The other day, I was persuaded to let the train take the strain and booked myself a day-return between Great Malvern and Paddington. I have a (deserved) reputation as a great kipper, so I settled myself down for a couple of hours of welcome shut-eye. Now, you expect to be awakened by the ticket inspector to provide proof that you are not fare-dodging, and I am fine with that. In fact, being an honest soul, I thoroughly approve that cheats and opportunist freeloaders are exposed and punished (that is, if they ever are). But it is not the integrity of the Great British Public that is at issue in this piece; it is the proliferation of intrusive, useless, pointless public announcements that gets my goat.
Between Great Malvern and Paddington on the Cotswold Line (unusually, for some distance single-tracked) there are fifteen stations, or “station stops”, as the fellow on the intercom never tired of telling us. Obviously, a train comes to a stop at a designated station. Why else would we need to know that it is going to stop? Unless he was making a distinction with any other reason for the train stopping – red light/workers on the track/platform unavailable/driver’s tea break/wrong sort of leaves/ gear box kaput etc, etc. At every station, we were informed that this was a Great Western Railway train to… and then came the list of the ‘station stops’ impatiently awaiting us.
Following each announcement was another, encouraging us to take all our luggage with us. After a two-second pause came yet another voice, instructing us to mind the gap between train and platform and to take care as we alighted from the carriage. Fifteen times! In addition, on the intercom came the voice of the guard (well, they don’t call them that these days – senior conductor, passenger assistant, safety operative?) with a gabbled and garbled message that was totally unintelligible to everyone. I saw fellow passengers shaking their head in equal bafflement. Then, to cap it all, we had that annoying, patronising and actually quite specious injunction: See It Say It Sorted. See what? Say it to whom? And who on earth, pray, is going to sort it?
To have my slumber rudely interrupted at regular intervals was annoying enough. But the sheer banality, the utter uselessness, the inconsequential information, the empty platitudes began to grate. By the end of my sleep-interrupted journey I was ready to scream. A scrutiny of the message board at Paddington introduced me to further administrative inanity: ‘Due to a problem under investigation…’; ‘Due to shortage of train crews…’; ‘Due to more than the usual number of trains needing repair…’; ‘Due to a delay for the signals to continue the journey…’. The vision of a signal making its merry way up the line did bring a smile to my face, thus helping me to avoid self-combustion. Incidentally, the use of the word ’due’ is incorrect, but that can wait for another time.
It's the same on aeroplanes. We are introduced to the pilot and co-pilot, and all the cabin crew one by one. We are informedof the cruising speed and altitude and what the weather is like on the other side of the world. When we board a bus, we are not introduced to the driver and the conductor, we are not told what the temperature is outside, we are not told at what speed or at what altitude (sea level presumably) we are travelling. Once the safety briefing on the plane has been conducted (necessary I suppose, but having heard it a hundred times, I tend to switch off), most passengers want to sleep or read their book or listen to their music or watch their film. No such luck. We are told in no uncertain terms that this plane is a strictly smoke-free environment, even in the toilets. Surely, we will have got this by now. In-flight smoking was banned in 1990. We are exhaustively informed of the contents of the duty-free cart, the foreign coin collection, the lottery tickets, the cut-price offers, the must-have bargains. Then, to cap it all, we are forced to listen to the same interminable spiel in a foreign language.
When the pilot informs us that we have arrived at our destination – it would be a huge surprise if we had landed anywhere else - we have to undergo a lecture from the flight attendant - that is if he or she can speak intelligible English (and I refer as much to the British natives as to the foreigners) – telling us not to get up from our seat until the pilot switches off the seatbelt sign, to be careful about unloading the overhead locker in case some object falls on our head and kills us, and to hold onto the handrail when disembarking from the plane. And all children must have their hand held at all times. Isn’t that what all responsible parents do? And if they don’t, no reminder from a flight attendant is likely to impinge on their empty brain. “And thank you for flying Annoying Airline and we wish you a pleasant onward journey… and we look forward to you flying with us again in the future.”
It's the infantilising tone and empty rhetoric that so annoys me. Why can’t these people in authority trust the common sense of their passengers and just shut up!
I once took a leisure cruise in a small boat while on holiday in Turkey. As we weighed anchor, one worried passenger enquired of the captain about safety instructions. “If you can’t swim, don’t jump off,” he grinned. In other words, don’t behave like an idiot and use your common sense. Now that’s my type of captain.
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