No murders, no hot sex, no wonky camera angles – the most riveting TV I’ve seen in ages

TODAY, I’d like to propose a heartfelt vote of thanks to the BBC for supplying the perfect antidote to this mind-numbing election and all the other trials, tribulations and irritations of our frenzied modern world.

In theory, these past six weeks of hyperactive campaigning by the party leaders — racing around the country from Land’s End to John o’Groats, spewing out millions of words — should have been a hugely exciting time for anyone like me. After all, I’ve spent most of my adult life either inside the Westminster bubble or pressing my nose against it from the outside, peering in.

By contrast, BBC4’s All Aboard! The Canal Trip, shown on Tuesday evening, seemed to offer nothing but excruciating boredom: no plot, no spoken words, no background music — just a two-hour continuous shot, filmed in real-time, of a barge journey along the Kennet and Avon canal from Top Lock in Bath to the Dundas Aqueduct near Limpley Stoke in Wiltshire.

Yet, it was the election campaign that I found unbearably, murderously tedious. All that prattle, those vacuous soundbites, the blizzard of tweets from the rival parties — and the emails piling into my inbox (of which more, later) — seemed to signify practically nothing.

Meanwhile, Cameron, Miliband, Clegg and Co appeared to go out of their way to avoid saying anything of interest or telling us what they would actually do if we were kind enough to honour them with our votes (and still less, where they would find the money to do it).

Indeed, there were moments over the past six weeks when I thought I would scream if I heard another robotic Tory uttering the mantra ‘ long- term economic plan’, or another identikit Milibandista complaining about ‘tax cuts for millionaires’ or ‘the party of the rich and powerful’.

Soothing

All I can say is thank God it’s over. Or rather, since I’m writing before any results have come in, thank God that bit’s over.

But if the election was noisy, gimmicky and hellishly boring, All Aboard! The Canal Trip was the polar opposite — an idyll of heavenly tranquillity, which I found not only mesmerisingly soothing but, in a strange way, utterly fascinating. At one hour and 58 minutes, it didn’t seem a minute too long.

Nor was I alone in feeling this. Indeed, the programme seems to have been the surprise hit of the week, attracting rave reviews on social media and 599,000 viewers on the night. This may not sound a great many, by the standards of shows such as The X Factor, but it’s a stunning success for BBC4 in the Tuesday evening slot, which apparently attracts an average audience of only 360,000.

If my guess is right, a great many more like me will have watched it since on BBC iPlayer, as word about it has spread (I was too tied up with my election duties to catch it when it went out).

As I say, I had very low expectations when a colleague told me the programme would be up my street and suggested I might care to write about it. Two hours with no commentary and nothing happening had the ring of a long, pretentious gimmick, like a conceptual artist’s submission for the Turner Prize. It also had unwelcome echoes of the five-minute interlude the BBC used to screen in the 1950s and 1960s when I was growing up, showing a continuous shot of the hands of a potter at work at his wheel. Hardly my idea of riveting telly.

Indeed, my only spark of interest in watching the programme arose from the fact that in my childhood I lived in the Berkshire village of Kintbury, on the Kennet and Avon canal. My siblings and I would go down to the towpath with our jam jars and nets to fish for minnows, and I wondered if I’d recognise my old haunts. But when I read the blurb and saw that the canal trip covered in the programme was well to the west of our old family home, even this faint flicker of curiosity was extinguished.

Still, I’m used to suffering in the service of my employers — not least, being forced to get up at unearthly hours and race around the country, listening to politicians hailing t heir l ong- t erm economic plan or denouncing tax cuts for millionaires. So I settled down to watch, with as good a grace as I could muster.

Now, I’m the first to acknowledge that this film may not be everybody’s cup of tea — and, of course, you’ll see the usual crop of incisive comments on the internet, consisting of the one word ‘booo-rringgg!!!’ (spelt with varying numbers of Os, Rs, Gs and exclamation marks, to indicate the full depth of the critic’s outrage).

Idyllic

But if you have access to iPlayer, do give it a try, for a few minutes anyway. You’ll know soon enough if you’re going to like it — and I don’t think I need to issue a spoiler alert before I say it’s pretty much the same from beginning to end. At any rate, you won’t miss any murders, bank robberies or steamy sex scenes if you fail to stick with it.

In one sense, however, you’ll miss quite a bit. For what is so striking about this film is that without the distractions of background music, commentary or constant switching from one scene or camera angle to another, we notice an awful lot more. The sounds are enchanting — the creaking of lock gates, the gentle chug- chug- chug of the barge engine, the birdsong, the flapping of wings, the bark of a dog or quack of a duck, the music of water lapping the boat or sloshing through the lock sluices.

So, too, are the sights — the changing light on honey-coloured stone, the shifting pattern of clouds in an idyllic sky as the barge passes stunningly beautiful bridges of stone and iron. God, what a lovely country we still have — in parts.

But what sets this furthest apart from our usual fare, letting us take so much more in, is the two-hour continuous shot. Indeed, almost nothing else on TV allows us to focus on a scene for more than five seconds at a time before we’re treated to another.

I’ve heard people in the business argue that they constantly chop and change between shots because modern viewers have incredibly short concentration spans. But I wonder if they’ve got that the wrong way round. If we have trouble concentrating these days, might this not be partly because TV directors never let us try for more than five seconds?

I’m old enough to remember the great historian AJP Taylor, speaking straight to camera without notes for an hour at a time. We didn’t keep jumping to reconstructions of battles, archive film, animated graphics or interviews with other historians, allowed one sentence each before being cut off. Yet this was truly absorbing television, watched by mass audiences. With the licence fee in mind, it was cheap to make, too.

Distraction

Have social media and the frantic pace of modern life really made us so scatterbrained as a nation that we can’t focus on anything longer that a politician’s three- second soundbite or a 140-character tweet?

Which brings me to those infuriating emails. In my experience, the single biggest distraction from getting anything done at work is the constant flashing of my Blackberry as another unsolicited message pops up in my inbox. Since I started writing this column, I’ve received 47 from colleagues, readers, PR companies, political parties, technical support, film promoters, media companies, supermarkets and a tailoring firm in New Delhi. Idiotically, I always stop what I’m doing to look at each new one as it arrives, just in case it’s important. It never is.

So, in my book, by far the wisest advice of the week comes from one of the country’s leading psychologists, Professor Sir Cary Cooper, who says that sending emails to colleagues in the same building harms productivity and should be banned.

Furthermore, companies should discourage staff from checking work emails at night, on holiday or at the weekend. For these wretched messages serve only to add to our stress and exhaust us, making us feel that we’re working when we’re not.

Indeed, All Aboard! The Canal Trip is a blissful reminder of the slower pace of life in an age when emails didn’t exist. So let’s switch the damn things off and relax, before they drive us all mad and bring businesses grinding to a halt.

Meanwhile, come along, BBC and the rest of you. I’m not saying that every programme should be just like this week’s treat. But why not put a little more faith in our concentration spans? You may find we’re less scatterbrained than you think.