The Railways that Built Britain with Chris Tarrant

[Nile_Griffith]

Watched the final part. If honest it was one of those occasions where I sat there and wished that having watched the programme it had told me something I didn't already know rather than leaving me comparing it to other attempts to convey the same subject.

 

There is a certain reality in TV scheduling and production nowadays, in that there is massively more broadcast capacity and massively less budget with which to fill that capacity. Ultimately advertising pays for programme production and this particular series will not have been sold on the fact that it's a factual, topic of interest style programme. More that it's Chris Tarrant presenting a factual, topic of interest programme. No doubt Tarrant's public draw being pitched to commissioning editors set against the relatively modest production budget required. I must admit I didn't catch on the credits who the production company were, Mr Tarrant has a couple of tame ones of his own and it wouldn't surprise me if it had come from one of his stables.

 

However there will always be a precarious tight rope for programme originators to walk when it comes to making programmes of this type. To in-depth and you risk loosing the baulk of your viewing public as soon as the mental urge for a cuppa sinks in. Make your programme too  light and the informed few will be more than happy to hang you out to dry on social media and such like. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know what advertisers are looking for.

 

Interestingly I was involved a few years back in a pitch for a motorsport series to one of the larger networks. "great work! We really do love it! Well worked out programme progression and great potential for third party involvement (advertisers)........ Now how much are you going to pay us to air it?"

[Pacific231G]

 

However there will always be a precarious tight rope for programme originators to walk when it comes to making programmes of this type. Too in-depth and you risk loosing the baulk of your viewing public as soon as the mental urge for a cuppa sinks in. Make your programme too  light and the informed few will be more than happy to hang you out to dry on social media and such like. You don't have to be a rocket scientist to know what advertisers are looking for.

 

Interestingly I was involved a few years back in a pitch for a motorsport series to one of the larger networks. "great work! We really do love it! Well worked out programme progression and great potential for third party involvement (advertisers)........ Now how much are you going to pay us to air it?"

Hi Nile

There is obviously a balance between really in-depth and fairly superficial. It'll depend on the audience, channel and slot where you place a programme on that spectrum and I'd expect a Channel Five programme to be rather shallower than a programme covering the same subject on BBC-4. However, audiences for both have a right to expect that what they're being told is factually accurate unless it's flagged as speculation or opinion.  I didn't actually mind the light weight of this series but there were too many factual errors and the use of archive footage was pretty dreadful; it looked as if they simply handed the editor a bunch of shots and left it up to them to put them anywhere they liked regardless of content. Any good producer will make a programme with equal care whatever the final audience and in many ways it's harder to do that well for a general audience as you have to leave more out without misleading.

 

I have now watched the final programme and it was an undemanding and pleasant enough romp through the history of BR. It made some good points about the lack of investment and the positive impact of the HST (I can remember the sudden change of mood from dying industry to one with a future when it first appeared on the WR) I don't think the bubble car was really the vehicle that drove people away from the railways but OK it's interesting that they were assembled in the old Brighton loco works. I also didn't know that the NHS was based on the GWR's staff medical scheme. If true that's very interesting but unfortunately, because so much else has been misleading or just wrong in this series, I don't know how true that was. Was the NHS based specifically on the GWR scheme or more generally on the many workers' contributory health schemes that had developed by the 1940s.

 

It was amusing to have comments about the lack of electrification spoken over a shot where a Southern region steam hauled train was clearly outnumbered by electric sets but annoying that here and in so many places the script was misleading when a few minor tweaks could have avoided this without overloading it with facts. Oddly most of these were in the voice overs, which are the easiest to change, and I noticed very few in Chris Tarrant's pieces to camera.

[Hroth]

This is a sort of epilogue on "The Railways That Built Britain".

 

Tonight I watched the first programme in a series on how photography has developed (ha!) over the past 170-odd years, almost the same time scale as the railways,  and how photography reflected the attitudes and social history of Britain.  It was presented by someone who had a deep knowledge of the subject, who talked to people who could explain what the images being shown meant to both their initial viewers and what they mean to us today and presented the information within a clear chronological framework of technical and sociological progress.

 

Of course there was "padding", but it carried the story.  No rapidly cut montages of irrelevant images, repeated ad nauseam throughout the programme, no out of context hyperbole either.

 

No, it wouldn't do for Channel 5. And that thought makes me worry about what we get fed on the telly nowadays.  But on BBC 4 it was an informative programme that didn't overdo either the technology or pseuds corner waffle. It was also an objective lesson on how to structure a programme to tell a coherent story, something that was rather lacking in "The Railways That Built Britain".  I'll definitely watch the remaining episodes.

 

Catch it on BBC iPlayer but be warned.  It doesn't contain any railways.

However, there was a section on the building of Brunels "SS Great Eastern"!

 

(Britain in Focus: A Photographic History.  http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08h95c3 )

[russ p]

Just as expected

[jjb1970]

 

 

Of course, the go-ahead West Germans were lauded for their wholesale re-equipping with diesel power after the war, but the script again neglected to say that the Americans funded it under the Marshall Plan (And I think we probably indirectly contributed because we were honourable enough to keep repaying our war debts to the Americans).

 

 

 

 

The UK was by far the biggest recipient of Marshall Plan aid. Unfortunately there is a national myth in this country that we lost the peace and were hard done by as America rebuilt other countries as that is an easier pill to swallow than to admit we received a huge windfall and squandered it.

[Pacific231G]

The UK was by far the biggest recipient of Marshall Plan aid. Unfortunately there is a national myth in this country that we lost the peace and were hard done by as America rebuilt other countries as that is an easier pill to swallow than to admit we received a huge windfall and squandered it.

Yes, that inconvenient fact about the Marshall Plan is not well known. We didn't lose the peace, we lost the empire that provided a captive market for our goods and had probably made our industries complacent.  The fact that West Germany became a prosperous, democratic and liberal nation decidedly averse to war wasn't losing the peace, it was winning it.

Britain's supposed lateness in modernising the railways' motive power is also a bit of a myth. Widespread introduction of diesel locomotives came only about two or three years after West Germany and France and both of them, especially West Germany,  were still using steam until well after we were.  The real problem was probably Britain's notorious failure to engage in long term public or private investment but to swing wildly depending on the ups and downs of the economy, the political weather and the desire of each government to change everything. The result was that the railways, as with the NHS more recently, were in the position of  going from an investment desert to trying to drink from a fire hydrant to catch up before the next drought. That makes sensible procurement and long term investment extremely difficult so it's not very surprising that the modernisation plan was badly handled.

[Nile_Griffith]

Hi Nile

There is obviously a balance between really in-depth and fairly superficial. It'll depend on the audience, channel and slot where you place a programme on that spectrum and I'd expect a Channel Five programme to be rather shallower than a programme covering the same subject on BBC-4. However, audiences for both have a right to expect that what they're being told is factually accurate unless it's flagged as speculation or opinion.  I didn't actually mind the light weight of this series but there were too many factual errors and the use of archive footage was pretty dreadful; it looked as if they simply handed the editor a bunch of shots and left it up to them to put them anywhere they liked regardless of content. Any good producer will make a programme with equal care whatever the final audience and in many ways it's harder to do that well for a general audience as you have to leave more out without misleading.

 

I have now watched the final programme and it was an undemanding and pleasant enough romp through the history of BR. It made some good points about the lack of investment and the positive impact of the HST (I can remember the sudden change of mood from dying industry to one with a future when it first appeared on the WR) I don't think the bubble car was really the vehicle that drove people away from the railways but OK it's interesting that they were assembled in the old Brighton loco works. I also didn't know that the NHS was based on the GWR's staff medical scheme. If true that's very interesting but unfortunately, because so much else has been misleading or just wrong in this series, I don't know how true that was. Was the NHS based specifically on the GWR scheme or more generally on the many workers' contributory health schemes that had developed by the 1940s.

 

It was amusing to have comments about the lack of electrification spoken over a shot where a Southern region steam hauled train was clearly outnumbered by electric sets but annoying that here and in so many places the script was misleading when a few minor tweaks could have avoided this without overloading it with facts. Oddly most of these were in the voice overs, which are the easiest to change, and I noticed very few in Chris Tarrant's pieces to camera.

 

 

As remarked I have only watched the last programme, however in my own experience of programme production for TV, I can wholeheartedly say the there are a lot of producers out there who will happily forgo editorial oversight in the pursuit of accuracy (unless of course lack of oversight runs the risk of future litigation, which featuring an incorrect loco type or location probably isn't) to ensure that a production stays within budget, a figure that is decided before pen touches paper not when final post production is finished. You don't last long as a jobbing TV producer with a reputation for exceeding budgets on TV filler.

 

With your regard to the ease of tweaking voice overs and the accuracy of piece to camera dialogue and information. It's a good point to note that usually most voice over scripts are compiled and recorded before the final edit, this allows the editor during the edit process to have a measure of the time required by the dialogue for each scene or section. Rather than the voice artist facing the rather more difficult task of trying to narrate dialogue within a particular set period of time as dictated by a final edit. The down side to this is that a particular section of voice over may require more picture than there is relative material for, or it is felt by the director that something more visually interesting is required than the subject of the V/O dictates in order to keep visual interest. As for after edit tweaks, these are not always possible if either the original VO artist is unavailable or more likely as not, there just isn't any cash left to pay for artist and studio time. Generally dialogue recorded on location offers a degree of certainty. That certainty provided either by the circumstances of the location itself and the fact that there may well not be a second chance to get every one and everything back in one place in the future should something be wrong, such knowledge usually galvanises attention to even fairly small details in my own experience.