Show that proved love and laughter can keep any marriage shipshape (even when it’s not all plain sailing)
As Timothy West and Prunella Scales make their last TV canal trip . . .
AMILLION viewers wiped away a tear at the weekend as the gentlest, most affec-tionate show on television drew to a close.
Great Canal Journeys, on Channel 4, has taken us chuntering up and down Britain’s prettiest rural waterways — and given us a glimpse inside one of the happiest and longest marriages in showbiz, bravely facing up to illness and the final curtain.
Seated on deckchairs around a picnic blanket, surrounded by four generations of his family, actor Timothy West proposed a toast as the show bade them farewell.
‘Ratty’s advice to Mole, in The Wind In The Willows,’ he announced. ‘ “Believe me, my young friend, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, half so much worth doing as simply messing about in boats.” ’
Messing about in boats has given a new lease of life to 85-year-old West, a giant of the Shakespearean stage, and his wife Prunella Scales, 87, forever a sitcom super-star as Sybil Fawlty in Fawlty Towers.
The hobby has provided the couple with endless delight since their children were small, and their summers spent pootling along Britain’s waterways in their narrowboat inspired a gentle TV documentary in 2014.
As Tim and Pru celebrated their Golden Wedding, cameras followed them revisiting the Kennet and Avon Canal, in Wiltshire, which they helped to restore in the Eighties.
The show was the first in a run of four on the tiny More4 channel, an offshoot of Channel 4. As Tim commented: ‘We thought it would be seen by some old ladies on a wet Tuesday afternoon, but somehow it caught on.’
It certainly did. From their first adventures, exploring the Rochdale and Llangollen canals, the couple became bolder as the show’s popularity spread. Soon, they had a primetime slot on C4’s Sunday schedules and they visited Venice, Amsterdam, Stockholm and Portugal’s Rio Douro.
Then wanderlust really took hold. Tim and Pru travelled to the Parana Delta in Argentina, Canada’s Rideau Canal and the Mekong Delta in Vietnam. That sweetly ironic title, Great Canal Journeys, was now a true description.
But their millions of fans weren’t tuning in for a new perspective on South-East Asia or South America from the towpath — not really.
Plenty of celebrities invite us to discover the world by steam train, vintage car, hot air balloon and other modes of transport and don’t earn themselves ten series stretched over five years.
The special attraction of this show has been its charmingly affectionate presenters and their touching relationship — especially the frank way they have talked about Pru’s Alzheimer’s disease.
They don’t hide their love for each other, nor their fears of what the illness is inflicting on them.
That’s what so many viewers respond to: a portrait of a marriage where one of the couple is ‘fading away in full view’, her mind ebbing, even though the warmth of their affection still glows.
We have watched and listened to them sharing thoughts and memories so often it’s painful to see the small griefs that beset them every day.
When Tim reminded Pru that, during one career lull, she took a temp’s job in an office, the confusion on her face was heart-breaking. She couldn’t remember, and he wanted to pretend that it didn’t matter. It is rare, outside our own families, to eaves-drop on such intimate heartache.
Last Sunday’s episode, a look back at some of their favourite trips, may well be the last.
Without ruling out the possibility of one or two more programmes, they acknowledged it was unlikely. Pru was deteriorating and, though he was loath to admit it, Tim was increasingly frail.
As they puttered up the oxford Canal, Tim began talking frankly about the toll his wife’s dementia was taking.
‘It has got worse,’ he said. ‘A big step back was when she began to be really quite deaf. It does make conversation difficult. So we don’t talk to each other as much as we did. And that’s sad, and awful really. We’ve been instantaneously swapping ideas and feelings for a large number of years and now we can’t.
‘I do feel quite lonely sometimes and it’s having an effect on my own mind, certainly. I haven’t got someone to share things with and that means my own brain is slowing up.’ He attempted a smile before screwing his eyes tight to blink away the tears.
If there has been a more poignant TV moment this decade, I struggle to think of it.
Tim and Pru married in 1963, after meeting on the set of a TV costume drama. Tim had been briefly married before and had a daughter, Juliet. The couple went on to have two sons: Sam is an actor and his brother Joseph is a
translator. Canal holidays became their escape from the intensity of theatre life; today, they provide a refuge from the numbing effects of dementia.
At home, Pru can become frustrated at her forgetfulness, sometimes asking the same question over and over. on the water, a blessed peace settles over her.
She sits in the bow of the boat, watching the bank and occasion-ally calling out a greeting: ‘Hello, duck. Hello, swan.’
Respectful editing means viewers never see her lose her train of thought. She and her husband share loving, even flirt-atious, exchanges — perhaps spontaneous, perhaps scripted (they are actors, after all), but unmistakably rooted in a lifelong fondness for each other deeper than words. As Tim gave Pru a hand with a crankshaft to wind open a pair of lock gates, she teased him: ‘It’s not just your strength. Look, you’ve got a longer one . . .’ and she held up her winding handle beside his. ‘ Yes,’ he said, huffily, ‘complaining about the size of my implement once again!’ ‘No, no,’ Pru replied, stroking his shoulder. ‘Never let it be said.’ Aboard the barge, they have long- established roles. He is captain, she is first mate. He steers with a hand on the tiller, she takes charge of opening and closing the locks. Increasing frailty means they occasionally bump off the sluice gates in their boat or stray into an overhanging willow. An actress right down to her bones, Pru is able to disguise her illness as the couple narrate the show. She reads as smoothly and clearly as ever, especially good when delivering lines from Shake-speare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘I know a bank where the wild thyme blows . . .’ Some skills, it seems, are never forgotten. Nowadays, Pru’s short- term memory is severely affected, and she frequently can’t remember things she did or said just a few minutes earlier. Tim’s career is still blooming. Viewers might know him best from the soap EastEnders, when he was the patriarch of Albert Square, Stan Carter, until four years ago. More recently, he was landowner Jeremy Lister in BBC1’s period drama Gentleman Jack this year, and Private Godfrey in a trio of Dad’s Army remakes. If we see no more of Tim and Pru on their Great Canal Journeys, they’ll be missed. But there is hope yet, for they intend to keep returning to the waterways for a while, without the cameras. Bidding us farewell in a poignant voiceover, Pru said: ‘Perhaps you’ll find me beside a lock, windlass in hand, or moored up with a nice glass of wine. Ideally you’ll catch a glimpse of us on the stern, gliding along serenely.’ It’s a lovely thought. Here’s to them messing about in boats for some time yet.