Simon Mayo

These are the things that get you annoyed and unrealistic in movies.

Who was number four?

Well, Ed Freshwater.

Yes, Ed Freshwater.

That Ed Freshwater.

Hi, Ed.

Says, I agreed so much with fellow church member Theo's letter a couple of weeks ago about people sitting bolt upright after nightmares, because that was the first one.

But one point of difference.

In 1944, Nicholas Alkmaid was a tail gunner in an RAF Lancaster that was shot up over Germany.

Unable to reach his parachute and with his aircraft on fire,

Alchemade took the terrible decision to jump out of the plane, leaping to his certain death from a height of 18,000 feet.

Wow.

Except he landed in a tree and survived.

His injuries from the fall itself amounted to...

amounted to a sprained knee.

His improbable escape led the Germans to think he was a spy until the wreckage was found and he gained some celebrity as an inmate in the notorious Stalag Luft III.

His captors even made him a certificate to prove his account, a quite remarkable story that deserves repeating.

So it's fair to say that in general, if you fall from a greater height and land in a tree, it's not good.

However, for Nicholas Alkmaid, even though he was in tragic circumstances, imagine falling that distance, landing in a tree and spraining your knee.

And Jimmy says, a couple of weeks ago, a listener wrote in about unrealistic movie moments and their real world consequences, including how falling from a great height into a tree is very unlikely to save your life.