20/09/2011 South Today

Hello, I'm Sarah-Jane Bungay. Welcome to South Today. In

tonight's programme: Operations cancelled and women in

labour moved after a gas leak causes a major alert at a Hampshire

hospital. I could not believe it. The midwife

said, there is something we have to Tanya, it is not good. I thought,

what on earth...? In memory of Charlotte - one mum's

fundraising for research into an illness which kills more children

than any other in the UK. Proud that this will be a lasting

legacy for have. The South's sailors who will go for

gold in the waters of Dorset next year.

During May, Tom Chambers, as I take you on a toe-tapping journey back

A major incident was declared in a maternity unit today after a gas

line was broken during building works at the outpatients department.

One woman was mid-birth when the emergency was declared at the Royal

Hampshire County Hospital in Winchester. 12 mums and eight

babies were moved during the emergency, which affected the

maternity, gynaecology and breast screening units. Our reporter Steve

Humphrey is in Winchester tonight. What more can you tell us?

The major emergency was declared soon after 1pm today at a Royal

Hampshire County Hospital in Winchester. What is interesting is

that the first that people knew about it was the smell of gas, and

the big gas leak, in fact, was caused by builders who were working

on a new building at the hospital. The hospital's major incident

procedure was put in place with police, fire and gas engineers soon

on site. A number of buildings were evacuated, including the maternity

and gynaecology unit, the treatment centre where day surgery is carried

out was also closed. 38 patients including eight babies had to be

moved. Amongst them was a mother who was in the middle of giving bad.

Terry and Robinson had to be moved -- giving birth. She made it in

time to complete the delivery of her little boy, Samuel. It was all

hands to the deck, and we were moved through all of these

corridors, through the car-park, just as I was about to deliver the

baby! Everybody was professional, it was like something out of Holby

City. Mind you, I was not that aware of it! It did not affect him

at all, I don't think. Today's emergency has had a big impact here

at the hospital. Day surgery operations were cancelled, the

emergency department was closed for a while and maternity cases

diverted to other hospitals. A few months ago, the hospital had a

training exercise to test its response to a major incident, the

planning and preparation certainly paid off today. Nobody was harmed

and our staff rose to the challenge to get their T8 patients, including

eight babies, many newborn off premature -- 38 patients, in two

facilities in other parts of the hospital. The good news is the gas

leak has now been sealed off, but Florence portal, the maternity unit,

will remain closed overnight and maternity cases are being diverted

to Basingstoke and Southampton. Emergency and accident ambulances

are being diverted also to Basingstoke and Southampton. A

hospital says any cancelled operations will be rescheduled in

the coming days. We will have more at 10:25pm, but for now, back to

you. Thank you.

A tissue bank to research new treatments for brain tumours has

been launched today with �30,000 raised by a Hampshire woman. Anita

Smith spent three years collecting the money in memory of her daughter,

Charlotte. She died from an aggressive brain tumour just weeks

before her 17th birthday. About 500 children a year are diagnosed with

a brain tumour, but it gets less than 1% of cancer funding for

research. Here is our health correspondent, David Fenton.

This is Charlotte Smith at her school prom. She had been diagnosed

with a brain tumour four days after her 16th birthday.

They told us that she probably had three years left to live. You are

just flawed, you'd do not know what to say. All I wanted to do at the

time was take her home. Her family then made a tough decision not to

tell her how long she had left to live. Charlotte died 11 months

later. Since then, her mother and twin brother Jack have helped raise

money for brain tumour research - �60,000 in just three years. It is

the biggest killer, so why is money not going to brain cancer?

Hopefully this will help. They have just given �30,000 to start a brain

tumour tissue bank in Glasgow. purpose of the tumour Bank is for

us to be able to investigate in much more detail individual

patients' tumours, and this will give us clues as to how we can

improve the treatment of those individual patients. Charlotte died

a month before her 17th birthday, a young woman who loved singing and

horse riding. A young woman with much to live for. Her family hope

that her legacy will be helping others. Oh, she would have been so

proud. Yeah, because she wanted to help people, you know, her friends,

if they ever had a problem, she was there for them. She was just lovely

and she would have loved this. She would be proud.

Anita Smith talking about her daughter, Charlotte. Joining me now

live from Glasgow is Dr Helen Bulbeck from The Brains Trust.

Thank you for joining us. Tell me how significant a development is

this new tissue bank? This is very significant, it is a step in the

right direction. To date, there are other brain tumour tissue banks in

the UK but they are not organised like this one in Glasgow, which is

why Anita, along with our support, decided to back this one. It is an

open resource, access to anyone with a suitable project. It is done

through a Bylo Repository framework, so the ethics are already in place

and every bit of tissue has the full clinical information that a

researcher will need, and there is no other bank in the UK set up in

this way. For patients and their families, what hope will this give

them? It will bring significant hope. What it means in the long

term is that if we can get every brain tumour tissue bank in the UK

to the same level as Glasgow, we can network than centrally, so a

researcher can ask for particular samples, maybe from a rare brain

tumour, and at the moment they might only have access to three or

four samples, but it we can network the tissue banks, it would give

them access to maybe 30 or 40 samples, which obviously will have

an impact on the amount of research and quality of research being done.

Briefly, in terms of funding, how much funding does research into

brain tumours get now and what would you like to see in the

future? At the moment it gets 0.7% of Cancer Research UK funding, and

if it was not forced charities such as ourselves and others that fund

research, it would barely get any at all. We need to really look at

this, and I think that is a good question that should be posed to

the politicians and the members of Cancer Research UK. Thank you for

joining us. He abused his position of trust,

that is what a court heard about a former leader of Hampshire's Army

Cadets who has been accused of sexually abusing teenage boys.

Brian Court denies indecently assaulting cadets during the early

1990s. Alex Forsyth was in court today and has this report.

Brian Court was in his 20s when he led platoons of teenage Army cadets

in Hampshire, a job which demanded respect and trust. Today,

Southampton Crown Court heard how Mr Court had abused his position of

respect by indecently assaulting three cadets on four occasions in

the early 90s. The prosecution said he took them back to his flat,

where he gave them alcohol, then touched them sexually. The

allegations came after one former cadet told police last year he had

been abused by Mr Court as a teenager. Similar claims from two

others followed. Today, one alleged victim, now in his 30s, told the

court he had not felt strong enough to talk about it before. In court

today, that man said he was left "feeling sick" after the incident.

He said he remembered it distinctly, and it was "so disturbing". He said

he thought the police stopped things like that. He said he had

told no-one at the time. The defence said allegations of abuse

were not true. Mr Court, who is now 44 and from Basingstoke, denies

four counts of indecent assault. The trial continues.

A Government minister has been criticised after suggesting former

Gurkha soldiers who settled in Aldershot should be dispersed to

other parts of the country. Gerald Howarth, who is the town's MP as

well as being a Defence Minister, suggested the ex-soldiers and their

families should be treated like asylum seekers. It follows concerns

about the impact of the former Nepalese troops and their families

who now make up 10% of the local population. Joining me now from our

Caversham studio is Joe Campbell. When the organisers of a protest

planned for next month due to take place in Rushmore called it off,

having a plan to highlight what they see as a negative impact on

the many thousands of former Gurkhas who settled in the area

since they were allowed to come to Britain, when that happened it was

thought it would give breathing space for politicians to think how

to address the issues, but if anyone expected it to take a heat

from the debate, they were sadly surprised with the comments from

Gerald Howarth, who came up with his suggestions as to how to deal

with the influx of people. suggested to the Prime Minister

that, because there is such support for the Gurkhas across the kingdom

and we have a specific problem in Aldershot with no end in sight to

the number of Nepalese coming year, there should be a policy of

dispersal and the Home Office said they have no power to do that.

These comments have caused quite a stir?

Many in the Nepalese community thought this took the heat out of

things when the protest was cancelled, and they have been

shocked and dismayed by the comments from Mr Howarth. It is

very sad. It is all very well to say this will not happen and it is

his thoughts, but it has gone beyond the local scenario now and I

am getting calls from all over the UK from Gurkhas saying, what I'll

be going to do? It is getting too much. Mr Howarth has been standing

by those comments, saying what he intended was not to force people

out of Aldershot but for them to be invited by other areas to go there.

There is now a cross-party group looking at the problems and a

report from that group is expected to land on the desk of the Prime

Minister, David Cameron, imminently, according to one of the people I

have been speaking to today. Many thanks.

A motorist has appeared before magistrates in Worthing accused of

hitting a cyclist on the head with a hammer. 20-year-old Samuel

Brownson, from East Preston, is accused of attempting to cause

grievous bodily harm with intent. He has been sent for trial at

Chichester Crown Court. It follows an incident on Gratwicke Road in

Worthing earlier this month. The South's marine industry has

been given a boost at the Southampton Boat Show, as the

Government's Business Minister announced new plans to promote

growth. More than a quarter of people living around the Solent are

employed in the marine industry. It is a sector worth over �3.5 billion

to the UK economy every year. You know we are an island nation

and in our heart of hearts, we have a passionate belief about the role

of the sea for all of us, but we have to turn that into jobs and

economy and what we have to do in government is be an effective

parliament, the dad, supportive, engaged, but letting the private

sector flourish -- be there, supportive, engaged.

Still to come in this evening's South Today:

Putting on his top hat - Tom Chambers steps into the shoes of

The Hampshire MP and Energy Secretary Chris Huhne has been

promising to cut energy prices at the Liberal Democrat conference in

Birmingham. In his keynote speech today, he promised new tougher

rules to make pricing simpler and promote competition.

It is not the usual question asked at the start of their lesson...

is a lot of fun to come out here once in a while to get out of

sitting in a classroom. Bridgemary School in Gosport put in a

vegetable past three years ago and it has expanded since then to

include chickens and an outdoor classroom. I look forward to it, it

is very good for me because I don't usually do stuff like this. It is

really fun because it is not like a normal lesson because you interact

with the wildlife. More schools are set to adopt a hands-on approach to

learning, and not just about food. The Co-op has launched the green

schools revolution which supports practical lessons outside the

classroom, including trips to farms, green energy providers and Science

and Discovery centres. It gives us extra information. They do a lot of

lesson plans and anything that can help us, really, widen what we do,

give the children more information and more experience in things they

might not normally did. It educate us on how to do things, and it is

good that we have got it where other people, we take it for

granted because we do it so much. There is a huge appetite for this

type of learning. It is all over my hands! 443 schools all over the

south have already signed up. That was a great packet! Apologies

that we did not tell you what it was about, Bridgemary School from

Portsmouth getting involved in a new initiative, the green schools

revolution. Very good indeed. Hundreds of people applied, now six

have been chosen to crew a 30-foot yacht along the south coast during

next year's Olympics. The yacht has been built from more than 1200

wooden objects donated from across the country as part of the Cultural

Olympiad. The lucky six are from the Isle of Wight and west Sussex.

Tony is here with the sport, what news today?

We will stay with the Olympic theme. The first 11 athletes for Team GB

were named today. Virtually all of them from our part of the world.

They are sailors. They have been so dominant when it comes to the

Olympics, probably only rivalled by the Olympics -- by the cyclists

recently. They are a formidable group of

sailors who know for sure that they are carrying our Olympic hopes next

year in Weymouth and Portland. Some are well-known faces with proven

Olympic pedigree. You can see Ben Ainslie there. For them, 2012 could

be an Olympic swansong. For others, the challenge is to follow in the

footsteps of some of these greats, and lay the foundations for the

future of Britain's sailors. The team announcement was made in

Greenwich this morning. The grand surroundings of the old

Royal Naval College in Greenwich were chosen for the team

announcement, a symbol of when Britain ruled the waves. These days,

sporting sailors keep up the tradition. These are the

heavyweights, the first names in Team GB's entire Olympic squad.

Nobody misunderstands the task is about winning gold medals, that is

what we are here to do, everybody is behind that and that is what

gives us a competitive this year on year. Established winners know

about preparation for major competitions, but for the McGregor

sisters, this is the first of many momentous days. The pair, with

Annie Lush, go into the women's racing. We are currently ranked No.

2, but a lot of things on the to-do list for next year. We have the

opportunity to win a medal but we need to work hard to make sure it

happens. At the Southampton Boat Show, they outlined the ambitions

of the team. They won six medals in Beijing. How many are they aiming

for this time? We are confident we will be in the region of three or

four definite medals, that is our stated target. We would love to win

more, I bet that all of the sailors selected believe they will win a

gold medal, and that is absolutely right. There are still places to be

won and performances at the World Championships in Perth in December

will count. Poole Pirates will go into the

second leg of their Elite League semi-final with a three-point

deficit against Kings Lynn. They were trailing by 11 points, though,

going into heat 11, but they turned the tables as Kevin Volbert and

Chris Holder secured a 5-1 victory. Poole closed the gap and lost 48-45.

Poole promoter Matt Ford is calling for a big performance to bounce

back next Monday night. Aldershot are aiming for a place in

the fourth round of the Carling Cup tonight. Dean Holdsworth's in-form

side host League One Rochdale. They are in the third round for the

first time in 27 years after beating West ham at Upton Park. The

Shots are the lowest ranked side left in the competition, but with a

great chance of reaching the last And BBC Surrey has full commentary

from the EBB Stadium tonight from 7:05pm. We will have the goals

tomorrow night here on South Today. A big week of football for Brighton,

who have two massive games in three days, starting tomorrow at the Amex

in the Carling Cup. Thousands queued for tickets because the Reds

are coming to town - it is Brighton against Liverpool. We will preview

the game tomorrow with the help of Gus Poyet, Mark Lawrenson and BBC

Sussex's Johnny Cantor. That is a night where you think

football in a big way has come back to Brighton and Hove. The fans will

be looking forward to that. Liverpool will not believe that, a

completely different stadiums. decades since they played here.

They will notice a difference! Better Changing Rooms, I am sure!

It is one of the greatest film musicals of all time, and now Top

Hat, which starred Fred Astaire, has been adapted for the stage for

the first time, nearly eighty years after the film's release.

It was always going to be a major challenge to fill the shoes of one

of the best song and dance men ever, and that challenge has fallen to

former Strictly Come Dancing winner Tom Chambers.

I caught up with him at the Mayflower Theatre in Southampton

ahead of tonight's performance, and he even found time to give me a

It is thrilling, so exciting. You are carried away by the music. It

is the most beautiful stuff you can It is because Fred Astaire, he is

such an icon, such a perfectionist and a genius. The choreography, he

used to spend hundreds of hours developing it and for about a month

I woke up at 4:15am every morning thinking, how will I grasp this?!

His daughter came to see the production, I gather? That was

incredible, what a moment. From about five years old I would watch

this amazing man in the golden Hollywood musicals at the weekend,

and for his daughter to be there, and wearing the ring that he wore

in the Neither Left Nor Right film in 1935. I said, please can I just

touch that? -- in the Top Hat fell Let me take you back to 2008

briefly, and that Strictly Come Dancing final. Did you think then,

this is what I would love to do for a career? I have, since as long as

I would remember, I used to stamp on the kitchen floor before I knew

what tap dancing was, and I just had this real passion and yearning

for it. Without a doubt, Strictly Come Dancing gave me that golden

opportunity to show a wider audience. No way would I have got

this job without maybe 17 rounds of auditions.

And then you do that with the other foot, we will do it together,

You are very welcome. You have a new partner, great

moves! Not my finest moment! And I did not

have the tap dancing shoes on, so I hope you will forgive me.

You two ladies noticed issues, I did not!

The let's move on and get the weather. Some brightness on the

horizon? It is looking good for the rest of the week, there we have a

blip tonight and tomorrow morning, then gradually it improves. We have

Murray Marshall was making the most of the dry conditions to harvest

his apples in West Grimstead in West Sussex.

David Adkin took this photo of cloudy skies over a pumpkin field

near Romsey in Hampshire. And Ken Rayner captured Everland

Bridge over the Kennet and Avon For most of us today, it was a

mainly dry day and we have that blip overnight where we will see

some rain arrived which could be heavy in places. It is a weather

front from the Atlantic, this line of cloud stretching over the south

of the United Kingdom, which will gradually slips south and east

words through the early hours of the morning. Some heavy bursts in

there. It will reinvigorate through the early hours, gradually easing

in northern and western areas, where we could have some mist and

fog patches. Temperatures will stay mild again. A damp start to the day

for the South Coast and South East, but the rain gradually clears to

the English Channel and it is an improving picture. Sony spells for

the afternoon, not wall-to-wall sunshine, temperatures up to 18,

perhaps 19 sows his, but a breeze increasing through the early hours

of 30 -- Thursday morning. Reduced visibility on Thursday morning,

expect a low of 11 to 13 Celsius, similar to tonight. The good news

is this area of high pressure makes low-pressure -- slow progress from

the Atlantic, so the winds will start to died down, temperatures

looking pretty decent. A dry, sunny day, lovely sunny conditions if you

catch them, and it will feel fairly warm with temperatures on the up,

slowly, through the week. Saturday is a decent day, a weather front

will arrive on Sunday, more cloud in this fight on Saturday afternoon

but a bright start to the day. For the rest of the week, expect a

misty and murky start, mainly dry from tomorrow afternoon with some

sunny spells, but we do have the rain overnight tonight which will

stay with us for South Eastern areas tomorrow morning. Improving

by the afternoon with Des winds dying down as we head towards the

weekend. Thanks to high pressure, it will be dry, sunny and sad told.

As long as the rain is overnight, I don't mind!

Just before we go, Roger Finn has some news about a series of special

reports starting later this week on Every year, 100 churches are forced

into retirement. Many are demolished or converted, but a

handful are saved. Historical landmarks, architectural jewels or

quirky treasures. The chosen be taken under the wing of the

Church's Conservation Trust -- the chosen few. I will be telling the

stories of some of these churches and hearing from their passionate

champion. Everything about England is embodied in the parish church.

That is Church Rescue, on Saturday, starting this their staple stop

don't miss that. -- starting this Thursday.

The goals from those football games tomorrow night, the big one,

Carling Cup, playing for a place in the last 16, and Southampton's game