A village fire crew attending a barn fire in Puddlegrove stood down from its hoses on Tuesday evening after its own watch commander concluded that the footage being filmed was not yet good enough.

The barn, on a tenant farm outside the village, had been alight for some time when the first pump arrived. Witnesses said the crew made an ordinary start on the fire before the commander, Mr Theodore Bream, raised a hand and asked everyone to hold position while the drone was relaunched.

Mr Bream, who has run a channel documenting the brigade's callouts for three years, told reporters at the scene that the decision was a practical one. "The flames were trending before we even got there," he said. "You don't put your best shot in the middle of the video. People scroll. If they see a wet haystack in the first five seconds, they're gone."

He confirmed that the evacuation of the neighbouring field, involving two ponies and a goose, had been restarted from the beginning twice, after the first attempt was found to have poor light and the second to have a pony facing the wrong way.

The structure

By the time the crew returned to the fire itself, the barn's west wall had come down and its roof timbers had begun to fall in a manner several residents described to this newspaper as photogenic.

A second pump was called, not for water but for its siren, which Mr Bream described as "the single most underrated sound in the emergency content space". Crews were asked to idle it at intervals throughout the evening.

The farm's owner, Mrs Gwendoline Farrow, said she had watched her barn for some time from a safe distance while a man in a helmet explained the fire to a small camera. "He said it was a shame about the hay," she said, "but the hay would understand, because the reach was enormous."

What happens next

The brigade's county office said the incident was under review, and that a working group had already been formed to draft guidance on what it called "narratively appropriate firefighting".

Mr Bream defended the delay. "The barn was going either way," he said. "The video was only going one way."

The follow-up episode, in which the crew watches the footage and reacts to it, is due out next week.