473 Great Railway Journeys of the World

First  viewed : 27  November  1980

At  this  point  in  time  my  youthful  interest  in  railways,  partly  inherited  from  my  dad  and  partly  from  the  Rev  W  Awdry  books,  was  at  a  low  ebb . My  dad  was  now  persona  non  grata   after  first  receiving  a  police  caution  for  indecent  exposure   ( swimming  nude in  a  moorland  pool  that  wasn't  as  obscure  as  he  assumed ) and  then  being  made  redundant  ; I  think  the  two  things  were  probably  related.  Also, the  previous  year  I  received  the  unwelcome  news  that  you  had  to  pay  full  fare  on  the  trains  at  14  ( rather  than  the  surely   more  sensible  16  as  on  the  buses ) . This  meant  trips  to  Manchester  had  to  be  by  two  buses  instead  which  took  much  longer.  That's  probably  why  I  only  saw  one  episode  of  the  first  season.

It  was  a  significant  one  however  , following  Michael  Palin  on   a  journey  through  Britain  from  London  to  Kyle  of  Lochalsh  on  Scotland's  north  west  coast. Although.  due to  his  busy  film  career  in  the  eighties,  it  took  a  while  to  begin  in  earnest  this  was  the  start  of  Palin's  second  career  as  everyone's  favourite  travel  guide. Starting  with  his  confession  that  he  had  been  a  fervent  train  spotter  in  his  Sheffield  youth,  Michael  wandered  up  the  country  talking  to  British  Rail    staff , visiting  a  preserved  line  in  Yorkshire  and  the  National  Railway  Museum  and  offering  the  odd  tart  comment  about  Beeching. Of  course  the  episode's   now  a  period  piece  itself  with  BR , green  parkas , the  125  train , 21p  cups  of  coffee  and  the  Steamtown  Railway  Museum  at  Carnforth  all  long  since  consigned  to  the  past. The  programme  also  contained  some  footage  from  the  Great  Railway  Exposition  that  summer  at  Manchester's  historic  Liverpool  St  Station  marking  the  150th  anniversary  of  the  Liverpool  and  Manchester  Railway. We  were  going  to  go  to  the  first  day  as  one  of  our  Saturday  trips  but  it  never  happened,  probably  because  Patrick , our  biggest  rail  enthusiast , had  dropped  out  for  a  time  following  a  not  entirely  harmonious  hostelling  holiday  in  the  Lakes  ( I'll  concede readily  that  my  behaviour  on  it  wasn't  exemplary ).    

If  a  new  chapter  for  Palin  was  just  opening  it  seems  that  the  final  episode,  featuring  a  journey  from  Paris  to  Budapest , saw  the  door  firmly  shutting  on   someone  else. I  read  somewhere  that  the  journey  was  originally  undertaken  by   Bill  Grundy  but  he  got  so  pissed  in  the  process  that  it  had  to  be  re-shot  with  Eric  Robson. If  true.  the  series  also  marked  the  end  of  Grundy  as  a    national    TV  presenter.

Eight  years  elapsed  before  Palin  started  Around  The  World  In  80  Days   but  the  wait  for the  second   season  of   Great  Railway  Journeys  was  even  longer.  Fourteen  years  elapsed  before  Clive  Anderson  kicked  it  off  with  a  journey  from  Hong  Kong  to  Ulaanbaatar. That  was  excellent  but  the  one  a  fortnight  later  with  Natalia  Makarova  journeying  from  St  Petersburg  to  Tashkent  was  excruciatingly  self-indulgent . I  suppose  that's  what  you  get  when  you  ask  a  prima  ballerina  to  present. Mind  you,  the  one  with  tiresomely  eccentric  writer  Lisa  St  Aubin  de  Teran  was  almost  as  bad.

That  was  the  season   where  I  saw  the  most  episodes.  In  the  latter  two,  I  only  recall  seeing  one  episode  each. In  1996   it  was  the  opening  episode  where  Victoria  Wood  did  a  UK  journey  and  drove  me  up  the  wall  with  a  constant  barrage  of  unfunny  and  inappropriate   similes . I  don't  want  to  speak  ill  of  the  recently  deceased  but  I  never  found  her  funny  at  all; she  always  came  across  to  me  as  one  of  your  mum's  "wacky"  friends  who  thought  they  were  highly  entertaining  when  you  really  wanted  them  to  just  put  a  sock  in  it. That  probably  put  me  off  the  rest  of  the  season.

In  the  1999  season  the  one  I  saw  was  the  second  where  famously  ejected  hardline  Tory  Michael  Portillo  did  a  journey  from  Granada  to  Salamanca  and  considerably  softened  up  his  public  image  with  his  reflective  musings  on  the  Spanish  Civil   War  and  his  family's  part  in  it.  This  set  up  Portillo  to  do   future  spin-off  series  Great  British  Railway  Journeys   which  has  had  five  series  so  far  and  is  regularly  repeated  at  the  time  of  writing.