Reach for the sky: the inspiring story of Tony Appleton, the British ‘Flying Man’
Steve Coogan would still have been at primary school when Bernard Falk interviewed Tony Appleton on the BBC in 1976, which, despite only being a tiny slice of television history, surely had a particularly huge effect on the young Coogan.
It’s everything he would come to lampoon with his Alan Partridge character. The faux-joviality. The particularly British eccentricity. The fact that the host clearly thinks he’s above the situation, while everyone watching can see quite clearly that he’s precisely where he needs to be. In fairness to Falk, this was a man who, a mere five years earlier, had interviewed a member of the IRA who wished to stay anonymous. Subsequently, he then spent four days in Belfast’s notorious Crumlin Road Goal for refusing to rat out his source.
Perhaps Falk was a little bit beyond this style of local interest journalism, but it’s easy to see the charm involved. After all, he’s interviewing a man sitting ten feet above him, clutching what looks like a paragliding apparatus, which is hanging from a crane. It’s not hard-hitting journalism, but it’s intriguing nonetheless. So Falk seemingly swallows his pride and gets to it, introducing the country to Tony Appleton via the show Nationwide on the Road.
But who was Appleton? Other than a man seemingly dead set on looking as 1970s as humanly possible. And why was he on a crane with an enormous flying contraption strapped to him? “Practise,” he says chummily in his molasses-thick Chelmsford brogue. “Isn’t that cheating?” Falk shoots back, and Appleton, calm as you like, explains that you’ve got to get used to the kit before you actually start using it. “Using it for what?” I hear you cry?
Using it to fly, of course!
Why was Tony Appleton trying to fly?!
Turns out, that’s what this local interest story is about. There’s a community of people who were, for lack of a more delicate way of putting it, trying to fly. Getting on the next plane to Magaluf wasn’t enough for them either; these are people who wanted to fly without an engine, who wanted to strap something to their back, run as fast as they can and take off into the sky. Be as cynical about it as you want, but don’t pretend that you’ve never had that fantasy yourself.
There seems to be a community of people with this dream, too. Appleton, sitting pretty in his paraglider like it’s the most natural thing in the world, describing rivals of his who’ve flown, an actually pretty astonishing, 48 metres through sheer force of will and science. It’s not just for bragging rights either, there’s a judging board waiting for someone to get to 50 metres with a £6000 prize waiting for the madlads who get there.
Is our Tony going to be in with a shout? Well… After hearing about the people who reached 48 metres, Falk asks about Appleton’s personal best. Without a hint of shame, Appleton says “four metres”. That’s not going to dent his resolve, though. After all, he was the first person to cross the channel in a four-poster bed, and what can possibly stop him from achieving whatever he puts his mind to?
It’s a fair question, and one that all of us (not just Steve Coogan) could learn from today as well!