MI5 ‘down the tubes’ / central London building collapse

Tuesday 13/06/07 

Story:   MI5 ‘down the tubes’ / central London building collapse

Today we had to do a similar think to last Thursday’s bus filming but in the Underground. Not on the Tubes but on the station platforms. Well at least the posters were bigger.

We were accompanied by an TFL officer but even she didn’t know anything about the posters or where they might be. She was able to tell us that we were not allowed to interview people on the platforms, that we’d have to do that off station property and that we all had to sign in and out of each station before we could start any filming, as well as having to pay our own tube fare between the two stations. Oh yes and once again no tripods were allowed.

At Vauxhall it was reasonably straightforward and I took a piece to camera with my reporter as well, to show that amongst all the other usual ads for holidays and drinks you could find a recruitment drive from the security services. At Waterloo station it was not so simple because the Jubilee line platforms have an extra set of doors between the platforms and the trains, as well as this I found out that for some reason the passengers at Waterloo were in general far more sensitive to being filmed, with many of them trying to walk past the cameras filed of vision and /or covering their faces with newspapers. Maybe they all work at MI5 already…

  In the afternoon there was some ‘breaking news’ on the 24 hour news channels about a building collapse near New Scotland Yard at Victoria. As always with these type of things I see ‘building collapse’ and think ‘building collapse’. My correspondent saw ‘building collapse’ and thought ‘terrorism’. Maybe I should be that way inclined but really it did look like a building collapse especially as it was a building being renovated and only the top two floors had caved in.

Whichever it was we went to have a look.

 

Much of Victoria Street was sealed off and we could not actually see the building in question but we could get an idea of the scene and get comments from a visiting American eyewitness. We also got to walk down a traffic free Victoria Street, that was a novelty in itself.

It was just a building collapse, but we had put in the effort to make a report about it and so we got something on air on our 24 hour news channel in Japan.