Johnny English Reborn
Flipside reporter | 16 February 2012
Johnny English Reborn has turned out to be the biggest UK opening ever for the international comedic superstar Rowan Atkinson, who plays the hopeless spy working for British Intelligence, now sponsored by Toshiba and with the slogan 'spying for you'.
To mark this week's release on Blu-Ray and DVD, Universal Pictures suggested we sent a young reporter to the Spy Games camp near the world famous Bletchley park code-breaking centre to find out how espionage really works. Edmund, 11, loved the film at the cinema and jumped at the chance. Here is his report.
You may have seen Johnny English on the screen, making a complete fool of himself and giving us all a huge laugh. You can have a good laugh and learn about the reality of spying at the Spy Games camp I visited this half-term holiday, where I discovered how to de-code secret messages, dodge lasers and navigate a minefield. But one of the best things of the day was seeing the gadgets, like an infra-red camera that can actually see the signals sent out from electronic devices as they transmit messages to one another.
Have you ever seen a movie that features an unmarked white can with a surveillance team inside? Well, nowadays, if terrorists see a suspicious vehicle outside one of their 'safe houses' they stick a bomb underneath it, blow up the van, never use that safe house ever again, and you'll have lost your surveillance team and your suspects. But, using modern technology, you can fit a camera inside the
little crack in the wing mirror - just go and see how small it is, you'll know what I mean. If you can fit a camera in there, imagine how many places you can fit a camera in an ordinary car. You can set up those cameras as much as a mile away, where you won't be seen. But if the terrorists do get suspicious and blow it up, you'll only have lost a normal car and a bunch of cameras - no humans.
Another great piece of spy kit I tried was some special mobile phone software. If I told you a rubbish old mobile phone could be worth more than an iPhone, would you believe me? Of course not! But it can with the very special and expansive software we installed that day. If you turn a phone off, then call it, you would go straight to answer phone, wouldn't you? But if you turn this special phone off then call it, the
phone doesn't make a sound, doesn't get turned on, but still puts you through. So it acts as a live bugging device without the owner knowing. It's very useful if you need to listen in to a conversation.
We also raced against time to defuse a live ticking time 'bomb', with messages to decode. We had to read the coded messages and unplug the wires in the right order. We found ourselves with two wires left, one second to go, and...just my luck, I guessed wrong and pulled the wires in the wrong order! Yes, the bomb would have gone off and we'd all have died. We learnt how to dodge lasers in a smoky room,
which we all failed. Again, we all died about five times until I found the power source!
Spy Camp, near Bletchley, is run by two ex-british forces. If you're eleven or over, you learn how to fire all sorts of guns, from sniper rifles to tasers and mini-guns to air rifles. You fire it at targets and learn how to reload and the rest of it.
Flipside thanks Edmund for his report. We thank Spy Games for hosting the Johnny English Reborn Spy Camp. Spy Games will be running Kids Spy Camps from 3rd March onwards. Visit www.spy-games.com for details. Johnny English Reborn is available now on Blu-ray Triple Play and
DVD from Universal Pictures UK.
If you really want to delve into the history of codes and code-breaking visit the Bletchley Park museum: www.bletchleypark.org. Bletchley's top secret work to break the Germans' secret codes is said to have finished the Second World War several years earlier than it would have without it. And it
led to the development of computers, which changed the world all over again - all thanks to a team led by a university mathematician.
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