You’ve got some Nerve Center
Discovery show finds the details
The cigarette is what stuck with me. The spectacular crash at the 2011 IndyCar Championship was memorable for other reasons: It involved 11 of the low-slung rockets, causing several of them to burst into raging flames. The vehicle of driver Dan Wheldon in particular flew more than 100 metres in the air before crashing into a fence above the wall at the Las Vegas Speedway and sliding to a stop on the heavily slanted track. And Wheldon, a two-time Indy 500 champion, didn’t survive.
But it’s the little details that make a show that promises inside access to an event memorable, and so, when Discovery’s Nerve Center went behind the scenes of an IndyCar production — coincidentally for the race that ended prematurely with the death of Wheldon — it ended up with trackside footage of the deadly accident.
Naturally, there were gasps of disbelief at what happened, which unfolded in a matter of a few seconds and ended with a scattered-debris scene that would, one imagines, look like what would have happened if someone had managed to successfully set a bomb off under a race. One IndyCar official brought his hands to his
There were gasps of disbelief at what happened
head and uttered an, “Oh my God.” Then he did something that seemed odd. Before he ran to take action, he paused and took a drag of a cigarette. Then he started organizing the rescue.
It’s a fleeting moment, but a human one, and a detail that a scriptwriter wouldn’t think to include — in the fictional version of such a disastrous crash, the rescue team would fly into action before grabbing one last nicotine hit.
And it’s those little bits that can make a show like Nerve Center interesting viewing. Produced by the same company that makes the Discovery hits Mighty Ships and its antecedent Mighty Planes, Nerve Center similarly goes behind the curtain, or more accurately, control room, of complicated productions, but those that neither float nor take flight: a ski resort, for example, or a Cirque du Soleil show. Or a car race.
The IndyCar e pi s ode, which premieres Sunday, is a strangely incongruous affair, for understandable reasons. The Discovery camera crews spent the days leading up to the race following the preparation of the teams for two drivers, Scott Dixon and Oriol Servià.
Engineers and mechanics explain what they do, while IndyCar officials outline how they stage the race. Servià’s team is portrayed as David to Dixon’s Goliath, but the former manages to earn the second qualifying start and begin the race in the front row.
And then, only a few laps into the race, the calamity. Wheldon is airlifted to hospital, and upon news of his death, the race is cancelled. There’s no resolution to the storylines the show established, just an abrupt end, and an eerie scene when the drivers do a slow tribute lap around the track in front of empty stands.
Such is the challenge of a show with no script: Sometimes the drama leaves you with an unsuitable ending.
‘WHO PLANNED THIS THING?’
The veterans of the raid on Dieppe, which took place 70 years ago this Sunday, do not seem convinced that the operation was worthwhile. The men inter viewed in
Dieppe Uncovered, a new History special that airs on the anniversary of the famous failed battle, have a point: More than 90% of the more than 3,000 Allied soldiers, most of them Canadian, who landed on the French shores were casualties, either killed or wounded. The question the vets in the documentary most often ask is some form of: why?
A member of the Royal Regiment of Canada, his eyes glassy, remembers that someone in one of the landing ships noted that the first three letters of Dieppe were D-I-E. “And that’s exactly what we did,” he says. But Dieppe
Uncovered, based on research into newly unclassified military documents, presents a new theory on the point of the Dieppe raid: That one of its main objectives in August of 1942 was an attempt by a newly formed British naval intelligence unit to steal crucial German encryption equipment that would help Allied codebreakers on the famous ULTRA team.
David O’Keefe’s research is all the more interesting for the fact that he has identified the intelligence officer behind the new commando unit as Ian Fleming, who would later create the character of James Bond. O’Keefe contends that this specific mission would have been obscured by the larger chaos of the Dieppe raid,
‘I know in my heart that my comrades did not die for nothing’
which would have been a key element, for had the Germans realized that the encryption materials had been stolen, they would have simply changed codes.
O’Keefe builds his case largely through what he has uncovered in British files, and with the hazy recollections of the lone living member of that commando unit. It’s an intriguing possibility he raises, and although, like all elements of the Dieppe raid, the codebreaking aspect was unsuccessful, it gives pause to those veterans who had considered their sacrifice wholly in vain.
“I know in my heart that my that comrades did not die for nothing,” one says. And that, at least, is something. Dieppe Uncovered premieres Aug. 19 at 9 p.m. on History. Nerve Center premieres Aug. 19 with two episodes beginning at 8 p.m. on Discovery Canada.