Quite enjoyed it, liked the female PHD student??
http://www.channel4.com/programmes/dambusters-building-the-bouncing-bomb

Arsecandles, I wanted to watch that. “Not available on 4OD” – arsecandles again!

not sure it needed 2 hrs to explain…1hr would have been fine…plus if you have seen the movie even less…time

Arsecandles indeed. I didn’t watch it because it specifically said on that very page: “COMING SOON TO 4OD” (This programme will be available soon after broadcast) 👿

Why didn’t they drop a live bomb from the plane? Talk about disappointing….

He seemed to have spent an awfully large amount of money to demonstrate how to do something which was done better and quicker the first time. It was interesting but I really can’t see the point of the whole thing.

Arsecandles. I wanted to watch that but the wind and the tree were messing with the signal.

top marks to the pilot.

Put the girlfriend in a strop, so double win

It was all a bit half ar5ed. As aP said, they messed with the design so it was all a bit pointless. SPOILER – The final drop was a complete failure as they hit the dam at speed rather than just kissing it yet they all whooped and hollered like it was a complete success. It was just a few yanks messing about. Fun for them but not much else.

saw bits of it. was very slow going and overly long, so turned off. Seemed like it would make a good one hour programme.
As said above, they also deviated a lot from the original design, so it felt like watching an episode of scrap heap challenge with a budget.

I got bored of it after a while and flipped back to the snooker then to Iron Man on Film 4.
Mess around with design, make overly long programme about it and end up not really succeeding anyway. The original film is a bit fast and loose with some of the facts as well.

Guy Gibson’s book “Over Enemy Territory” is a good read although cos it was written immediately after the mission and before the end of the war a lot of the details were still secret. Good first-person view point though.

I think they’d expected it to be a lot harder than it turned out to be so spent a lot of time focusing on what weren’t really big issues etc.

I thought it was mildly interesting but a bit over-long and with far too much emphasis on stressing how dangerous everything was.

Yeah, I think; quite interesting, overly-long and a waste of money sums it up

I certainly agree on the money aspect. Must have cost a packet to build the dam etc. and just to recreate something that was done [better] 60 years ago.
The pilot was pretty good though although I suspect he dropped the bomb late on purpose as he had earlier said that he thought the bouys where too far from the dam – this is probably why it smacked into the dam and no ‘kissed’ it. He also may have just gone for it as there was a possibility the dam was going to collapse any minute.
Anyway, I love stuff like that though so I watched it happily 😐

Yeah, should have been an hour long, and they should have dropped actual explosive bombs rather than fake ones. Also think I could have kicked over the dam with a decent pair of wellys on, it was so badly made.

I disagree with most(?) of you. Seemed to have plenty to fill 2 hours, and the whole point was that it was being done from first principles rather than copying what had been done before – it was about the science, not a historical re-enactment. As for doing it quicker the first time – wasn’t the opposite actually the case – BW had rather longer to sort his design out, along with having rather less constraints in terms of risking damaging aircraft. As for the final drop being a failure – the “bomb” was dropped at a distance from the damn, bounced several times and sunk down the damn to a point it would have destroyed it had it been live – how is that a failure? I’m sure GG wasn’t too bothered with the finer points of how hard the bombs hit the damn.

far too much emphasis on stressing how dangerous everything was

Maybe that’s because it was all rather dangerous (in civil aviation terms) – in ways not immediately obvious. I found myself wondering how they got clearance to do that (or indeed if they did actually have clearance to do what they did – could imagine the person who signed it off being rather shocked watching that!)

Seems it’s avaliable