It’s the most wonderful time of the year: the season where British people traditionally complain about spending too much on rip-off Christmas events. This year’s festivities have already kicked off in earnest, thanks to the malfunctioning Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer drone show in Haywards Heath this week. By all accounts the drone show was a classic of the genre. It made big promises, offering families “a night of magic and wonder” complete with “state of the art production [and] 600 LED drones”. Then it charged big money, with some families paying hundreds of pounds to attend. And then, of course, it comprehensively underdelivered.
Reports describe the event as not only being too short – about just 15 minutes – but also, due to the failure of several drones, completely unintelligible. “From the beginning, large numbers of drones were missing, which left huge gaps in the formations and made it nearly impossible to understand what the images were even supposed to represent!” wrote one aggrieved attendee on social media. “The ‘finale’, the moment the entire audience was waiting for, didn’t even happen. Just a black sky.”
