A Risk Business Special Report on the world's most extravagant fairgrounds.
In which Michael Rodd sets out in search of the ultimate fairground ride. In two of America's sunshine states, California and Florida, he finds himself taking part in a high-wire act, in a Wild West shoot-out, and in the breath-taking twists and turns of a 400-foot aquatic Cresta run. Participation, it seems, is the name of the Theme Park game.
Every year the impresarios introduce new ways of luring customers through the turnstiles of their particular brand of money-spinning fantasy. It's an ' arms race ' in which the principal weapons are million-dollar roller coasters, breath-taking machines designed to carry the customer cork-screwing and gyrating in apparent defiance of the laws of gravity.
But the bills can escalate as rapidly as the thrills, and Parks can plunge from giddying heights to sickening depths almost as rapidly as their pleasure-seeking passengers. It's an industry where holidays are the most frantic time of the year, and where pleasure turns out to carry a very slender profit margin.
Film cameraman JOHN WYATT Film editor JON LEE
Producer LYN GAMBLES
Editor MICHAEL BLAKSTAD
(Postponed from 20 December 1978)