Back in the late 90s/early 00s I worked for the British Council. I travelled the world with a pack of Windows NT 4.0 CDs upgrading their servers. I was in my early 20s. They flew us Business. It was quite a thing. I’ll never stop appreciating how lucky I was, it was the time of my life.
This was pre-9/11, so security was … lax? I remember there being two lines at Heathrow: British, and not. (There were probably three: British, EU, other. Anyway.)
So you’d fly in from some really random place – I mean Kosovo, Ukraine, Nigeria, Colombia – and you’d walk through the ‘British’ line. You’d get to the guy checking passports and, I shit you not, he’d have his feet up on the desk and he’d be reading The Sun. (Terrible tabloid newspaper.)
Scores of British people would walk down that corridor holding their passports up, photo page presented, three abreast, and the guy would occasionally look up from the paper to check nothing too untoward was going on.
Good times.