I read John Holden's complaint to the BBC and their reply with interest (News and Reviews - Nov 13). This morning, as I drove to work, I listened to some of Terry's show, he described his 'near miss' on Friday night when 200-weight of chain landed 2 feet away from where he was standing during the live Children in need broadcast. Needless to say, Terry didn't make any jokes about the incident, or about Health and Safety 'officials' in general, perhaps this has helped him realise that health and safety professionals are working extremely hard to protect us all from the everyday dangers to our safety and our health and have a little more respect for them in future. Ian.

Did it fall? Or was it pushed... ;-)

Now theres a way to raise money for children in need!!!! would the mods allow a top 10 list of "victims" perhaps? i think not. :)

Now then - the near miss did happen and could have resulted in a really serious accident, even a fatality! I just wonder of Sir Terry might just have an even worse opinion of us H&S professionals, because, if the BBC safety person had done the risk assessments properly, if at all, the equipment would not have fallen?

The H&S person does not do the risk assessment. They put systems in place and training in place to allow the competent person, who is going to undertake the activity, to perform and document foreseeable hazards and assign risk values. This then should feed into the operating procedure to make it a safe operating procedure. Maybe they did not consider that potentially killing Wogan was a big hazard. They may have performed a hazard v's benefit analysis. Was the potential benefit worth the risk?!?!?