All over the world today, work came to a standstill and streets emptied as billions focused their total attention on Twitter to hear the latest desperate news of the unfolding air-travel disaster crisis affecting their poor old Uncle Stephen Fry.
The universally-revered renaissance man, wit, raconteur, panel game host and bottom connoisseur’s ordeal began in Sydney, where he unsuspectingly boarded a doomed Qantas A380 Airbus. Halfway from its scheduled fateful stopover in Singapore on the way to the UK, however, disaster struck as one of the enormous flying deathtrap’s engines suddenly shut down horrifically – forcing the hapless pilot to make a life-or-death consultation of the manual about whether to land at Dubai or risk flying on safely on just three engines.
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Really? How incredibly interesting |
Tweeting frantically from his first-class seat via his faithful iPad, the terrified polymath heroically issued a frantic battery of updates on his unfolding ordeal to a shocked world. “Bugger,” he tweeted mellifluously, as he revealed his awful plight. “Forced to land in Dubai. An engine has decided not to play.”
With humanity now fully alerted to the crisis, thanks to his BBC employers clearing the schedules for non-stop coverage, a collective gasp echoed around the globe at his next desperate but exquisitely-worded communication: “My flight. Still on board. Not sure of
[sic] we'll be bussed to the airport lounges or kept aboard while they work on it. Mnaah.”
As tragedy upon tragedy unfolded on the tarmac in Dubai, the undisputed master of verbal dexterity wailed plaintively: “Oh Jesus arsemothering fuck. I've left my wallet on the sodding plane. Hell's teeth this really isn't my day… I'm going to be siting
[sic] here for ever and ever and ever… That's it. I'm fucked. Seriously fucked… It's at times like this a man considers taking up smoking again. Possibly with heroin, crack and MDMA mixed in & all washed down with vodka… Hurrah! I seem to have made Gulf News.”
Uncle Stephen’s appalling ordeal was finally ended five hours ago when panicking Qantas officials finally realised who he was, and decided his unendurable distress was sufficiently interesting to transfer him to an Emirates flight to London - where teams of trauma counsellors are waiting to help him as he tentatively attempts to pick up the tattered threads of his brutally shattered life.