12/12/2011 Inside Out East

This week and in Milton Keynes and this is what is coming up. The

increasing number of people relying on food handouts. I had no food in

the cupboards, I was down to my last 30p, and it was going through

my mind that morning, it is Christmas, how would I cope?

pioneering heart surgeon who has saved and improved the lives of

thousands of patients. Celebrating 100 years of the great British air

race. We recapture the spirit of the real magnificent men In Their

Flying Machines. They were iconic figures in those days, like the

astronauts. They were celebrities. They are are three untold stories

Welcome to Milton Keynes. With less than a fortnight until Christmas,

many of us are stocking up on food for the festive season. Hundreds of

people cannot even afford a meal, let alone a big Christmas one. They

rely on handouts. We have been to the food bank in Milton Keynes to

see why so many people need help. had my first major heart attack two

years ago and then I had another one, then I had a stroke after that.

It left me in a bad way. The left side is mostly affected. Obviously

it has slowed me down, I cannot do a lot. The problems with his health

has meant Michael Parker, who lives in Milton Keynes, can't work. He

was forced to give up his job for a taxi company. Money is tight for

Michael and several times he's been unable to provide food for himself

and his daughter. It has happened quite a few times over the last two

years and I would not like it to happen again. I feel for people it

happens to now. How desperate has it been? It has been very desperate,

one time I only had a couple slices of bread and a can of beans. I have

experienced that. I have hidden that from my doctor. -- I have kept

that food for my doctor. Michael was lucky. The Milton Keynes Food

Bank stepped in to help him before the situation got too bad. That is

lovely juice. Just what we Milton Keynes Food bank takes

another delivery of supplies, this one from a local church. There are

over one hundred Food Banks in the UK. Milton Keynes is one of the

largest, and it's never been busier. Tell me about the food bank.

provides emergency food parcels to local families, like the ones we

have here. We will have 9,000 of these by the end of the year. That

is 63 % up on last year. Why do so many more people need your help?

The current economic climate, people have less disposable income.

The food bank is for people in genuine need, the aim is to tied

them over for a few days. A GP, the Citizens Advice Bureau and other

similar agencies can decide that a person is in need of help and send

them to the food bank. Isn't there a danger that people might become

too reliant on food banks and so they do not go out and try and find

a job? A good point but the way we operate we only allow clients to

come up to us up to five times in the rolling 12 months. The Food

Bank relies on the goodwill of the public to donate the food. Apart

from Sue and one other person everyone else that helps at the

food bank is a volunteer. What would you get enough food parcel?

It is quite a mixed bag. Lots of staple items like dried pasta,

long-life juice, pass the sauce, noodles, long-life milk, breakfast

cereal. It is designed to last three days. Ho nutritious is this?

You have no fresh fruit or bread. The items in the food parcel, if

this was all they had, the nutritionist have told us this

would give them all the value they need. Not exciting food but it will

keep the will from the daughter of three days. -- the will for from

the door. It is well-documented that supermarkets Broadway

thousands of tons of food, surely they should donate it? People often

ask us that, but the food we have around here is tinned food, dried

food, long-life produce. That stuff is fresh, yoghurt, fruit, and it is

not something we can deal with. After sorting out today's food

parcels Sue and her team of volunteers are off to one of five

distribution centres in Milton Keynes. People might be surprised

you need somewhere like this. Milton Keynes is an affluent city,

you would not see the areas of poverty, but they are there. They

are hidden behind the tree-lined boulevard us. There is a 63 %

increase in demand for hour services. Could people come in that

even though they could help themselves? You do get people that

will try and get free food parcels, but we are very keen to make sure

we only help people who have a genuine qualified need. If someone

is trying to pull the wool and we catch them, we will tell them. We

will tell them to get off their backside and do something practical.

How long have you lived here? Michael Parker is one of those who

have reason to be grateful for the work of the Food bank. It's helped

him out on a number of occasions. About a hundred tones of food has

been donated to the food bank this year, that's up nearly a hundred

per cent on last year. The lowest time was I had no food in the

cupboards, I was down to my last 30p. I did not know I would call,

and out of the blue, are hampered turned up from the food bank. These

two people brought a hamper in, we look at it after they left, and

they gave me a four presence to put round the tree for Christmas Day.

There was tinned food as well. Inside was a brown envelope, it had

�20 in it. I was over the moon. It was like winning the lottery, �20.

What is it like when there is not enough food? It is hard, but we

have to get through it. How do you feel when you have not got enough

on the table? It feels a bit sad, but you have to keep your head up.

Do you worry about that? Yes. do you do with your dad to keep

going? We keep each other laughing. Do you worry about your father?

About 100 tons of food has been donated to the food bank this year,

up nearly 100 % on last year. Just over forty per cent of the food

parcels will be handed out to people between the ages of twenty

six and forty. There is your food. You can help yourself on the table

to tea and coffee. I saw this raw advertised in the church newsletter.

At the time, I was working for BT, I had been there 10 years, good

payment, look at a salary for this and thought it was a joke. But I am

a Christian and I took the leap and I have never looked back. I feel I

can make a difference. Could you use some toothpaste? Absolutely.

How many people would you expect to see today? Normally about 50 -- 15

households. We have had up to 35 in an hour. We serve here twice a week

but we serve six days a week for five different locations. What are

the reasons people might come here? Lots of different reasons, somebody

may have just lost their job, benefits are circumstances may have

changed, somebody may have just come out of hospital, and they have

a voucher, somebody may have come out of prison, at somebody may just

have an extra big bill. A lot of people cannot afford heating bills.

Although his life is still far from perfect Michael Parker is hoping

that his days of struggling to put food on the table are finally over.

I hope the future brings better health. No more benefit problems as

well. I do realise now the food back in Milton Keynes is there if I

needed. I hope it does not come to that. It is a struggle. It has

taken me a while to get a better life for myself. If there is every

something you think we should be investigating you can send an e-

mail to last. Later on, we will recreate the 1911 the a race, 100

years ago they went up and came down. The race 1000 miles a grown

Britain. -- around Britain. John Wallwork carried out the UK's first

successful heart-lung transplant and the world's first triple

transplant. We were given exclusive access to his final few days at the

hospital, and his last operation. Our heartbeats something like 30

million times a year. We will now stop the heart so we can open it up.

On the monitor it you will see there is no output. When John

Wallwork arrived at Papworth in the early 1980s heart transplant

surgery was still in its infancy in this country - and no-one had

successfully transplanted both heart and lungs until he pioneered

the operation in 1984. I remember it very well, we had to bring the

donor down from the Midlands, do the operation here. Spent a fair

amount of the evening doing it. patient was 36-year-old school

assistant Brenda Barber. There are so many things we did not know, we

had no way of properly measuring drug levels, we had no way of

measuring rejection. I was the first one to be done in Britain. I

was not skier, even though it was like the first one. -- I was not

frightened. I only had a 50-50 chance and I knew I was dying

anyway so I had nothing to lose. She lived 11 years following the

transplant. She saw her daughter grow up. Just a couple of years

later the bar was raised even higher as John and the team at

Papworth performed the world's first combined triple transplant -

heart lungs and liver. We had a patient whose lungs were destroyed

by liver disease. Then are people with a variety of diseases who it

would be appropriate to do it on, and I suppose you have to argue

because we are stretching the boundaries, it is possible. It is

like being reborn. I cannot describe how much of a difference

it has made to me. During his career it's estimated John has

carried out more than 3,000 operations - both transplants and

heart repairs - Colin Dedman is his last ever patient - he needs open

heart surgery. We said we will replace your valve. There are lots

of things we can do to hearts that we could not do, people repairing

some parts. We can do things to the heart to make it work better

without needing a transplant. Town is one of thousands of

patients whose lives have been transformed by John. Born with a

rare condition - she desperately needed a new heart and lungs.

remember him saying, we would like to offer you, if we do the

operation, we would hope to offer you four health the years. That

sounded great. I went through a silly-season post transplant,

having never been allowed out to play or to any sport, I did horse-

riding, badminton, circuit training, learned to swim, there was almost

nothing I did not have a go at. I would work on the basis that I am

alive today, and I was alive yesterday, and I will let you know

about tomorrow. John's last operation has been a great success

and before long Colin will be back on his feet. We can see the attack

is beating again. That is all, folks. For the surgical team it's

time for some very special celebrations to mark a very special

career. Is this guy asleep, before I cut into it? And there's more

about John's extraordinary career and his plans for the future in an

Inside Out Special here in the East - next Monday night on BBC One. 100

years ago all eyes were on the sky as the aeroplane captured the

imagination of a generation. A group of pioneering aviator us were

getting ready to race each other in a course of over 1000 miles. These

days we take flying very much for granted But a hundred years ago the

skies were a brave new frontier - the aircraft had only been around

for a few years and pilots were still working out the best way to

take off, to land and most importantly how to stop falling out

of the sky. Then the stakes were raised even higher. In 1911, The

Daily Mail invited aviators from all over the world to race around

the entire country with the winner of the Circuit of Britain taking

home a �10,000 prize. This was probably the biggest challenge that

the early aviators in terms of a race had faced so far - you had a

very long race the longest yet and you had the British weather to deal

with and they went right up into Scotland over mountainous terrain

so it was an enormous challenge for those early aviators and machines.

The aircraft had only been invented eight years before, and the longest

distance race ever attempted in Britain had been a 185 mile dash

Britain had been a 185 mile dash Britain had been a 185 mile dash

from London to Manchester in 1910. That race had seen only two

entrants with former Bedfordshire Schoolboy Grahame White taking on

Louis Paulhan from France. Eventually Grahame White had to

retire after his aircraft was damaged - and the Frenchman took

the spoils. But the public's appetite for flight had been

stirred and the 1911 Circuit of Britain would be next. And this was

a challenge that would test the pilots and their machines to the

limit - starting at Brooklands in Surrey they'd be undertaking a

journey for more than a thousand miles - nothing like this had ever

been attempted before. Indeed back in 1911 many people had never seen

a car, let alone a plane - but the early aviators were determined to

prove the aircraft was safe, fast and reliable. Before long thirty

pilots had signed up for the air race in an incredible collection of

flying machines - they were all hoping they would be the first

across the finish line - or at least finish the epic journey.

Today, the Shuttleworth Collection in Bedfordshire has more examples

of the type of aircraft that took part in the race than anywhere else

in the world. So, John, these are all examples of types of aircraft

that took part in the Circuit of Britain race? Yes, that's right,

we've got the Deperdussin here, Bleriot, Blackburn and Bristol box-

kite. They look really different, though - this one here the wings

are quite high - this one the wings are low - this one over here looks

like a kite - they really are a mixture of design. That's

absolutely right, and in those days the conventional aeroplane wasn't a

convention so it was very experimental - they tried bi-planes,

tri-planes, quadraplanes monoplanes different layouts and

configurations - engines at the front, engines at the rear - nobody

knew how to make an aeroplane as we know it now, of course. But they

were prepared to push the boundaries to try and advance

aviation if you like and of course there was also the �10,000 prize,

which I'd imagine was quite tantalising. It certainly was for

some of the competitors - the 10,000 prize would have been a

substantial amount of money and it would have been very important to

them - for others it was the glory - for others the sportsmanship.

They were iconic figures in those days like the astronauts were, they

were celebrities. Brave men, but with egos? No doubt a lot of them

had quite large egos! You had to have an ego and a lot of money. Yes,

by and large, yes - you certainly had to be a very strong personality

of some sort to pursue it. Saturday July 22nd 1911, nearly 30

aircraft and their pilots gathered for first leg from Brooklands in

Surrey to Hendon. It caused a sensation - despite the early

morning start thousands of people from all over the country gathered

to witness these extraordinary machines take to the air. From

Hendon, the second leg would take them up through Harrogate and

Newcastle to Edinburgh. Leg three would see them through Stirling,

Glasgow, Carlisle, Manchester and Bristol. Then it was west to Exeter,

back across to Sailisbury Plain and down to Brighton before the flight

back to Brooklands - a total of 1010 miles. Among the entrants were

nine British machines including one flown by Samuel Franklin Cody. A

one-time Wild West showman and sharp-shooter, he came to England

in 1890, became a British subject and was now of the country's very

first flyers. He was a completely experimental aviator - I don't

think his approach was even particularly scientific - the

biggest problem with Cody is that its hard to extract the man from

the myth really - he sort of created this whole show around him

and so it's hard to get to the bones of who he really was and how

he went about things. Unlike Cody, some competitors didn't even make

it past the start line! The main challenges would have been

reliability of the engines and the aircraft themselves - the weather

was tough and the abilities of the pilot. You know, this was very

early days before conventions were established and the safe way of

doing things, so there were numerous challenges they had to

overcome, and of course, the machines themselves were, well, an

unacceptably low standard by today's standards, yes. It's said

that the Circuit of Britain Race was the inspiration behind the film

Those Magnificent Men In Their Flying Machines. This aircraft - a

replica of a Bristol Boxkite - was built for the film and is similar

in design to the one Cody would A hundred years ago pilots had

little experience of flight - today only the most experienced can take

these historical machines into the air. Shuttleworth chief pilot Dodge

Bailey spent a career with the RAF before tacking the Edwardians. It

must have been an incredibly risky time in aviation - the very early

years - and very dangerous. Well, it was genuine pioneering because

of all these uncertainties - uncertainties about the aeroplane,

the engine and the weather, and they didn't know what was going to

be beyond that line of trees and they had no way of dealing with

that weather, whether it be strong winds or rain or fog. They just

kind of pressed on and survival of the fittest prevailed. Some of them

lost their lives just because of the weather and others were lucky

Dodge, that was absolutely fantastic to watch - the way the

plane climbs it just looks so graceful, what's it like to fly it?

Well, it's different. The first concern with this particular

aeroplane is its climb rate. It doesn't climb very well so I'm very

conscious of wind and turbulence in the trees, in order to get it up to

a safe height, and flying the aeroplane is a little different.

It's not terribly stable so I have to be in control all the time. I

can't take my hands off the stick, for instance, so I have to be

flying the aeroplane all the time. The early pilots may still have had

a lot to learn but the French were catching on fast. In the Circuit of

Britain, Jules Vendrines was in second place while Andre Beaumont

in his Bleriot was leading the field. Beaumont was like many of

the early pioneer aviators from a wealthy background, and it was a

sport, you know? He was a bit of a glory hunter and so he was probably

less interested in the prize, and more interested in the celebrity.

But nevertheless, a pioneer and a pretty experienced aviator.

nation was gripped with aviation fever - thousands turned out all

over the country - not least to get a glimpse of Cody, who was still in

the running but suffering a lot of problems with his flying machine.

And now a hundred years later the crowds are gathering again. Every

summer the Shuttleworth Collection puts on a series of flying displays

and every now and then when the weather is just right the Edwardian

aircraft take to the skies once more. And included in today's line

up are two original aeroplanes virtually identical to the ones

that would have flown the Circuit of Britain - a 99-year-old

Blackburn monoplane - the oldest flying British aeroplane in the

world - and a 101-year-old The Circuit of Britain race ended

just a week after it had begun. It was won by Andre Beaumont in his

Bleriot who completed the 1010 mile course in a total flying time of

just under 22 and a half hours. Fellow Frenchman Vedrines was just

over an hour behind. As for SF Cody, well, he finished fourth - arriving

ten days after the winning French machine - but his biplane was the

only British-built aircraft to complete the course. It was a bit

like the lunar landings, where it was a major advancement in science.

It had all the elements of sportsmanship and courage and

challenge for the participants, so, yeah, it had everything. It was a

great, great event. I guess if they hadn't tried, if they'd sort of

given up. Then you have to say where would we have been? If they'd

maybe flown three miles and said, "no, that's too dangerous, we are

not doing that", where would aviation be now? It's a good

question. What a great story. That is it from Milton Keynes. We will

be back on 9th January. Have a great Christmas. There is a special