Who knew the deadliest WW1 machine was the train?
Unless you have a particularly longstanding passion for Tiswas – and it’s fine if you do, there is no judgment here – then Chris Tarrant is forever associated with Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? For that reason, the opening moments of Chris Tarrant: Railways of the Somme (Channel 5) had a worryingly familiar air.
“Why did so many die?” Tarrant asked about the First World War, before laying out four possible answers in melodramatic style. “Was it the trenches and mustard gas? The deadly machine guns? The aircraft? Or the first tanks?” Actually, it turned out to be none of those. “No! The machine that enabled death on such a horrendous scale was, in fact the train.”
From those dodgy beginnings, Tarrant settled in to his subject. The role of the railways during the Great War, both at home and on the Western Front, has already been the subject of a Michael Portillo series this year. Portillo is very good at presenting these programmes. Tarrant lacks Portillo’s odd charm but plenty of people like him – his series are among Channel 5’s most popular output.
This one took us through the staging posts of the conflict – beginning in Troisvierges, where the
Germans launched hostilities on August 1, 1914, and ended up at Montauban, scene of the first day of the Battle of the Somme.
The central thesis was that railways shaped the conflict, and enabled the terrible death toll as they were able to transport so many men to the Front. There was interesting material along the way, such as the story of the Tyneside Scottish, a brigade of volunteers who trained in the pastures of Alnwick Castle. They were thrilled at the prospect of going to war; as local historian Cliff Pettit explained, the majority were coalminers, and after a working life down the pit who wouldn’t be tempted by the thought of marching down a Parisian boulevard cheered by mademoiselles?
We were also told of the 96,000 Chinese who answered Field Marshal Haig’s call and signed up in 1917, travelling 12,000 miles to work as labourers on the Western Front railways. The photographs of those men were striking, as was a remarkable recording from a prisoner-of-war camp. A German linguist in the camp made men read the Bible story of the prodigal son. We heard one, John Tarwood from Huddersfield, and it made the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. Chris Tarrant’s name may have got this series made, but it was the other voices that made it worthwhile.
What was so very Yorkshire about the premises in A Very Yorkshire Brothel (ITV)? The accents? The fact they’re always putting the kettle on? Would you ever get a programme called A Very Warwickshire Brothel? Forgive me, but we Yorkshire folk can be touchy about these things.
Anyway, five minutes into the programme I realised why they’d come up with the title. The brothel in question, City Sauna in Sheffield, has already been the subject of a nearidentical and slightly better Channel 4 film called A Very British Brothel. So this was the television equivalent of copying a cleverer kid’s homework.
Mother and daughter team Kath and Jenni run the massage parlour in the city’s red light district. While sex work is legal in England and Wales, brothels are not. The police turn a blind eye but the council could close them down at any time. The hook for the programme was Kath and Jenni’s campaign to legalise brothels because, apparently, “this traditional business is more under threat than ever before”.
Of course, that’s not really what it was about. It was an excuse for a fly-on-the-wall show portraying the sex trade as a bit of seaside postcard fun. The comedy was in the gap between the fantasy and reality – the women posing for sultry website pictures, then sitting down in their stripper heels (and, boy, did the director love shots of those heels) for a natter and a Mcdonald’s Happy Meal while Kath put a wash on. A woman called Autumn arrived for a three-week stint referred to here as a “residency”, which made it sound like Celine Dion doing a concert run in Las Vegas.
The programme did the job of showing that brothels, if run properly and with the welfare of women in mind, are a far safer option for sex workers than the streets. The women insisted they were happy in their work – one of them had underlined the point by renaming herself Lilly Loves-it. In the end, Kath explained, working in a brothel is “just like working in a chip shop”. And about as erotic, by the looks of it.
Chris Tarrant: Railways of the Somme ★★★
A Very Yorkshire Brothel ★★★