The hearse rolls on for LAR Traffic Services
Following the recent story about a ‘fake funeral’ being filmed in Shoreditch High Street which stirred up a hornets nest of complaints on Twitter & other such networking sites, a plethora of vicious complaints have been directed at LAR Traffic Services of Enfield. Recovery World were asked to supply a street lifter to film a hearse being ‘lifted’ outside a church during a funeral as part of a comedy sketch for a show. Mac Engledew cross hired the truck from LAR. It was only when he received a tirade of abuse at the film scene that he realised that some bystanders actually thought it was all for real. This was then compounded when photos posted on You Tube and Twitter were picked up and viralled by over 1000 irate ‘twits’ who failed to notice the microphone boom clearly in shot.
Instead of this innocuous incident fading into obscurity, a number of ‘Twitters’ spotted the livery on the recovery truck, and identified it as one of the LAR Traffic Services fleet. As a result, manager James McAuliffe received a daily tirade of abusive phone calls and e-mails which still continues weeks to this day!
Such gullible observers continue their vilification with comments of ‘shameless’, ‘morons’ and ‘heartless basterds’ (sic) being some of the printable versions but many were more profane and couldn’t grace the pages of a reputable magazine such as this. Despite such provocation James retained his true professionalism and responded to all the e-mails pointing out the reality of the situation and including links to the Recovery World blog, The Sun and YouTube to underline that this was indeed a film scene for a TV comedy series.
On the positive side, BBC News motoring journalist Adam Rayner (son of agony aunt Claire Raynor) had nothing but congratulations on the huge coverage LAR received on the Internet, while The Cremation Society of Great Britain found it amusing enough to want to run the story in their quarterly magazine.
Hopefully this story will fade and become a distant memory, but it’s reassuring that there are still some astute people out there who recognise that we are not only true professionals, but we also have a sense of humour!
