User Reviews

Tales of the Unexpected: Hijack starts in London on an airport runway as Gaelic Airways flight 103 to Edinburgh prepares to take off. With the passengers aboard, a large group of renowned surgeons, the Captain (Denis Quilley) & his co-pilot (Simon Cadell) take off. Then shortly into the flight the Steward (Sean Barrett) enters the cockpit & informs the Captain that an unidentified passenger has taken the air hostess Milly (Suzanne Danielle) hostage in the toilet, he says he has a shampoo bottle full of nitro, a gun & if anyone tries to enter the toilet Milly gets it. The hijacker also demands the plane stop to refuel at Manchester where he wants two parachutes & one million pounds in used notes. All the hijackers demands are met & the plane takes off again but what he is up to & how can he possibly get away with it...

This Tales of the Unexpected story was the 17th & final episode from season 4, the sixth of nine Tales of the Unexpected episodes to be directed by Herbert Wise Hijack is actually an enjoyable little tale with a twist. The story by Robert L. Fish was dramatised by Denis Cannan & is your typical Tales of the Unexpected episode that revolves around some sort of clever criminal scheme that ends in a twist of some sort be it good or bad for the perpetrators. Here the story revolves around a plane hijacking which these days is a bit of a hot potato of a topic & one would suspect that most sensible TV stations now wouldn't make a show with such a theme but luckily back then at the beginning of the 80's things were different & as such Hijack was made. At only twenty five minutes in length at least it's short, it moves along at a good pace & it has a fairly gripping story in which most viewers will probably want to know how it ends. Speaking of the ending I must admit I didn't foresee the twist & it was both satisfying & unexpected.

This appears to have been shot on a real plane but obviously on a runway somewhere, in fact I can't remember a single shot showing the plane flying in the air. At the start of Hijack the hijacker walks through customs at London & he's wearing a long overcoat, huge dark sunglasses & an obviously fake moustache & I sat there & said to myself 'could this guy look any more conspicuous if he tried?'. Dark sunglasses at night & a fake moustache is not the sort of thing to wear if you want to go unnoticed! I am also not convinced that you can open the door on a plane in midair & casually just walk down the aisle against nothing stronger than a slight breeze! There's yet another good cast here including Denis Quilley OBE & Simon Cadell.

Hijack is a bit far-fetched at times especially when compared to todays ultra high security at airports but it's enjoyable enough with a good twist at the end as well, a good end to a largely mixed fourth season which includes great episodes like Would You Believe It? (1981) & crap episodes like Vicous Circle (1981).

A flight is set to take off from London to Edinburgh, a number of the passengers are surgeons, heading an important convention, they all take through all manner of surgical equipment, knives and appliances. One of the guests is a suspicious looking man in sunglasses, not long after they've taken off he's taken stewardess Millie hostage and has started a hijack, the Pilots are alerted. He asks for £1m in used notes, diversion to Manchester, and two parachutes.

It's funny to think by today's standards how you could manage to get appliances on a Plane by sweet talking one of the guards, and how you could manage to get on a plane in dark glasses.

As has been mentioned, Series 4 has been a definite mix of good and bad, but the standard overall is still pretty good, this is definitely one of the better episodes.

Utterly far fetched, but fun, diverting enough, 6/10

You really have to take yourself back to forty years ago when this program originally aired for the story to work. Security precautions today would never allow a creepy looking, mustachioed guy with dark glasses to board a flight without proper screening. Not to mention that doctor with all the sharp bladed scalpels in his briefcase. That aside, this was an exceptionally clever story that keeps the viewer firmly engaged and wondering how it will all work out. I think a good deal of the suspense had to do with the dialog between the Captain (Denis Quilley) and control tower trying to determine the best way to deal with the hijacker holding stewardess Milly (Suzanne Danielle) hostage. The meticulous planning of the perpetrators even had the plane making a forced landing to disembark passengers so the flight could resume with no interference from anyone on board. I have to admit, the surprise ending for this one came right out of that wild blue yonder you often hear about. The only thing is, with at least five crew members in on the million pound heist, their individual take didn't seem like all that much, although it would be worth at least four times as much as it does today.

This episode was screened in 1981, two years after Thatcher promised to end Labour's Winter of Discontent.

This was before budget airlines allowed the masses to get on board, so air travel was not exactly affordable for folk in say Carlisle or other working class areas of the UK.

Anyway, the air crew have to contend with a hijacking, and the ending was quite a twist. It's quaint seeing aircraft boarding security, 20 years before 9/11. No formal racial profiling back then (if you know what I mean) so quite an interesting atmosphere. Now we cannot even have water bottles in our hand luggage!