I've just booked to DME from LHR on BMI, through the BA.com website.

Now, neither website will give me advance seat selection option, a quick search of these forums has made it clear that this is unavailable at present. I called the BA customer service line which repeatedly told me it was too busy and disconnected; then tried BMI.

The nice lady at BMI has allocated seats, however frankly they're sub-par and her English wasn't good enough for me to ask her about availability, I was limited to scrabbling around on seat guru looking for the non-Red seats and giving her numbers that looked least awful.

My question is, will I be able to use a premium check-in facility at T1 as a BA Silver card holder a bit earlier than other pax and looking at all available seating? Also, does the tier match work both ways allowing me to "block" the middle seat as if i were a BD Gold?