Ian Hislop Goes Off the Rails BBC4, 9pm
No matter how old he gets, Ian Hislop retains the fearless satirical impulse of a twinkly-eyed schoolboy soothsayer whose sole task is lampooning the purblind pomposity, innate foolishness and rampant self-interest of grown-up authority.
This he does by rigorous assembly of the facts, thereby uncovering the truth. It helps that at the same time Hislop delivers the goods in a fruity upper-crust gargle, unconsciously sending up the very forces of Establishment duplicity he seeks to unmask. Hoorah, Hislop!
In Ian Hislop Goes Off the Rails, the editor of Private Eye - and confirmed railway-lover - gargled us a portrait of my childhood's single scariest monster: Dr Richard Beeching, the lardy, weakly-moustached and smug-looking management guru who, in 1963, savagely stole my dad's job as a painter of British Railways carriages and wagons.
Beeching was responsible for the infamous government report which, bidding to reduce a £136m railway debt, led to the drastic loss of 200 branch-lines, 2000 stations and almost 5000 miles of track, plus many thousands of jobs, including my dad's*.
In the popular imagination, Beeching endures as the soulless axe-man who callously ended the golden age of rail travel and needlessly diminished the poetry of the British landscape, excising rural idylls from Adlestrop to Yelverton (calling at Hawick, Lowestoft North and Padstow). None of this was strictly true, however, as Hislop soon established.
Rail's aureate era in Britain actually ended in 1914. The network did have too many miles of unprofitable track. Beeching was chiefly guilty of personal PR failures which all too readily allowed himself to be cast as a media demon, obscuring the worth of his recommendations.
For starters, Beeching openly demanded to be paid his private sector salary, £24,000 (£14,000 more than Prime Minister Harold Macmillan). He honestly refused to regard the railways as a form of public service, stating that, for him, its existence depended on matters of profit and loss.
He also saw no problem in admitting he lacked all specific railway industry expertise, placing his faith in universally-applicable laws of management practice. These included euphemism: not for nothing was the Beeching Report sub-titled "The Re-Shaping of British Railways".
He also relied over much on clipboard-toting efficiency experts whose evidence supporting mass rail closures was gathered nationwide within a single week.
Hislop's quest featured much atmospheric monochrome footage of long-gone steam trains, and found him wandering nostalgically along ghostly long-abandoned platforms at mildewed stations with overgrown railbeds.
All this prevented Ian Hislop Goes Off the Rails getting stuck into the real villain of the Beeching Report: Transport Minister Ernest Marples.
Hislop identified him as a disingenuous egotist who'd made millions out of road-building. What he then should have said, but didn't, was that putting Marples in charge of Britain's rail network was like putting a fox in charge of a hen house.
* Fear not. My dad secured another railway job, becoming a wheel-tapper, wielding a long-handled hammer (when tapped against a carriage's lower regions, the hammer should induce a metallic clang indicating the likely attachment of a wheel).
Almost as importantly, it also led to some of his night-shifts at Manchester Victoria station being enlivened by visits to throbbing West Indian shebeens nearby with his throbbing West Indian and African workmates. Thank goodness Dr Beeching never found out.
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