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Ian Hislop’s Trains That Changed the World


Liam
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Been watching this for the past few weeks. I do like Ian Hislop, and on the whole this is a very good programme. He focuses on topics which would be of interest to the average viewer, such as how the railways brought fish to inland areas for the first time, along with enabling the introduction of a national football league. The one slight downside to the programme is that it is not exempt from those annoying Channel 5 competitions, and this one is ambiguously styled as ‘win £3,000 for a rail adventure’, with no further details on where you might go and what you might do. 

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For me, the whole series has been marred by the usual TV habit of 'using a film clip completely unconnected with what we are talking about' - just about the first mention of "Great Western" and what do we see? A shot that's clearly of a Caledonian train (C.R. on bufferbeam!)... and as for the constant 'tooting' of inappropriate-sounding whistles - that's sooo irritating! 

I don't think there was much in this series that hadn't already recently been covered in other railway programmes.

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I've been very disappointed with this programme, mainly, as Coppercap says, due to unconnected film clips and much over-simplifying of things. It's also been done (to death?!) before... In fact my wife, who usually watches these things saw the first episode and asked if it was a repeat!! That comment says it all really. 

 

For me the "Mark William's on the Rails" series was the benchmark and this falls well short, I'd suggest he stick to stuff he's good at in future.

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6 hours ago, Hobby said:

I've been very disappointed with this programme, mainly, as Coppercap says, due to unconnected film clips and much over-simplifying of things. It's also been done (to death?!) before... In fact my wife, who usually watches these things saw the first episode and asked if it was a repeat!! That comment says it all really. 

 

For me the "Mark William's on the Rails" series was the benchmark and this falls well short, I'd suggest he stick to stuff he's good at in future.


In my OP I said how I liked the show but that was with my average TV viewer hat on, which we must remember is the hat which the majority of people watching it last night would have been wearing. As members of this forum we have pretty good railway knowledge, but the wider public are probably wouldn’t have such knowledge, and I guess that this was who Hislop aimed the programme towards. 
 

A previous episode covered the Flying Scotsman, and whether you’re a fan of the loco or not (personally I am) its history has been covered by other programmes hundreds of times before. 

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4 hours ago, Liam said:

my average TV viewer hat on, which we must remember is the hat which the majority of people watching it last night would have been wearing. As members of this forum we have pretty good railway knowledge, but the wider public are probably wouldn’t have such knowledge, and I guess that this was who Hislop aimed the programme towards. 

 

My wife has no interest in trains, hence I included her comment... If a non enthusiast is making such comments that should tell us that it's been overdone.

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23 hours ago, Liam said:

Been watching this for the past few weeks. I do like Ian Hislop, and on the whole this is a very good programme. He focuses on topics which would be of interest to the average viewer, such as how the railways brought fish to inland areas for the first time, along with enabling the introduction of a national football league. The one slight downside to the programme is that it is not exempt from those annoying Channel 5 competitions, and this one is ambiguously styled as ‘win £3,000 for a rail adventure’, with no further details on where you might go and what you might do. 

 

It'll be a voucher to use on one you want from the company brochure.

 

I know someone who won one for a cruise from a different programme, something like X Celebrity Goes Cruising. ISTR they went to Scandinavia.

 

 

 

Jason

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I'm findng this programme irritating. Ian Hislop is a good presenter and his own affection for railways is obvious and, in terms of style, his script is well written. They've also got a good selection of railway historians to interview - albeit the usual suspects gving the usual answers to the usual questions - but it's sloppy where it doesn't need to be and very obviously produced by someone who simply doesn't know the subject.  I don't expect the producer to be a railway historian (though getting one to view the rough cut wouldn't have been difficult) but I would expect any producer to learn enough about a subject they're making programmes about to avoid the more obvious errors and to know where to check their facts.

 

Apart from the usual random, "any steam engine from any company in any era will do for any  train" use of archive shots, such as a script line about the GWR's passenger numbers being stagnant illustrated by a suburban train with High Barnet on its destination board, I noticed far more serious omissions such as the description of Rocket's steam cycle being cut before the interviewee, who did know his subject,  got to the blast pipe but then including a back reference to it later. Even more obvious, there was a line in the same programme saying that, before the Liverpool and Manchester railway was built, they'd built a ship canal between the two cities, which is a bit like talking about mid nineteenth-century tea clippers using the Panama Canal.  I can sort of forgive them for the interviewee from the Snowdon Mountain Railway saying that  nobody was injured in the opening day deraillment. The producer may have assumed that the railway's engineer would know its history but even a quick glance at Wiki would have told them that one of the passengers on that train was killed. 

(They also trotted out the usual rubbish about Huskisson being the first railway fatality when I'm quite sure that plenty of workers and probably bystanders as well had been run over by trains on the many colliery and other lines before him. They weren't of course MPs.)

 

Apart from such stupid and easily avoided errors I also thought I was watching a repeat. There are surely different ways to tell the story of the railways and how they really did change the world but Channel  Five's commissioning  editors certainly haven't found it (nor I suspect even asked for it)  

By the way though this is billed as 'Ian Hislop's Trains that Changed the World' he wasn't its producer and wouldn't have conducted any of the interviews nor done  the production or archive research.

Edited by Pacific231G
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7 minutes ago, Pacific231G said:

 

(They also trotted out the usual rubbish about Huskisson being the first railway fatality when I'm quite sure that plenty of workers and probably bystanders as well had been run over by trains on the many colliery and other lines before him. They weren't of course MPs.)

 

Apart from such stupid and easily avoided errors I also thought I was watching a repeat. There are surely different ways to tell the story of the railways and how they really did change the world but Channel  Five's commissioning  editors certainly haven't found it (nor I suspect even asked for it)  

 

Definitely the first passenger death though considering it was the first train on the first public railway that actually went anywhere that you could buy tickets for. I think that is what is significant about it.

 

First recorded death is 1650.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rail_accidents_(before_1880)

 

 

 

Jason

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On 05/09/2021 at 01:05, Steamport Southport said:

 

Definitely the first passenger death though considering it was the first train on the first public railway that actually went anywhere that you could buy tickets for. I think that is what is significant about it.

 

First recorded death is 1650.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rail_accidents_(before_1880)

 

 

 

Jason

Hi Jason

Huskisson probably was the first passenger fatality though It's difficult to be absolutely certain as there were passenger carrying railways before the L&M. starting with the Oystermouth (Swansea and Mumbles) in 1807 and including the Stockton and Darlington.

That is indeed a fascinating list though difficult to know just how comprehensive it can be. For example, according to this list, actual railway traffic accidents in Britain  - as opposed to boiler explosions and people being run over- appear to have started with Howden in 1840 but there were several others that year so I wonder if that year was simply when the Board of Trade started reporting them.

 

The 1833 accident on the L&M- when passengers who'd got off a train whose loco had suffered a fire tube failure were run over by a train on the other line - does bear a striking resemblance to the earlier death of William Huskisson and it would have been very easy for the script to have simply said that Huskisson was the first railway passenger to be killed by a train. The writer of the Wiki list is sensibly more cautious "William Huskisson becomes the first widely reported passenger train death" suggesting that there may have been others that went unreported.

We don't expect producers to be academic historians which is probably a good thing but, having produced my own share of history based programmes and items - mostly for the BBC- it really annoys me when producers of entire series appear to have done so little actual research and checking.   

Edited by Pacific231G
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On 05/09/2021 at 00:43, Pacific231G said:

 Even more obvious, there was a line in the same programme saying that, before the Liverpool and Manchester railway was built, they'd built a ship canal between the two cities, which is a bit like talking about mid nineteenth-century tea clippers using the Panama Canal.

 

No they said that traffic was carried by canal - Bridgewater, St Helens etc canals had been operating to Runcorn since the 1760/70s. There was no mention of 'ship canal'

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On 06/09/2021 at 13:28, Bomag said:

 

No they said that traffic was carried by canal - Bridgewater, St Helens etc canals had been operating to Runcorn since the 1760/70s. There was no mention of 'ship canal'

I'm sorry Bomag but I wasn't mistaken,   I've just checked and it was in Ian Hislop's voice-over about five minutes into programme three of the series between the second clip of Prof. Kate Williams describing (very well) the industrial revolution and the first appearance in that episode of Bob Gwynne from the NRM. 

The actual line was

"The roads at this point were dirt tracks. Horses struggled to pull even small loads along them. So, the Liverpool and Manchester ship canal was built to move cotton and the vast supplies of coal needed to power the factoriies. But, the journey between the two cities took up to twelves hours and came to a halt when the canal froze over in winter"

 

Obviously the sort of confusion between a barge/narrowboat canal and a ship canal that you might get from a badly briefed tour guide or even a hastily written news item but such gross errors surely have no place in the script for a properly produced factual TV series. The trouble is that they make you doubt the factual accuracy of everything else in programmes on subjects you're not familiar with. There is of course no such canal as the "Liverpool & Manchester"-ship or otherwise and  "up to twelve hours" would be extremely ambitious to get a narrow boat from Liverpool to Manchester usng the Bridgewater canal, though with lock transits perhaps about right for a ship using the Manchester Ship Canal.  

 

It's just possible that someone complained about this line and they edited that line out for later transmissions but I doubt it.

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Ian Hislop did once present a one-off documentary for the BBC called Ian Hislop Goes Off The Rails a few years ago, where he covers the state of Britain's railways in the run-up to the publication of Dr. Beeching's Reshaping Report, the Report itself and the fallout and aftermath from it.

 

Hislop also briefly goes into the archives of Private Eye to see what his predecessors made of the Reshaping Report at the time.

 

This documentary can be found, though incomplete, on YouTube.

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1 hour ago, Pacific231G said:

 

 

It's just possible that someone complained about this line and they edited that line out for later transmissions but I doubt it.

 

It wasn't edited out, I also heard it but with all the other rubbish I just laughed it off. Just yet another innacuracy. 

 

It's been a long time since we went up the Bridgewater (as part of a silver sword awarded cruise in 1975), but wasn't it a barge canal (14') rather than a narrow canal? 

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2 hours ago, Hobby said:

It's been a long time since we went up the Bridgewater (as part of a silver sword awarded cruise in 1975), but wasn't it a barge canal (14') rather than a narrow canal? 

 

Yes, the Bridgewater is a broad canal, we went on it a bit later than 1975* doing a big loop from our moorings on the Shroppie, via the Bridgewater**, the Leeds and Liverpool, various NE waterways to the Trent, then up the Trent to the T&M and so back to the Shroppie.  The most striking thing about Worsley was the red water washed out of the ironstone in Worsley Delph.  There was the same sort of effect at Kidsgrove outside the North entrance to Harecastle Tunnel.

 

* Just remembered it was in 1986 because I needed some stamps and they were Fergie and Andrews wedding issue...

** I've a photo somewhere of my father winding the Barton Swing Aqueduct....

 

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3 hours ago, Hobby said:

 

It wasn't edited out, I also heard it but with all the other rubbish I just laughed it off. Just yet another innacuracy. 

 

It's been a long time since we went up the Bridgewater (as part of a silver sword awarded cruise in 1975), but wasn't it a barge canal (14') rather than a narrow canal? 

I wasn't sure so described it as a barge/narrowboat canal. What it most certainly was not was a ship canal. 

I thought I'd seen this series before but there was a series in 2018 on Yesterday channel (and made for the channel) called "Trains that Change the World" with much of the same cast and telling more or less the same story. It was made by a different production company but I'll be interested to find out if there was a buyout.

It looks as though all of Ian Hislop's pieces to camera and presenter shots were filmed, probably on the same day, at Quainton Road.

 

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10 hours ago, Hroth said:

 

Yes, the Bridgewater is a broad canal, we went on it a bit later than 1975* doing a big loop from our moorings on the Shroppie, via the Bridgewater**, the Leeds and Liverpool, various NE waterways to the Trent, then up the Trent to the T&M and so back to the Shroppie. 

 

 

Our '75 trip was from our moorings at Scarisbrick on the Leeds Liverpool near Southport, down the Leigh Arm to the Bridgewater, then down the Trent and Mersey and across to the Shopshire Union, down and along the Staffs and Worcs to the Severn, down to Sharpness and then back via the Avon to Stratford, along the southern part of the Stratford canal (we were the last boat out as they ran out of water!), down the GU and Oxford to Oxford down to London and back home via the GU, centre of Brum and Shroppie/T&M and Bridgewater, also stopping off at several "remainer" canals en route...

 

We sent our log book off to the IWA and then ran into problems as my calculations of mileage was out (I only had the Nicholsons guides and they aren't very accurate) but they let us off that because we had done more miles than needed... The main issue was around the fact we hadn't had the log book signed by some "authorised" person when we went up the remainer waterways! I pointed out that when we went up these canals there wasn't usually a BWB guy standing there to sign the book so we had to get whoever was there (usually a local walking a dog!) and we did have some photos... They let us off in the end and gave it to us, i still have it, though considering how important it was back in those days there's surprisingly little online about the award.

 

The final part of the story was at the Mersey Motor Boat's annual do at the end of the year when they gave out a cup for the most adventurous trip carried out by one of their members, most people thought we were a shoe-in for it that year but we were "new" to the club (about 3 years at that time) and, true to form, we didn't get it, instead it went to someone who went up the Wigan 21... And back down again... Obviously more adventurous than going to London and back via Sharpness! Dad was disgusted by it, as were several others, even some of the older members were embarrassed! The next year Mum and Dad did the "21" on their own but still didn't get it!!

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25 minutes ago, Hobby said:

along the southern part of the Stratford canal (we were the last boat out as they ran out of water!)

We went up the Southern Stratford in a Dawncraft Dandy when the Upper Avon had just opened in 1974. Shroppie-S&W-Severn-LANT-UANT-SS-GU-B&F-T&M-Shroppie. We lost the outboard prop on the GU but were luckily able to get a replacement locally.  As the South Stratford was still owned by the National Trust then, there were a couple of old biddies at the top lock before it rejoined the delights of BWB, exacting tolls for passage.  

 

We launched our steel narrowboat in 1976, just in time for the Big Drought, the move to the moorings took over a week, a days work in normal circs. The southern Oxford was also prone to drying up, one time we got stuck for several days at Upper Heyford, with F111s screeching overhead.

 

We didn't really bother with joining the IWA, but there were a couple of local boats with Silver Swords screwed to the cabin sides.

 

We started off with the blue BWB canal booklets, which are pretty much historical documents nowadays.  I've still got a few, and also the hardback first edition Nicholsons (which were for home planning use ONLY). The paperback boat ones disintegrated through exposure to the atmosphere.  Our last set were the ringbound ones.

 

Hmmmmmmmm.....  Looks like we've drifted  :offtopic:    :jester:

 

 

 

 

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We started with a Dawncraft 25, but that trip was done in an Enterprise, another fibreglass 25 footer but very upmarket, shower, inboard/outboard, flock on the walls to prevent condensation, but still cramped for three people over 5 weeks!

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Ah well, if we've moved onto epic canal cruises ...

 

Parents launched their (home fitted out) Norman 23 in 1975, and sold it in 1988.  In between times, it did pretty much everything that could be done at that time (a few bits of the BCN and the middle levels were missed).  I can't remember which years, but they picked up two Silver Swords along the way.

 

Mention of the Bridgewater brings back the memory (1975) of the swing aqueduct being clipped by a passing ship when we were the "wrong" side of it.  At the time, the only alternative route back to Leeds was via the Trent & Mersey and Trent, which we didn't have time for, so it ended up on the back of an artic for a journey from Lymm to Burnley (which meant we missed the ascent of the Wigan flight).

 

Shortage of water brings back memories of the long hot summer of 1976.  The summit of the Staffs & Worcs was short of water, and we hit what (according to local legend) was a 45 gallon drum full of concrete, which damaged the stern drive, resulting in another trailer ride (this time all the way), that was on the day the rains came.  The drum was supposedly a left over from a scaffolding bridge that was rigged up in the midst of the chemical works at Four Ashes.

 

Going back to the programme in question, I've missed one of the episodes, but like others, I've been a bit disappointed with both the content, and the production quality.  I don't remember learning anything that hasn't already been covered in similar programmes.

 

Adrian

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1 hour ago, figworthy said:

The summit of the Staffs & Worcs was short of water, and we hit what (according to local legend) was a 45 gallon drum full of concrete, which damaged the stern drive

We were at Gailey Top Lock when a hire boat duffed up the top gate and managed to unseat it completely. Complete traffic jam during peak holiday traffic.  It might even have been August Bank Holiday weekend...

 

There's lots of things to hit on the canals, on another trip we had just come down Foxton locks and were proceeding at a measured pace down the middle of the GU (Leicester Section) when we hit something, the bows went up and we porpoised over it and came down on the rudder.which ended up bent out of the water. Lord knows what it was.  Luckily we could still steer and managed to complete our cruise.

 

This was the second mishap we'd had within a few days. While coming up the Soar, we noticed the boat was a bit stern-heavy and looking into the engine bay found that water was rising therein...  Luckily we had an efficient bilge pump and that started to gain on the incoming so we pulled in at Mountsorrel and had a poke about to find that a bolt had fallen out of the stern-tube outer bearing.  Luckily we had a suitable bolt in the spares box, so we gave up for the day, let the engine cool down, put a cork in the hole to stop it spouting (while rummaging in the spares box) and fixed it.

 

We left the rudder as it was as we had the dry dock at Chester booked for Easter the next year for bottom scrubbing and painting, so we fixed the bent rudder stock then.

 

This is beginning to sound like the Rime of the Ancient Mariner.....

 

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19 hours ago, Hroth said:

We were at Gailey Top Lock when a hire boat duffed up the top gate and managed to unseat it completely. Complete traffic jam during peak holiday traffic.  It might even have been August Bank Holiday weekend...

 

 

We were heading up the River Lee, when word reached us that Hertford Lock was out of use.  On getting there we could see why.  A boat heading downstream hadn't stopped in time, and had hit the bottom gates with such force that they had turned them inside out (i.e., they were now pointing downstream).  that must have been an interesting experience for whoever was on the boat.

 

hertford-2a.jpg.034470934ab6b1e5afa691efc77880fc.jpg

 

Adrian

 

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Alas I wasn’t aware of this programme until seeing this thread but I can join in the fun with a canal trip tale of my own - a narrow boat trip on the Kennet and Avon canal from Bath to Devizes in the summer of 1985 with the Bristol University Canal Club (well five of us).  A wonderful trip it was.

 

Cheers

 

Darius

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