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Murray stood talking sincerely to the room, his general demeanor relaxed and polite as he addressed the jobseekers that were seated in a crescent-like array before him. His subtle New Zealand accent rolling off anecdotes: “When I lost my job after 9-11, I was pretty taken aback, so I sent my CV to all my friends and I phoned up all the people I used to work for and I found a new job pretty quickly. Of-course it might not be like that now, there is a major recession on…”

The jobseekers look unfazed.

Any fan of Flight of the Conchords, the hit BBC Radio and US TV comedy show chronicling the exploits of New Zealand’s formerly fourth most popular guitar-based digi-bongo acapella-rap-funk-comedy folk duo, will understand the giggles I was beset with. The kind that build and bubble with any pressure you exert to hold them in. Murray is the band’s manager and an employee of the New Zealand consulate in New York, where the show is set.

Unfortunately I wasn’t watching TV at the time – this was all happening live – and the man before me was not Murray from Flight of the Chonchords, he was Steve from the Jobcentre Plus. It was four in the afternoon and I was sat right in the middle of a Back to Work “session” aimed at helping me and fifteen other jobless muppets find paid employment.

I took a deep breath, like some kind of asthmatic suffering from the pain of trapped wind. I couldn’t help it, biting my smile the giggles leaked out again. I can only assume at that point Steve and every other person in the room had concluded I was definitely not suitable for employment in any way, shape or form.

In my defense I had been at work (unpaid) at a radio station reading the news that morning, and had been up since 5am after only an hour’s sleep.

It’s not easy to stay focused on being sensible when you’re sleep deprived. The early tension I felt as I arrived at the Back to Work “session”, faced with a room full of glum no-hopers and awkward “yoof” must have contributed to my giddy behavior. The scene would have been ridiculous at the best of times, and it was an awkward and contrived situation being fragilely held together by uncharismatic performers – it was crying out to be broken by humor.

My fellow jobseekers were not exactly a motley crew, more like a loose assortment of chaff. We’d started the session by introducing ourselves and stating what kind of work we were looking for – in the style reminiscent of a support group for alcoholics. Jenny was looking for admin work, Joel wanted a job in a shop, Reggie wanted to return to work as an HGV driver, Jafar was soon to start a course in social work, and a middle aged Thai woman who’s name I missed was “look for job as cleaner”. This seemed like such a blatant racist stereotype I can only assume she was a Jobcentre plant, perhaps looking to get close enough to us to uncover our laziness, or worse yet, to be the only one who gets a job and shame us all into taking work as chimney sweeps and charity muggers.

We were required to leaf through a folder with various bullet points and charts, and got some actually quite useful information about the end of New Deal and the fact we can get most of the services that were once only available after six months of unemployment right away. You can also get a suit paid for if you need one for a job interview, or have things like a hard-hat and boots, or a monthly travelcard paid for if you need them to start work, but would not be able to afford them otherwise.

Murray (sorry I mean Steve) also painted a fantastic picture of a young man “who has no family and is willing to move to just about anywhere to find a job” roaming the country at the taxpayers expense, from Cardiff to Manchester and Sunderland, as an example of the fact the Jobcentre will reimburse travel expenses of over four pounds when going to an interview.

The man sitting to my left was “one year away from retirement age” and was clearly insane. He’d been unemployed for four years after being made redundant from a charity where he was a manager of a warehouse. He also claimed to have been put on a training course that was neither a course or involved any training. He said he’d instead been working for free in a charity shop for three weeks.

The man to my right was slightly more with it, although at one point he became outraged by a pie chart. It illustrated the amount of jobs that are advertised in various places compared to the 51 per cent of vacancies that never officially reach the labour market. He insisted that it should be against the law, and that all jobs should have to be advertised, which was an interesting point to make considering the report released the day before from an all-party panel chaired by former Labour minister Alan Milburn.

The report painted a damning picture of Britain as a country where the key to success was having a mother able to coerce the local solicitor into taking you on as an intern while filling his or her glass with champaign at a dinner party (providing of course you’ve been to a private school and Oxford or Durham university). But I digress.

Only something as amazing as seeing a medevac helicopter squatting in the common opposite, would have provided enough of a tonic to clear my head from such an experience. It’s just as well then that as soon as I stepped out from Olive Morris House – the 1980’s eyesore that was our venue – on to Brixton Hill, there wasLondon’s air ambulance in all it’s poised glory.

Best of all there seemed to be no emergency to justify it landing in such an improbably tight clearing. Children played football as close as they would dare threaten, while parents sat their little ones on the step beside the cockpit, posing for pictures. The crew were chatting to interested passers by and must have been taking some kind of break.

My normal journalistic instinct is obviously to wade in and try to get as much information as possible about the situation, and more importantly get a number to add to my contacts book. But I was in no state to approach the pilots in any way that would have made a good impression.

The chopper was sitting there with its improbably short rotor blades drooping so low they could easily have hit someone in the head as they started up. Sure enough the pilots asked the crowd to back away and one climbed into the right-hand seat and wound her up. The other made a systematic appraisal of the landing zone, walking from roughly one rotor length from the nose, around the aircraft, looking at the distances of the space and noting the objects around and the distance from the tail to the nearest council estate. (For a full description of this and other helicopter piloting tips read Robert Mason’s excellent book Chickenhawk.)

I managed to help a guy get a picture of him standing in front of the helicopter with his very nice road-racing bicycle before we were chased back by the pilot.

He climbed in and the right-seat pilot spun the rotor disc up to operating RPM. It was scary how quickly it was spinning: five blades heading straight for you and twirling around, many times per second. I was standing closest of all spectators, using a tree for cover just in case the jesus-nut came off.

The pitch was pulled in and I was hit with an almighty blast of kerosene and dust. Then it rose in such a perfect ascent that it could have been on a wire. At about 200 feet the pilot nosed forward and it gently throbbed away. What a show!