I've just been reading the Wogan thread with lots of discussion regarding Simon Mayo. It was his R5 show I was listening to at work as it all happened.

Watching the programme, they have a tendancy to use little bits of creepy incidental music. It isn't needed.

It's pretty atmospheric, isn't it? The "big" moments (the crashes; the collapse) are really quite unsettling when you don't see them on a loop, they just happen the once and are done so are all the more startling.
The falling bodies are disturbing, too. All quite spooky and chilling, basically - very effective, not least having seen the suicide videos of the folk who were convicted today for plotting "Britain's 9/11". Wonder what they'd make of the film...

I got a bit obsessed post 9/11 and must have seen the usual footage a thousand times. I thought I was dulled to shock by repetition. The moment of the second plane hitting in this film though left me feeling anxious, a little nauseous and genuinely shocked.

Hopefully it also helped to destroy some of the ridiculous conspiracy theories that even reasonable people appear to accept as fact these days.

The footage of Manhattan lost in smoke remains astounding. I can still barely believe it happened.

i had followed simon from radio1 to 5live and found he was a bit over his head covering news items but when he covered the incidents on that day i felt he covered the incident brilliantly. he painted the picture perfectly(i did'nt know what the twin towers were)

i'll be very p***** off when he leaves 5live for radio 2

of this a few weeks ago. An excellent piece of work. Even more unsettling for its starkness. The clip of the second strike from a womans flat with her flat mate panicking on mic was very disturbing.

I watched it all and it was chilling, like going back in time to the day itself. I remember going into Tescos on the afternoon of 9/11 and wondering why everyone was watching the TVs in the store. I rushed home, put on the TV, then put on the Today programme and did some ironing and tried to carry on as events unfolded. I really did believe that it was the beginnning of the end of the world that day.

Sorry it wasn't the Today programme, it was an extended version of PM on Radio 4 that I was listening too.

being at my desk at the end of a late lunch when the news of the first plane strike came up on the BBC. I called it across the office and we all thought it must have been some terrible accident. Then a refresh brought up news of the second strike, and we knew that it was no accident.

We had no televisions in our office, and it's no exageration to say that none of us did any work that afternoon. The enormity of what had happened and the certain knowledge of the consequences that must necessarily follow made it an impossibility.

The web basically ground to a halt. The BBC website, Ananova (big back then), Reuters, Sky News were all so overburdened, they barely updated. The best place for news was the scurrilous web forum Popbitch, because so many journalists hung out there, but it wasn't being over-burdened. There was news being posted up there quicker than it was going out on the radio or on the news websites. It wasn't always accurate - I recall there being a report that the White House had been hit - but news of United 93 went out considerably before it appeared anywhere else.

the Radio 5 Simon Mayo broadcast and it was done very well - considering it was possibly the biggest news story since the Cuban missile crisis and nobody knew what was happening his sheer professionalism shone through and it was the BBC at its best - no hysteria, no gung ho opinions. History should rightly judge the aftermath of the situation in a better light for the Bush administration than they will surely get credit for. Dont get me wrong - I concur with the opinion that it was the worst administration in recent years but considering the sheer scale of the atrocity it would have been so much easier to have unleashed a nuclear response against all of Americas perceived foes and suffer the consequences afterwards. There must have been many worried leaders in troublesome Middle Eastern states in the days after the attack. Obviously they decided to take it out on Iraq which was a big mistake but it could have been a whole lot worse.

The eerie thing for me is that on September 12th I had to pick up one of my American agents from another UK office and take him out to dinner. The Indian restaurant we visited was normally bustling - on this particular evening we were the only ones there. The fear was widespread and it will be a long time before it completely disappears. The loss of some freedom following that attack was arguably the biggest consequence and in International Trade the security screening that has subsequently been put in place has had an enormous cost to Western economies.

It offered a real sense of the terror that comes from being caught up in an attack of that nature. The fear, the panic and the disbelief were palpable.

Although i would like to know where is the sensitive, shocking film that portraits the terror of being a resident in Baghdad in march and April 2003 when their homes and lives were shocked and awed.

Iraq and its people have suffered firstly at the hands of a despot and secondly because of a misguided political/military revenge game. What happened at the twin towers had nothing to do with the people of Iraq, and yet Bush and Blair felt it gave them permission to destroy a country. It makes me sad and angry.

The part where an older chap covered in dust with a few bags wandering after the collapse of tower two asking "where do we go"? will stay with me for a long time.

... but my overriding memory of the day was that gut-wrenching feeling of "What's coming next?", either from the terrorists, or as Steve above says, from the USA in retaliation.

And minor conspiracy theorists might be wondering if the conviction yesterday of the 3 failed plane bombers might just have been deliberately timed to happen this week of all weeks, just to remind us all of The Threat...

I was in New York just 6 weeks after the catastrophe with my wife and she mentioned last night that they did such a remarkable job cleaning up the city. The only physical evidence of the destruction of the towers was the smouldering - we saw it from a Green Line boat on the Hudson. New Yorkers were very welcoming at that time as well.