Evening Standard (London): Grounded by the script

LIKE moths and Eastern mystics, we Brits are possessed by a secret yearning for self-immolation.

You can see it every summer during the barbecue season, when the gardens of suburbia are filled with drunken fatties igniting charcoal briquettes in old biscuit tins, then deciding to "get it going" by pouring a can of petrol over the smouldering coals, only to end up performing a miniature re-enactment of the Dresden fire bombing.

Or there's the glorious tradition of Burns Night (also known as Guy Fawkes Night), an English version of Russian Roulette that's played each November with dodgy Chinese incendiary devices, and ensures a brisk trade in AE departments across the country. Still, it could be worse. I'm told that up in the rougher parts of Glasgow, macho types like to compete in a seasonal variation of apple bobbing, using a deep fat fryer, their own faces, and batter-covered Mars bars. We're talking "tonight Matthew, I am going to be Simon Weston".

If you really want to singe your physiognomy beyond recognition, you could learn to fly a helicopter, a ludicrously expensive and dangerous form of transport that enables the superrich to perish in their own personal fireball. If a disgruntled Iraqi with a surface- to-air missile doesn't get you, then a momentary lapse in the pilot's concentration probably will, as was confirmed by archive of some extremely nasty infernos in last night's Building the Ultimate Helicopter (Five).

The narrator talked reassuringly of recent developments in safety, such as a modern Chinook's ability to "auto-rotate" without power like a sycamore seed, but the accompanying footage didn't inspire much confidence in the technique, mainly because the pilot hastily switched on his 3,000hp engines again when 50ft from the ground, to avoid what is known technically as a "crash". And nobody even mentioned the delicate matter of what my highflying friends refer to as the "Jesus bolt", which connects the rotor head to the frame, and is so called because, if it breaks, you just have time to utter the single word "Jesus" before your head is forced down into your chest cavity, thereby enabling you to stare out at the world through your own nipples.

Before looking at the latest models, the programme chronicled the machine's evolution, from ungainly and useless toy to essential military vehicle.

Apparently, a Spaniard called Juan de la Cierva developed the first practical helicopter back in 1923, but it wasn't until the Korean war in the early 1950s that the machines became fast and reliable enough to be used in active service.

There followed a period of innovation, with turbine engines replacing pistons, lightweight plastics superseding steel, and changes to the shape of the rotating blades, although nobody in the industry has yet followed up my revolutionary idea of fitting an ejector seat. Pity.

For years, I've been trying to persuade Noel Edmonds to have one installed, so that he can shoot upwards through his own rotors, and slowly descend as 150lbs of thinly-sliced salami.

Speaking breathlessly over a cheap and relentless drum 'n' bass ostinato, the narrator promised that part two would reveal "the one enemy that engineers still have to overcome". I'd expected it to be gravity, but the helicopter's nemesis turned out to be birds, which can hit a windscreen at more than 200mph, and can shatter even laminated glass. Thus it was that we were introduced to a man whose job consists of stuffing game birds into the barrel of a nitrogen gas gun, and firing them at windscreens at a speed of 310mph (they'd certainly have to be game to agree to that).

ITHINK the pheasant we saw receiving this treatment was already dead, but if not, I bet I know what the last thing that went through its mind was. Its arse. Talking of which, I had a pheasant leave me at damn near that speed, through the same orifice, shortly after my last visit (and I mean my last visit) to the Ivy.

Edited like a rock video and hyperactively voiced by a man who would make you want to call the police if he spoke to you like that in the street, this was a documentary that (like its subject) hovered aimlessly and lacked momentum. With ghoulish glee, each crash and splat was played several times, so we could enjoy the mayhem to the full, and the use of computer graphics of the mechanical workings seemed unnecessary, when it would have been simpler and clearer to have shown the real thing.

Just as the weak point of a helicopter is pilot error, so the weak point of this programme was its gauche and clumsy script, full of clunking phrases like "with bated breath, they nervously watched", and "all engineers know well the bird strike test". Doubtless the script was written by the producer in a bid to save on the budget, and she was obviously a keen orthinologist.

No, I don't mean ornithologist, I mean orthinologist. She wasn't a bird watcher, she was a word botcher.