Peter's Waterways Blog The Cutting Of The Cut This was first published in IWA West Riding's Milepost in February 2016 about appearing in television programmes and whether the publicity for the waterways is worth the effort of participating.

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"If you go on first, the dog might follow and then ...“. The third attempt to film the dog walking on to the boat was successful. They thought it really important to have a dog-onto-the-boat shot to properly tell the story of the Christmas floods. As you do. It was a brilliant day’s boating to position the boat for the visit of the film crew: they were telling the story of the Christmas floods in the Calder Valley, and this couple-of-minutes of film was to be a short insert into a longer set of interviews in Mythamroyd and surrounding places. They had half-an-hour to make the item, a couple of days ahead of the broadcast. They brought the presenter – and the dog – with them. The script, which was a couple of sentences, was filmed in long, short and middling versions: there were a couple of shots of water churning out of the propeller, and of the boat passing along the canal, and then the film crew were off, walking back to their cars.

Rochdale Canal being filmed for a television programme about the floods

The dog has been persuaded to come on board

The boat crew, that’s us, then had some more hours returning the boat to base, and later, the reverse of the couple of hours of driving from home to the boat. The C&RT Flood Appeal benefited –everyone’s expenses were donated to this – and it was an extremely enjoyable winter-boating day. But was it worth it? It seemed an expensive way to picture a dog walking on to a boat: it could have done that at the base, even if that was further from the programme‘s interviews. The boat and canal were a brief and picturesque backdrop to a serious story of the devastation of the floods and recovery-so-far, forty days later. The canal wasn’t the main story, and the need for us to manoeuvre past flood-deposited channel-blocking-silt wasn’t pictured. The canal’s need of extensive repair wasn’t mentioned, either: indeed once the dog was in position, the canal passed-by as it would have done before the floods. Maybe the programme’s audience gained an unhelpful impression of normality on the canal

Should we, we the waterways community, have participated? Those who sup with the ... errr... television know that news and features editor don’t easily concede script approval: it’s a package visible to a large audience and all publicity is (maybe) good publicity. It doesn’t much matter which programme or which channel or which celebrity presenter is involved: the producers say they want authenticity, and there are many possible authentic news scripts based on the same clips. With an ‘entertainment’ (rather than ‘news’) film crew last the year, a discussion on the importance of authenticity was interrupted by passing some moored boats and my comments on issues around mooring restrictions and their implementation nationally: please could I say that again to the camera? Steer round the bend sounding as authoritative (and authentic) as the situation allowed. Could I say it again – repeat performances are a regular requirement – and could I look at The Presenter this time. Yes. Easy. Of course, the Presenter isn’t there: they are sitting inside the boat working on where is best for the next picturesque scenery shot.

Film crew at Sowerby Bridge

Interviewing

Cut to Cooking-The-Presenter’s-Breakfast. Presenter and Producer have stayed afloat overnight while boat and film crews have gone away, and are now reassembled ready for a morning start. Which is delayed by the need of a tomato-to-fry. Have any of us a tomato to hand? Errr ... no we haven’t. Now, it’s no part of the duties of a Volunteer Lockkeeper to have a tomato about their person: but presence-of-mind is useful in all situations, and maybe those Local Residents chatting in their front garden can find us a tomato, if asked. Yes They Can. One is produced, handed to Volunteer Lockkeeper, to Producer, to Presenter, to frying pan. And a pound coin is duly passed in the opposite direction to the joint satisfaction of the waiting onlookers. Breakfast is suitably sizzled, filmed, and stored in the oven because all these waiting people want to get on with boat-moving. Authenticity, of a kind, is maintained.

A different programme, in a different century, had us closing in on a floating cable-drum, not clearly visible to the steerer fifty foot behind us. “Three, two, one ...” and there’s a slight bump as the bows push away the obstruction. And in one morning’s filmed boating, that little incident seemed sure to make the final programme. Which it did: I was reminded of it last summer as a viewer of, seemingly, a collision-every hour and a barely competent crew. A TV canal-programme needs “something happening” I and can roll-up lots of minor incidents into a wholly-misleading impression.

Filming the BCN challenge

And a weedy background

Unwinding some webbing attached to a strangely-bent piece of metal, all tightly wound around the propeller: “could you hold that up again, and tell us what it is”. A dozen years later, and benefiting from satellite-channel rebroadcasts (on dull Tuesday afternoons), new boating friends were still surprised that I failed to correctly identify the rail-to-sleeper attachment thingummy. Such is the way of television: happenstance and editing can tell a story to an audience many times removed from its original context. And we are still flattered to return to be on (or close-by) yet another TV show. Sigh.

Peter Scott @peterjohnscott