Britain From Above
Andrew Marr presents Britain From Above
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"I spend a lot of my time in hot television studios, interviewing hot politicians and, occasionally, if I'm good, hot actresses, so I feel enormously privileged to be able to get out and do something like this from time to time," says Andrew Marr.
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Certainly, filming Britain From Above is about as far from a stuffy W12 television studio as it's possible to get.
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Rather like a boy's fantasy adventure, Andrew has skydived, microlighted, parachuted and paraglided his way across the skies of the nation.
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"It's been a blast. I can't remember how many different ways I've been in the air but it's at least two or three different helicopters, four or five different planes including historic planes from the Thirties, a Tigermoth and a silver Synergy jet – which is, apparently, Kylie's transport of choice.
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"On my first day I was strapped in a microlight, which is like a motorised tricycle with wings which goes faster, then dangerously fast until suddenly you are a couple of thousand feet up.
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"It's an astonishing feeling. But it was brilliant for me because I know that part of Scotland pretty well from my hill-walking days.
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"Zipping down the Great Glen very low and seeing it from a bird's eye view, a buzzard's binoculars, was spectacular.
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"Despite icy temperatures it was a perfect way to start the filming.
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"Paragliding was a similarly surprising experience. It essentially involves jumping off a hill holding on to a plastic bag attached to some string.
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"Even being strapped to a world champion isn't terrifically reassuring but it's wonderful once you're in the air.
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"It's so skilful. My pilot was reading the clouds, the hills and watching the birds hovering – we were accompanied by a red kite – to find the thermals, taking us soaring into the air amongst a shoal of 50 hang-gliders.
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"I'd never understood before how it is possible to read the air."
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But most shocking of all was the skydiving.
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"There's no doubt that the biggest highlight was being dropped out of a plane twice, two miles up – in other words, skydiving – which was completely unlike what I'd expected.
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"I thought it was going to be the most fun, full-on moment – partly because you see all these pictures of people skydiving and they look like they're floating.
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"I thought, therefore, it would be a bit like floating. You get out the plane, there's a rush of air and a skoosh and then you would be floating.
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"But, I can report, it is categorically not like floating.
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"You are plummeting. You are going down as fast as the human body could go. You drop about a mile before the parachute is opened.
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"It takes about seven or eight minutes to do the second mile but the first mile takes 40 seconds, so you are going unbelievably fast.
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"In terms of sheer, unadulterated fun, this has been a wonderful shoot. But I don't want people to think it was just about me having a laugh.
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"On television you have to have something interesting to look at and one of the ways that you make it interesting is doing strange things to your presenter!
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"You know – you chuck him out of things, you drop him from things, you hang him from things, you have great big meetings sitting around the table laughing about the next mildly alarming thing you can do to Andrew Marr.
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"But it does truly give you a completely different perspective on life in Britain.
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"There are so many things that you see from the sky. Most of us are familiar with being up there from our flights to various holiday destinations so we know, roughly speaking, what the ground looks like from a jet.
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"But here we're in smaller planes or helicopters talking with experts who know exactly what they are looking at. The effect is completely different.
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"You see all the archaeological sites, extraordinary field patterns, Iron Age forts, traces of original Roman roads and so on, which most people would look down and not even notice.
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"When you see the erosion of some of our coastline, how the barriers hold the sea back, but then a little bit of barrier is missing and the sea is pouring, and you get a different sense of the scale.
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"This was such a simple idea, but such an effective one.
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"It was vital to be looking down, but the perspective is only interesting if you are with somebody who knows something special and can strip away the blandly familiar.
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"Our perspective was a kind of keyhole, but knowledge – the knowledge of amateurs and academics, scientists and sportsmen – were the keys.
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"My job is to ask the obvious questions, what in Scotland we called 'daft laddie questions'.
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"Why are our cities this shape? Why are our field systems like this? How is it possible to get so many people in and out of cities everyday and not tip into mayhem?
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"Somehow, by a blend of skill and alchemy, everything on our crowded, beautiful islands keeps working.
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"What I hope people take away from this is a sense of how extraordinary it is that we all manage to get along without tipping into utter mayhem and chaos.
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"Because there are so many of us on such a small, historic space the miracle is not that we avoid some kind of dramatic national catastrophe.
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"No, it's that we actually all, most of us, get through 24 hours again and again and again without grinding into each other and the whole thing falling apart.
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"I think it's a story about an extraordinary, intricate, biodiversity machine – as extraordinary in its way as the Amazon rainforest – with all its systems connected through history to each other and somehow managing to hold it all together and keep moving because, I think, most of us are pretty tolerant of each other.
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"We call it Britain."
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Andrew Marr is one of Britain's best known television faces and broadcasters.
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He is the host of The Andrew Marr Show on 91Èȱ¬ One, the award-winning interview programme, and 91Èȱ¬ Radio 4's Start The Week.
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Andrew joined The Scotsman as a trainee and junior business reporter in 1981 and became parliamentary correspondent in 1984 and political correspondent in 1986.
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He worked for two years at The Independent, then returned to The Scotsman as political editor in 1986.
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He moved to become political editor at The Economist from 1988 to 1992.
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He then returned to the Independent as chief political commentator in 1992 and was promoted to editor in 1996.
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Sacked from that, he became a columnist for The Express and The Observer in 1998 before being appointed as 91Èȱ¬ political editor in May 2000.
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Andrew has had five books published: The Battle For Scotland (Penguin, 1992); Ruling Britannia (Penguin, 1996, 1998); The Day Britain Died (Profile, 2000); My Trade (Macmillan, 2004); and A History Of Modern Britain (2007).
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Broadcasting includes series on contemporary thinkers for 91Èȱ¬ Two and Radio 4, and political documentaries for Channel 4 and 91Èȱ¬ One's Panorama.
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He has received more than a dozen major awards for writing and broadcasting – including prizes from BAFTA, the Royal Television Society and, most recently, the Broadcasting Press Guild, which awarded two prizes for The Andrew Marr Show and Andrew Marr's History Of Modern Britain.
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He is currently shooting the prequel to his History Of Modern Britain, Britannia, and a major documentary for 91Èȱ¬ Two about evolution – Darwin's Dangerous Idea.
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He previously championed Charles Darwin in the 91Èȱ¬'s Great Britons project and is president of the Galapagos Conservation Trust, which exists to protect the islands that helped inspire the theory of evolution.
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