HELICOPTER HEROES: Meet the York TV crew bringing the Yorkshire Air Ambulance to our TV screens

That was the situation Ian Cundall found himself faced with when filming an episode of hit TV series Helicopter Heroes for the BBC.

They were at the Cow and Calf rocks above Ilkley. Ian was embedded with the crew of the Yorkshire Air Ambulance. And he was given the task of talking to the trapped climber while the emergency services struggled to free him.

The man had been pinned to the cliff edge when a rock moved, trapping his hand. He wasn’t in a lot of pain, Ian recalls; he just couldn’t move.

“So there I am perched on the cliff edge, trying to make conversation with this guy,” he says. “What do you talk about? I asked him where he came from...”

For ten years, Ian and his Andy Joynson have been following the day-to-day activities of the Yorkshire Air Ambulance.

For much of that time, they did it for the BBC. During almost ten years of filming for Helicopter Heroes, camera crews followed the air ambulance as it attended a chemical tanker crash on the M62, helped rescue a critically injured miner trapped 2,000 feet underground, and scrambled to help a walker who had fallen and injured her ankle in the remote Yorkshire Dales.

The Air Ambulance over Yorkshire

But all good things come to an end. Or, as Ian puts it, all TV shows have a shelf-life.

The BBC decided to cancel the show. Ian and Andy still felt they had more to say about the Yorkshire Air Ambulance, however. So, at the start of last year, they quit the BBC and set up independent York-based TV production company Air Television.

It’s a tiny outfit: Ian, Andy, producer Matt Richards, a couple of other cameraman, an editor, two researchers. There are ten of them altogether, and they operate out of two small rooms at the Ron Cooke Hub on the University of York’s new Heslington East campus.

Warren Baxter in the editing suite at Air Television

But Helicopter ER, the series they now make for UKTV’s Really channel which goes out on Monday nights, is already making waves.

Earlier this week, The Press carried on its front page the story of York student Rebecca Neal, who was badly hurt when she was hit by a car as she was cycling home along Hull Road in May.

The air ambulance was scrambled from RAF Topcliffe: and on board, as both cameraman and part of the crew, was Air Television’s Matt Richards. He was able to film what happened next.

The helicopter landed in a field beside the road, Matt says. Rebecca had suffered facial fractures, as well as a broken leg, a dislocated ankle, and other serious leg injuries.

She was conscious. “But paramedics were worried about a possible head injury,” Matt says.

Rebecca was treated at the scene, then rushed to Leeds General Infirmary, where the chopper landed on the hospital’s helipad. The footage Matt captured made for a dramatic sequence when it was aired during this week’s episode of Helicopter ER on Monday night.

Student Rebecca Neil during her rescue drama

But best of all, for Matt, was that he was able to meet up with Rebecca again months later, when she was well on the road to recovery.

She came up to Topcliffe to meet the ambulance crew and have a look around. “It was really good to talk to her,” he said.

She could actually remember little of the rescue and 15 minute helicopter flight to the LGI. But looking around the helicopter did spark one memory. “She remembered the air vents which had been above her head as she was lying there,” Matt says.

Rebecca Neal visiting the Yorkshire Air Ambulance crew who saved her

As readers of The Press will know, Rebecca is back at her studies this week. Hers was a story that had a happy ending.

That’s not always the case. But at the end of the day, however a rescue has turned out, the air ambulance crew know that they’ve done their best.

“You know your sole aim is to try to help,” says Andy Joynson.

That goes for the Air Television cameraman embedded with the ambulance crew as much as the paramedics themselves.

There's only ever one cameraman on board the air ambulance at any one time - and they’re not there to be a voyeur, Andy says.

Yes, they’re making a TV programme. But, whether working for the BBC or for themselves at Air, they’d never film without a patient’s consent.

And while they may be holding a camera, they’re also an integral part of the crew. They wouldn’t be allowed to take up precious space in the air ambulance if they weren’t.

So they have basic life-saving training, they help fetch and carry at the scene of an accident, they assist with navigation – and they even help save lives.

In one case, Andy was on duty with the air ambulance when they got a call to a house in a remote rural part of Yorkshire. A woman had suffered a heart attack.

The Air Ambulance in flight

The lead paramedic had to concentrate on clearing her airway: leaving Andy to perform CPR – cardiopulmonary resuscitation – until a defibrillator could be brought to restart her heart.

It seemed like an eternity that he was pumping her chest, although in reality it was only a few minutes. But CPR is exhausting, Andy says. It was the adrenaline that got him through. “You get lots of adrenaline.”

One of the great things about making Helicopter ER, Andy says – and, before it, Helicopter Heroes for the BBC – is that the camera crews are able to follow through, from beginning to end, the story of what happened to a patient.

That not only makes for a satisfying piece of television – it also means a lot to the patients themselves, and to the emergency crews who rescued them.

Very often, the paramedics who treat a patient at an accident never get to see them again. But programmes like Helicopter ER can bring rescuers and patient back together for an emotional reunion – as they did with Rebecca. “The paramedics really like that side of what we’re doing,” says Matt Richards.

The programme also helps to enormously raise the profile of the air ambulance – an important factor in itself, because the charity, which is in the process of replacing its two ageing aircraft with new Airbus H145 helicopters, has to raise £12,000 every day to keep flying.

While the BBC’s Helicopter Heroes was on air, it is thought to have helped raise £2 million pounds a year for air ambulance charities around the country, Ian says.

That didn’t all go to the Yorkshire Air Ambulance, of course. Helicopter Heroes went out on national TV, and viewers tend to donate to their own local air ambulance charity.

But the publicity generated by the shows certainly plays a vital part in helping to keep the Yorkshire Air Ambulance in the air.

STILL FLYING HIGH AFTER TEN YEARS

Helicopter Heroes, the original BBC series following the Yorkshire Air Ambulance, was originally commissioned after Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond’s dramatic accident at Elvington near York in September 2006.

The TV presenter was badly injured when the Vampire jet car he had been driving at speeds approaching 300mph veered off the track and rolled several times before coming to a rest upside down.

He was rushed to hospital by the air ambulance. And, grateful to the team which had saved his life, he later agreed to present the first series of Helicopter Heroes.

Ian Cundall, who began his career as a journalist on the Yorkshire Evening Press, and Andy Joynson, who started out on Radio York, worked on the BBC series for years.

By the time they left the BBC to set up Air Television after Helicopter Heroes had been cancelled, they had developed a real bond with the ambulance crews.

Ian Cundall, left, and Andy Joynson, bosses of Air Television

Helicopter ER, their new show for UKTV’s digital Really channel, is different to Helicopter Heroes. It goes out post-watershed, so is grittier and more graphic – but never voyeuristic, the pair insist.

Making the show relies very much on trust, says Andy – the trust of the ambulance crews, but also of the patients being helped.

Air TV always gets consent to film. But because there is such a huge amount of goodwill towards the work of air ambulances, it is surprising how many people agree to their story being told.

Helicopter ER is Air Television’s main focus at the moment, though they have also done work for Channel 5 and there’s some work with Channel 4 in the pipeline.

Ian and Andy are also hoping to get a commission to make a second series of Emergency Rescue Down Under, a Helicopter Heroes spin-off Air TV made in Australia which ran on the BBC.

Filmed in New South Wales, it followed British flying doctors and nurses working with the Australian emergency services.

On board an air ambulance during filming of Emergency Rescue Down Under

It often involved flying huge distances, says Andy, who was based in Australia with a small Air Television crew during filming.

In one case, a call came in about a baby suffering breathing and bronchial problems on a remote cattle station.

Andy and the emergency rescue crew flew for hours to a remote community set in the red, dusty Australian outback.

The heat hit them as they stepped out of the fixed wing aircraft, he says. And there was something else, too. “As we started filming, I thought there was mud on the lens. But it was flies...”

At least a plague of flies is one hazard they won’t have to encounter while filming in Yorkshire...