Barging Round Britain With John Sergeant (ITV) sounds like a sharp-elbowed charge through these isles accompanied by the BBC’s former chief political correspondent, but the title misleads. This is a soothing excursion along Britain’s inland waterways, starting with the full length of the Leeds and Liverpool canal. Sergeant stops off along the way to make friends – a tailor here, a Women’s Institute branch there. There are also, as you might imagine, a lot of locks to negotiate.
I once did some barging on the Leeds and Liverpool canal, so I know what he’s up against. Travelling by barge affords a unique perspective; you get to see every town from the back, as it were, with the Asda car park in the foreground. And you meet lots of people at locks who say stuff such as: “It’s not a barge; it’s a narrowboat.”
It is also insanely slow. After a day and a half of progress, you can still easily cycle back to your car to fetch your sunglasses. The canal is 127 miles long, so Sergeant’s trip was necessarily a bit compressed: Skipton got skipped; Wigan wasn’t mentioned. But he did tie up in Saltaire, where Sir Titus Salt founded his textile empire, and his town.
Here’s something I learned that I might never forget: Salt’s great innovation was to make cloth from imported alpaca wool, which had previously been used only as packing material on ships. Sergeant illustrated this fact by getting someone to shave an alpaca on Saltaire’s bandstand. The alpaca farmer said alpacas weren’t really people animals. As if to prove the point, the alpaca spat in Sergeant’s face.
I’ve long suspected that John Sergeant is slowly morphing into Jo Brand, and the transition is almost complete. But he makes for a jolly bargeman and an agreeable travelling companion. This programme might remind older viewers of a simpler time, before television had any obligation to be interesting. If I could, I would slow this down to the stately pace of a narrowboat journey: no history lessons, no alpacas; just Sergeant pootling along, in real time, smiling and waving to people as he passes, for as long as it takes.
