Could five cross passengers possibly beat the bigwigs?
It’s no fun commuting by train into London. There’s the eye-watering ticket prices, the cattle-like overcrowding, the endless delays and cancellations – not to mention the constant possibility of a TV camera being shoved in your face to show the rest of the nation how miserable you are.
Whether it’s a local news bulletin or investigative documentary, programme makers just love shots of nose-to-armpit passengers and apoplectic vox pops conducted on station platforms. The Passengers That Took on the Train Line (BBC Two) was the latest such vehicle to come chugging from the sidings.
This sparky film found righteously angry reporter Jacques Peretti rallying together five disgruntled commuters on the notoriously shambolic Southeastern Rail – nicknamed “Southeastern Fail”, it scores lowest in passenger satisfaction surveys – to bid for the franchise and see if they could do a better job of running it. Frankly, you’d think that a chimpanzee wearing a fez could do better, let alone five bright, committed professionals.
They founded a company called “The People’s Railway”, raised funds and roped in experts. They travelled to Switzerland to gaze enviously at their system which runs, fittingly, like clockwork. To add insult to Brexit injury, 70 per cent of our franchises are owned by foreign governments, meaning that British commuters are effectively subsidising French, Dutch and German ones.
The quintet were a likeable bunch, especially bearded Scottish business manager Ross, who psyched himself up for big meetings by asking, “What would Madonna do?” Probably strip down and dance on the boardroom table, Ross – don’t follow her example too literally. Meanwhile, Peretti made an engaging guide, despite his distractingly hirsute arms and mild resemblance to Tweety Pie.
For six months, our plucky underdogs toiled to convince the Department of Transport (DOT) that their radical approach – putting passengers first and ploughing profits into improving the service – would work. Could they really take on the rail bigwigs and win?
Of course they couldn’t. The DOT erected hurdles so high, only a jet-heeled giraffe could jump over them. This was a closed shop masquerading as open competition, which made something of a mockery of the previous hour’s TV.
Although the film’s fanciful premise hit the buffers, it still did worthwhile work in exposing the process. Peretti’s post-script – that the rail franchise system is not fit for purpose – came as no surprise to anyone who’s tried to let the train take the strain in the past 20 years. Cameras will be capturing commuter disgruntlement for a while yet.
The second episode of school drama (Channel 4), set at a newly mixed white British and Asian academy in Yorkshire, was a slight improvement on the series-opener. ’Tis often the TV way. Once the scene-setting groundwork and clunky character introductions are out of the way, we can settle down and enjoy the action.
In a neat twist, troublesome pupil Jordan (Samuel Bottomley) turned out to be a teenage father and was left literally holding the baby by its resentful mother. So Jordan did what any right-thinking dad would do: smuggled the cute infant into class inside a holdall and blackmailed PE teacher Steve Bell (Paul Nicholls) into looking after it in the stationery cupboard. Just another average school day, then.
While Steve had his hands full, his wife and headteacher Mandy Carter (Jo Joyner) fell into the eager arms of her boss, Sadiq Nawaz (Adil Ray). This love triangle was the weakest story strand. It’s hardly been slow-burning, will-they-or-won’t-they sexual tension. Snogging by episode two meant viewers weren’t emotionally invested but instead, rolling their eyes at the thudding predictability of it all.
Resident minx Missy Booth (Poppy Lee Friar) emulated Dangerous Liaisons to wreak revenge on her former best buddy Nas Paracha (Amy-leigh Hickman). When the pair buried the hatchet, Nas confessed she was only wearing hijab as an experiment and that her secret crush was a lesbian teacher. Another neat twist.
Ackley Bridge has the potential to say something fresh about race, class and education in the 21st century. See the scene where a Muslim father berated his judgmental daughter: “Stop telling other people how to live their lives. It’s what half the country thinks we do anyway.” If only it had the courage of its convictions and dropped the soapy filler about teachers’ love lives.
The Passengers That Took on the Train Line Ackley Bridge