TV Watch: Ian Hislop’s Trains that changed the World
I’m a great admirer of Ian Hislop and his unremitting moral outrage about wrong-doing in high places. I also enjoy his television programmes, which are quirky and original. That’s why I watched yesterday evening’s programme. I should have known better because it was not his usual BBC 4 slot but one of Channel 5’s many documentaries cobbled together from old film. ‘Presented by’ Ian Hislop is very different from ‘written by’. So, we saw the aforementioned and oft-seen before film clips, plus interviews with people you see all the time on programmes about railways or Britain’s industrial archaeology. We also saw Professor Kate Williams. Do they wheel her out to pretend that their programmes are in any way historical? She’s a remarkable woman. She must have a specialism (I believe it’s the Tudors?), yet there is no period of British history for which she cannot bring out some trite observation for television. Yesterday we had, ‘I wonder what the Victorians, travelling by train at thirty or forty miles an hour would have thought of the Japanese and Chinese travelling at 200 m.p.h. 100 years later?’ (Or words to that effect). Wow, that’s some historical insight! You really have to be a professor of history to think of something like that. Not.