and the private ownership that was once seen as the solution is now condemned as a major part of the problem. Attempts to find a future for Thames Water within the current framework of debt and equity ownership have gone about as far as they reasonably can. Any further machinations merely prolong the agony, and are really only about salvaging at least something from the wreckage for current senior creditors, as well as lining the pockets of a veritable army of advisers and lawyers. Most of them deserve little sympathy, even if the original sin at Thames was committed by a generation of owners who have long since disappeared with their bags of swag. Many will take positive pleasure in the likes of Elliott Management, a vulture capital fund that specialises in buying up distress debt and squeezing it dry, losing their shirts. Their only motivation is value extraction. They cannot be allowed to dictate the future course of bills and regulatory obligations. I no longer buy the argument that putting Thames into 'special administration' – a form of insolvency procedure intended to ensure protection for public services – would send a bad message at a time when the Government is looking to raise hundreds of billions of pounds from private investors for Britain's energy transition. Rather the reverse; actually, it would say yes, we want private investment, but on fair terms that don't seek to rip the heart out of essential public services. Since I cannot put it any better myself, let me just repeat what a reader said on a rival news site: being open for business does not mean being open to exploitation. The bottom line is that in order to properly meet its social and environmental obligations, Thames needs to be made largely loan-free, wiping out the near £20bn of debt that it is currently struggling to service. The arguments in favour of this approach are now so overwhelming that it is hard to see why ministers are still hesitating. From a political perspective, it would be extremely popular, which is why Nigel Farage's Reform UK has latched onto it as gainful, populist fodder. That doesn't necessarily mean it is the right thing to do; often, the easy, popular course turns out to be the wrong one. But what are the alternatives? The 30pc haircut to more junior debt holders currently under discussion is very unlikely to be sufficient. Despite initial fears that it would cost the taxpayer an arm and a leg, the most recent example of special administration – Bulb Energy – has worked out reasonably well. Bulb was one of a number of fly-by-night retail energy suppliers that found its relatively generous fixed rate deals rendered hopelessly uneconomic by soaring wholesale prices. When first put into special administration, the Office for Budget Responsibility estimated that based on energy prices at the time, the bailout could cost the taxpayer an eye-watering £6.5bn. But that tally has steadily eroded, and with further recoveries from Octopus Energy – which acquired Bulb's customer base – the ultimate cost to the taxpayer is expected to be negligible. Nationalisation without compensation is always a process fraught with legal difficulties. Historically, it has tied presiding governments up in knots for years afterwards. But how else is the never-ending saga of Thames Water ever to be resolved? Once freed from the ball and chain of excessive debt, Thames Water could easily be sold back to investors, and with requisite reform to regulation, could then perfectly adequately serve all three interest groups: investors, customers and environmentalists. Time to bite the bullet.
