It’s not everyone’s idea of gripping television. A train advances steadily along a railway track, without commentary or music. After a full, wordless minute, the view switches to the front of the train, where a static camera captures the track being eaten up, sleeper by sleeper.
Fascination, however, is in the eye of the beholder, and the BBC is hoping that these scenes could provide an unlikely audience hit this Christmas, when it screens an hour-long, real time journey of the most famous steam locomotive in the world: the newly restored Flying Scotsman.
The programme, broadcast on 29 December, captures a journey made this summer by the locomotive from Bridgnorth to Kidderminster, a distance of 16 miles, shot almost entirely from static cameras fixed to the locomotive: inside the cab, on top of the coal stack and next to the pistons and crank shafts. Other cameras on bridges or signal boxes capture lingering shots as the locomotive, pulling nine carriages, chuffs past.
No one interacts with the cameras, and aside from a moment when the fireman Ryan Green puts a little too much coal on the fire and has to vent some steam, nothing much happens.
Yet to judge from the crowds of people who can be glimpsed crammed on to bridges and platforms and bunched in fields to wave and film on their phones, the fascination with this particular locomotive extends far beyond railway enthusiasts.
The engine, first built in 1923, was brought back into service earlier this year following a 10-year, £4.2m refit, and caused such wild excitement on its first journey from London to York that every train on the entire east coast mainline had to be halted briefly because of overexcited fans straying on to the track.
Andrew McLean, head curator at the National Railway Museum in York – which now owns the locomotive, says it has always attracted crowds, since it was first included in the British Empire exhibition the year after it was made, and then featured in a film of the same name in 1929, one of the first British talkies, that in turn inspired Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps.
“It’s over 90 years old now, and it’s always been a celebrity engine,” he says.
Named in tribute to the train service between Edinburgh and London famous to Victorians as the Flying Scotsman, the locomotive never uses the definite article, notes McLean. Neither should one describe Flying Scotsman as a train, he stresses – the name refers merely to the steam engine.
After it was removed from service in the 1960s it was bought by an eccentric millionaire who toured the US, Canada and Australia, meaning that as well as holding the record as the first steam locomotive to have travelled at 100mph, it was also the first to have circumnavigated the globe.
Yet while Flying Scotsman will add a particular interest for some, this kind of “slow television” has proved a surprising hit in the past even without a famous star. All Aboard! The Country Bus, a similar programme screened earlier this year which featured, without commentary, the two-hour journey of a country bus in Yorkshire, attracted almost a million viewers on BBC4. Other shows in the same vein have featured a canal trip, a wordless video of a knife being forged, and a programme made up of an hour’s footage of birdsong, uninterrupted by voiceover or any music.
To slow TV devotees, indeed, Flying Scotsman: From the Footplate may prove to be a bit racy, since the voices of both Green and driver Roger Norfolk occasionally interrupt the clanking and puffing of the engine to explain what they are doing. Purists need not fear, however – for those who feel the first programme is too action-packed, the broadcaster will screen the documentary again without the commentary on New Year’s Day.
Despite the lack of obvious drama, Roger Keech, the programme’s producer, said filming had been more of a challenge than one might expect, thanks to the noise, vibrations and high temperatures inside the driver’s cab. Only on their third journey were they able to successfully operate the cameras without them cutting out after overheating.
An unexpected delay on the approach to Kidderminster station meant that he hadn’t quite been able to fit the 63-minute journey into the hour-long running time, necessitating some invisible cuts of “the less interesting parts of the journey”.
Such camera trickery aside, Keech said he hoped viewers would find the pace of the programme “quite refreshing”. “The pace of TV is so fast generally these days, that it’s actually quite nice to go back to a little bit more how it used to be. Just to become absorbed by something for his own sake.”
• Flying Scotsman From the Footplate is broadcast on BBC4 at 9pm on Thursday, 29 December
