3 days ago
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.
