Nick Hewer picks up Margaret Mountford in his enormous Mercedes. Hang on, isn’t this Nick and Margaret: The Trouble With Our Trains (BBC2), about Britain’s railways? What are they doing in a car, have they given up already? Also, does that particular car resonate with Nick’s claim, later in the show, that he’s “a man of the people”?
And why Nick and Margaret in the first place, when they admit they aren’t daily train users? Presumably because it’s a business story: Nick and Margaret used to be a double act on a well-known business reality show. Maybe they can inject some Apprentice pizzazz into a story that is getting Britain’s collective goat, but – because it’s about sell-offs, franchises, operating companies, rolling stock, Network Rail, the Department of Transport, the Office of Rail Regulation, and the Delay Attribution Guide – is hard to make sing, on TV.
Margaret goes off to observe Team First Great Western, and joins a commuter train to Paddington. She struggles with her Telegraph (not a good paper for a crowded peak-time commute in second class, Margaret; can I recommend the more manageable Berliner format of the Guardian, also available on tablet and mobile for a more 21st-century read or for a proper cattle truck?). And she meets some of the human livestock, including Clare who pays four grand a year to be treated with contempt that borders on cruelty.
Can Team Southern do any better? Nope, worse. Nick takes the 7.29 from Brighton, a train that is literally never on time. Graham here got so angry about it that he saw a therapist, who told him he had the wrong kind of anger. Has anyone rewritten The Night Mail about the service, I wonder?
This is the nightmare crawling from Brighton,
Bring the Guardian and Michael Crichton,
Because summer or winter, it’s always the same,
The 7.29 is the train of shame ...
... or something better, more WH Auden, less WH Smith.
Nick and Margaret ride more trains and meet more people, narrating each other’s sections, rather sweetly. Nick takes a thrilling new route; Margaret goes to Hollywood, and runs over a horse. But the people are mostly grey, middle-aged railway men and financial analysts (including an Irishman called Martin Welshman); the thrilling new route isn’t that thrilling; it turns out that it’s not in fact Hollywood, California, but Holywood, County Down; and the horse is a computer-generated one, on a train simulator ... which is obviously good news (though she’s always going to be Margaret “Horse Murderer” Mountford to me from now). Still not really singing, then. Still not the Apprentice. Maybe that’s the answer: get Alan Sugar involved, too (he runs Amtrak in the States, doesn’t he?). He could get this lot – First Great Western, Southern and the rest – up to the boardroom and fire all their arses. Then hire … the state. Call it British Rail – why not? – though Horse Slayer, with her Telegraph, might not approve.
There is, sadly, another – real – animal tragedy within the pages of the Delay Attribution Guide: a dispute between a train operator and Network Rail over a peacock hit by a train. Whose fault, and is a peacock the wrong kind of bird? Nick reveals that he used to have peacocks, until they escaped … Well, it was clearly one of yours Nick, and you are to blame. But hang on: is a peacock really a bird for a man of the people?
An alternative to train travel: Peter Kay’s Car Share (BBC1), in which the man who just a few years ago was probably the best-loved man in Britain returns, in a Fiat 500L. It doesn’t start well – neither the journey, nor the sitcom – with Kay’s character John having problems finding the house of his appointed sharer Kayleigh (Sian Gibson) and falling out with the satnav. Falling out with a satnav is no longer funny. And it doesn’t get a whole lot better when, on the way to the supermarket where they both work, Kayleigh’s drink ends up all down John’s front. Except it’s not a drink, it’s Kayleigh’s urine sample, in a drink bottle! Stale wee, stale gags.
But it gets better, when it doesn’t try too hard to be funny, and it’s just the two of them talking, coming round to each other, awkwardly, sweetly, along to 90s music and crap adverts on Forever FM. Not hilarious, but nicely observed and performed, human. Maybe there is mileage to be had in a shared Fiat 500L.
• This article was amended on 30 April 2015 to correct the spelling of Holywood, County Down.
