The Wiki Man | 22 May 2010

With the single exception of the in- flight live map with its wonderfully eccentric ideas about the relative importance of towns and cities (what’s so special about Chartwell?), I don’t often use the in-flight entertainment systems on planes. I’m not sure I want to watch Avatar on a nine-inch screen — or on any screen, come to think of it. In fact I think it would be better if, a week before the flight, your airline just sent you a £10 Amazon voucher along with a few book recommendations.

In a way, the best improvement to in-flight entertainment has been the BBC’s and Sky’s creation of desktop software which means you can download television programmes to a PC. This means that, before your trip, you can download many hours of television to your laptop and then watch it at leisure while you’re abroad.

In my case this largely means programmes from BBC4 — a miraculous channel which seems to absorb little more than 1 per cent of the BBC’s budget while producing around half its worthwhile content. As a result, I have just spent an hour of my recent flight watching The Box that Changed Britain, a documentary narrated by Roger McGough — and as valuable an hour of television as I have seen in ages. If you are quick you can find it now by searching for it at www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer.

The programme chronicles a seemingly banal invention which, though little celebrated, may have done more for the postwar economy than almost any other innovation. This is the standard shipping container, a centuries-old concept which finally realised its true promise as the result of work in the 1950s by Malcolm McLean, a self-made North Carolina trucker.

What’s interesting about the whole story is how much it parallels and presages the development of the internet — a container being analogous to the packets in which data is moved about.