Going with the flow
Canal life lets ageing narrow boaters Timothy West and Prunella Scales “enjoy things as they happen”.
The show that melts everyone’s heart returns with a new season this week: it’s Great Canal Journeys (Living, Sky 017, Sunday, 8.30pm), which may sound like a slower version of Michael Portillo’s Great British Railway Journeys, but is, in fact, about so much more than canals.
Only the British would think to put devoted octogenarian thesps Timothy West and Prunella Scales in a TV series and follow them at 4km/h through the canals of Britain and Europe. The actors have been married for more than 50 years and have been narrow-boating for about the same time.
In the 80s, they campaigned for the restoration of the Kennet and Avon canal in southern England and, in 1990, were on the first boat to travel its length in 42 years.
If it’s unusual to see a couple in their eighties presenting a travelogue, what sets Great Canal Journeys apart even more is that they keep puttering through these watery byways in the face of what West calls Scales’s “slight condition” – Alzheimer’s disease.
He has had to accept, he says, that “Pru’s domestic life is getting a little narrower by the day”. She is still sprightly, but will sometimes forget words or become confused, but “you don’t have to remember things on the canal. You can just keep your mind absolutely vacant and enjoy things as they happen.”
Scales, on the other hand, says “it can be a nuisance, but it doesn’t stop me remembering how to open a locked gate or make the skipper a cup of tea”.
It seems that the canal journeys, during which “you’re always busy and you never do anything in particular”, may even help Scales. When they were joined by their son
Sam, also an actor, in an early episode, she remarked, “It feels like only yesterday that our two boys were running up and down the towpath opening and shutting locks, then at the end of the day flopping exhausted onto their bunks.”
The first journey of season five is not in the UK, however; the pair are popping over to Europe for a boating trip in Venice. There is a thespian bent to the trip, which includes a visit to the famous La Fenice opera house.
They quote Byron and Dante and are generally terrific company. “Would you allow me a lover or two if I was Venetian?” asks Pru. “That would depend,” says Tim. “He would have to be very, very handsome.”