White City Pyrotechnics

I suppose the lesson to be learnt from this is: don’t ever get your props and special effects made by White City Pryotechnics. Because – and I’m quite happy to go on record with this – White City Pyrotechnics are run by twits.

Back in December 1995, Alan and the team at KMKYWAP throw a festive bonanza and attempt to break the record for pulling the world’s largest Christmas cracker. Naturally it fails dismally and the cracker ends up on fire and the ‘toy’ inside (a dialysis machine) gets sent back to where it came from. Prompting a brief conversation about whether the show is better use of £300k than purchasing a further 13 dialysis machines.

White City Pyrotechnics are represented by Hilary Simpson, who ends up being lambasted by Alan for shoddy work resulting in the blaze. They do have brief visual representation, but it’s merely block lettering on the back of some crew overalls. And considering that 1995 is pretty much three decades ago, we can take some artistic licence with how their branding would look now. If they survived this hammer blow to their reputation. I mean, they’re not real so I’m saying they did.

Actually a more tricky one to pull off than you might imagine, this one. There aren’t particularly glaring examples of fireworks companies out there. And ‘protechnics’ *is* just an overly glamourous word for ‘fireworks’, isn’t it? Any examples of logos you might see out there are predictably colourful to the point of being garish, so keeping it a little bit muted and ‘professional’ proved quite taxing.

And White City itself. Nothing really goes on there other than QPR, Westfield…the old Television Centre (hence why WCP featured on this show, being local and all that). There was the Franco-British Exhibition, but that was held in 1908, so hardly a contemporary source to extract ideas from.

So I pretty much just made this one up out of my own brain. Sorry about that.