By GREG DIXON
Where were you when you first heard the news?
The editorial producer of TV's Sunday, David Lomas, was at a resort in Fiji when he received a phone call from his journalist brother to tell him of the attacks in New York and Washington on September 11 last year.
The resort, which was full of American tourists, had only one television.
"I had to go and bang on the hotel door to get them to turn the bloody television on and I was the first person there," Lomas recalls.
"That was about 6 in morning. Then about 7, someone else wandered in and at 7.30 someone else. By midday there were about 100 people in the television lounge."
It was the first time Lomas and the rest of us saw those images, and far from the last.
As the media moves into anniversary mode this week, those pictures will confront us again and again as first TV3 (with the two-part Tale of Two Towers, which begins tonight at 8.30) then TV One and Prime screen programmes marking this calamitous event.
Most of the commemorative programmes will be produced in America or Britain.
The New Zealand-based Sunday, which has made a 90-minute special to air this Sunday (TV One, 7pm), will be using the images judiciously, according to Lomas.
They will bookend the programme, featuring first in a visual timeline of the day's events then, at the end of the show, in a montage of still pictures.
"It's not 90 minutes of planes flying into buildings. We haven't gone berserk.
"But it is a year on and they are the images that shocked the world. I must say, for myself, going back a year after and looking at all of those images, I'd forgotten how powerful and dramatic some of the [video footage] is."
Sunday, which dispatched reporters Cameron Bennett and Rob Harley to the United States about a month ago, will feature a series of stories from New York, San Francisco and Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
As well, Bennett will be coming sort-of-live from Ground Zero.
Lomas says Bennett will report from New York that day, but he won't be live because time zones mean that in the Big Apple it will be well past midnight when Sunday goes to air.
"It would have been 2 o'clock in the morning, which made New York a pitch-black hole. So it will be pre-recorded when it's dusk in New York."
Sunday anchor Mike Hosking will talk to Bennett about the mood and feel of New York as the first anniversary approaches.
Among the items featured will be an interview with the San Francisco-based widow of the only New Zealander who died that day, Alan Beaven.
A lawyer educated at the University of Auckland, Beaven was a leading environment specialist, representing various groups in high-profile cases in California.
He was on Flight 93 and, along with other passengers, tried to seize the plane from the hijackers before it crashed into a field in Pennsylvania.
Other stories tell of of photographer Gary Suson, who was given full access by the New York Fire Department to Ground Zero during the recovery of bodies, and New Zealander Melissa Jenner, who survived the towers' destruction.
Bennett visits the US Army base at Guantanamo Bay, where 500-plus Afghani prisoners are being held. He interviews civil rights activists in New York and examines whether the Afghanis are prisoners of war or detainees, and the legal issues involved.
Lomas says the question is asked "whether this is America going down the McCarthyism line again".
Fallout continues one year on
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