He once survived a near-fatal fall. In 1997, Dibnah was almost killed when a 2,500-ton concrete chimney on Canvey Island collapsed prematurely. He tripped while running from the falling structure, but luckily, the chimney corrected itself and fell in the opposite direction

Fred Dibnah videos are my goto for showing people heavy local English accents; it's rare you hear one that heavy any more, but they can be local down to only a few miles.

This one makes my palms sweaty:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3R3-YwDZrzg

And it's just a ladder really.

A man out of his time somehow. I enjoyed his shows as a boy.

I don't know why Fred keeps getting posted to HN, but I love it. and I'm glad more people get to see his work.

Something that might not be immediately obvious from this clip is that all the sound effects you're hearing of the planks bouncing and scraping off the bricks, the iron dogs being hammered into the brickwork or wind blowing etc, is all recreated and recorded after the fact in some BBC sound studio. There's no sound guy up there with a boom mic or even a lapel mic recording, yet all the sound effects are perfectly audible. Even the ones around the other side of the chimney. If they didn't dub them in afterwards the video recording from the ground level would be quite boring!

Though there are a couple of other recordings of Fred with a one-man camera crew up at the top once he's got the platform fully setup.

Besides, I suspect if he was mic'd up there'd be quite a bit more swearing than you'd be able to get away with on the BBC!