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The Luton writer behind the original Airplane!

Paul Hayes
News imageAA Film Archive/Alamy/Paramount A colour mid-shot, a publicity still from the film Airplane!. It shows a jet airliner cockpit set, with seated on the left of frame the inflatable autopilot character ‘Otto’; standing in the centre a woman in her mid-20s in the white blouse and dark blue skirt uniform of an airline cabin crew member; and on the right of frame, sitting, a man in his early thirties with headphones on, in light grey shirt and greyscale tartan tie, operating the controls and holding a radio set microphone.AA Film Archive/Alamy/Paramount
The hit comedy film Airplane!, released in 1980, tells the story of a flight on which both pilots fall ill and a passenger has to take the controls

A director of one of the world's most famous comedy films has praised the writer of the original TV version on the 70th anniversary of its first broadcast.

The spoof disaster movie Airplane!, starring Leslie Nielsen, has been widely acclaimed since its release in 1980.

But the initial version, Flight into Danger, was written as a live drama for Canadian television in 1956 by Arthur Hailey – a then-unknown writer from Luton.

David Zucker, the co-writer and co-director of Airplane!, told a BBC Sounds documentary that Hailey was "a very, very skilled craftsman" who had "thought of this great story" which Zucker and his colleagues had been able to parody.

News imageGetty Images A black-and-white mid-shot of a 39-year-old man with short, greying dark hair, dressed in a suit with a grey jacket, light-coloured shirt, and a tie with a dotted pattern on it. He is looking into the camera, smiling, leaning forward slightly, posed against a plain, featureless background.Getty Images
Writer Arthur Hailey, pictured in 1959, was born and raised in Luton. He emigrated to Canada in the late 1940s

Hailey was born in Luton in 1920 and grew up in the town.

During World War Two he served as a reconnaissance pilot in the Royal Air Force, then in the late 1940s emigrated to Canada.

Keen to become a writer but unable to make a breakthrough, Hailey instead worked as the editor of a trucking industry magazine.

While a passenger on a flight across Canada in late 1955, he wondered what would happen if both pilots were incapacitated and he had to try and land the big four-engined plane.

He had not flown for a decade, and then only in smaller aircraft.

"I daydreamed a story," Hailey remembered on Desert Island Discs in 1986. "It's like a fairytale, and still seems that way. Everything changed."

He turned the idea into his play Flight into Danger, which he successfully sold to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC).

It tells the story of an airline flight on which there is a choice of salmon or lamb for dinner. Everyone who has the salmon suffers debilitating food poisoning, including the two pilots. Former fighter pilot George Spencer has to take the controls, talked down via radio by a senior pilot on the ground.

News imageGetty Images A black-and-white close-up shot of a woman in her mid-30s, with short, bobbed blonde hair, wearing a black top, smiling and looking away to the right of frame.Getty Images
Corinne Conley, pictured here in 1965, had one of the leading roles in Flight into Danger, as the stewardess Janet

CBC Television broadcast the play, performed live as was then usual, on 3 April 1956.

Corinne Conley, now 96, co-starred as stewardess Janet, who helped Spencer land the aircraft. She admitted the cast were initially unsure about the new writer.

"He had been writing commercials for trucks," she recounts.

"We were all kind of scoffing, 'Arthur who writes the truck commercials is writing a drama!?' And of course then Arthur had the last laugh, because two weeks later he was famous."

Flight into Danger was a huge hit, later described by the Toronto Star as "probably the most successful TV play ever written anywhere".

Starring as George Spencer was James Doohan, who later found fame as Scotty, chief engineer of the starship Enterprise, in the original Star Trek series.

News imageGetty Images A black-and-white close-up publicity shot of a man in his mid-40s with short, dark hair, smiling looking away to the left of frame with his eyes, although his face is facing the right of frame. He wears a top which looks grey in the photo, with a black collar.Getty Images
James Doohan, who starred in Flight into Danger, later became well-known as Scotty, the chief engineer in Star Trek

But Flight into Danger also has a link with another long-running science-fiction classic.

The producer in charge of Hailey's original play was Sydney Newman, then the Head of Drama at the CBC.

Later in 1956, BBC Television in Britain bought and showed a recording of Flight into Danger. It was such a success that they purchased other CBC plays produced by Newman.

An audience research report on Flight into Danger, preserved at the BBC Written Archives Centre at Caversham in Berkshire, recorded that it was estimated to have been watched by a quarter of the UK adult population. Those surveyed gave it an average reaction score of 92 out of 100, then a joint-record for any drama.

All this eventually resulted in Newman moving to work in the UK, initially at ITV and then from 1963 as Head of Drama at the BBC.

There, he co-created the famous science-fiction series Doctor Who.

Graeme Burk, a Canadian broadcasting historian who edited Newman's memoirs for publication, said none of that would have happened without Hailey's play.

"Without Flight into Danger, you don't get Doctor Who," he says.

"All those dominoes don't necessarily fall down in that order if Flight into Danger didn't happen."

News imageA close-up colour half-profile shot from the right of a man in his mid-60s, looking away to the right of frame with his chin in his hand. He has grey hair which is still dark in places, and a moustache which is still mostly dark, and dark bushy eyebrows. He is wearing glasses, a watch with a silver strap, a red, white and grey tartan-patterned shirt, and a white and green neckerchief.
Sydney Newman (pictured in 1984) was the supervising producer of Flight into Danger, later becoming Head of Drama at the BBC from 1963

Arthur Hailey also enjoyed a long and successful career, as a best-selling novelist.

But he told the BBC in 1974 he had lost interest in writing for television when the days of live TV drama ended, as he didn't find it as exciting.

Flight into Danger was remade for television several times, including in the US, Germany, and Australia. There was also a novelisation, and in 1957 a feature film version called Zero Hour!.

It was Zero Hour! which would give Flight into Danger its most prominent legacy.

A more melodramatic version of the story, it still retained Hailey's structure and much of his dialogue.

A television broadcast of it in the 1970s was seen by the writer-director team of David Zucker, Jerry Zucker and Jim Abrahams, and they were inspired to turn it into Airplane!.

"As silly as we think Zero Hour! is now, and Flight into Danger, they were good pieces of drama," David Zucker said.

"They had the requirements for a good, interesting movie – comedy or drama."

Hailey himself took the parody in good spirit. He told BBC Radio 2 in 1997 that after he and his wife had been to see Airplane! she had asked him what he thought of it.

"Some of the lines I wrote are actually in there," he said.

"But it was very funny, and then I thought about it and I said, 'Well, that play has been so good to us and we've squeezed so much out of it, if anyone can get a little more mileage good luck to them'."

The full documentary telling the story of the 1956 live TV play Flight into Danger
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