Attention ladies and gentlemen, this is your Captain speaking. Those of you with windows seats can look to your left now and see Comet McNaught; just to the right of that you can see Naomi Campbell’s frozen, falling body after she threw one too many drinks in our cabin crew’s faces and we sucked her out the vacuum toilet. We’ll be arriving at out destination shortly, so those of you with seat trays extended should return them to the upright position; those stewards or stewardesses bonking Ralph Fiennes in the toilets should make sure he is *also* in an extended and upright position; and passengers who are being attacked by venomous snakes in their seats are encouraged to turn their headsets to easy listening muzak on Channel 3 and Samuel L. Jackson will attend to you shortly. Well, whilst we’re putting down the landing gear and signalling for Superman to get the heck out of our flight path, let’s analyse today’s in-flight entertainment, MILE HIGH (Tuesdays, Seven, 12:30am).
MILE HIGH is an excellent little show revolving around the lives and loves- usually both disastrous- of a group of stewardesses and stewards for a fictional airline called ‘Fresh Air’. It’s also a drama/comedy hybrid. Now, before you panic and have facial tics and flashbacks to the horrors of ED, ALLY MCBEAL and anything with Rob Lowe in it, let me reassure you that it’s a *British* drama/comedy hybrid, so the dramatic bits are actually fine bits of character acting rather than sentimental schmaltz that would give MAD ABOUT YOU’s writers diabetes, and the comedy parts are actually funny (you see, THE WEDGE? Comedy is meant to make you laugh!).
Once you get past the Batman-esque timeslot and the dubious premise that out of the seven male steward characters, only one is gay (I thought that Airline Steward was one of our core industries, like Fashion Designer, Broadway Musical Dancer and Reality TV Show Contestant), you should have a lot of fun with MILE HIGH. The aircraft is more disaster-prone than the one on LOST, the guys are all uniformly hot (and often don’t bother with their uniforms) the girls could give the ladies on Wisteria Lane a lesson in Bitchitude and hardly an episode goes by without a torrid sex scene, a slap in the face or a gremlin on the side of the plane- often simultaneously.
Demonstrating how to inflate the lifejacket at the front of the plane are:
Will (Adam Sinclair) the somewhat self-destructive gay steward who is arguably the hottest man on the plane. Will may be somewhat shallow but his heart’s in the right place (as is his bubble-butt). Will has a not-so-hidden crush on his (probably) straight co-worker Marco which has yet to come to fruition, but that doesn’t stop Will from getting some man on man action almost every episode.
Marco (Tom Wisdom) the tragically straight new flight attendant whom Will would dearly love to stow safely in his overhead compartment. Actually, Marco could do worse than end up in Will’s…cockpit… as the women he’s shagged on the show (Janis, Poppy) are total gorgons and usually get him into hot water. And sometimes they shag him outside his bathtub as well…
Janis (Jo-Anne Knowles) ‘Why did my airspace have to have a harpy in it?’- an icily venomous stewardess with a tongue sharper than that of the Queen Xenomorph in ALIENS, Janis loathes Will with a passion and tries to shoot him down (sometimes figuratively, sometimes literally) whenever she can. After learning of Will’s unrequited love for Marco, the first thing she did was shag Marco, record it on her mobile and send it to Will…
Jason (James W. Redmond) Allegedly heterosexual, the womanizing steward still managed to get naked and in bed with Marco on one occasion- true they’d both been victims of mischievous Danish stewardesses who got off on guy to guy action, but throw me a bone here, people!
Captain John Bryson (Matthew Chambers) – the snake on this particular plane, Bryson keeps one eye on his altitude and the other on the legs of every woman on board. Mind you he insists on getting naked so often on the show he must save the costume department a fortune on wardrobe…
Cute men, catty dialogue, stewardesses, in-flighting and in-fighting! Fasten your seatbelts and enjoy the bumpy ride!
