“I am a boomer!” Michael Portillo says at one point in Thursday’s Great British Railway Journeys (BBC2, Wednesday-Friday). He certainly is. Both in the demographic, baby-boom terms in which he was speaking and in verbal style, the man booms for Britain. His voice is a posh foghorn, sounding from his floppy patrician face like a great clarion.
There is a type of programme that starts with a bunch of TV commissioners sitting in front of a board full of headshots of tired-looking famous men and another filled with modes of transport. Eventually someone says, “Let’s put Russ Abbot on a boat. We can call it Russ A-Boat,” and then they go to the pub. I believe every man in Britain over a certain age is entitled to a travel programme. Producers first put Michael Portillo on a train back in 2010, and they’ve all been in the pub since.
All the while the former Tory MP booms about the British countryside, meeting ordinary people for the first time. Unlike Irish politicians, who you can’t stop from attending your grandmother’s wake, British MPs can attain power while knowing exactly 100 people, all of them old Etonians. He also gazes at everything – old houses, trains, industrial wastelands – with detached fascination.
Portillo is complicit but unthreatening, and that’s what programme-makers want from a presenter these days
Back when he was a politician, Portillo was the sort of cuddly Conservative who snuggled up to Labour centrists on TV couches and looked as if he might have owned, and maybe read, a book. He was the type of Tory who knew to look sad when telling the people of Britain that this year they would have to eat their pets. He wasn’t the type who says, “You’ll eat your hamster and be happy, you pigs,” or the type who tells his constituents to celebrate because Brexit was always about eating our pets and now the EU can’t interfere. No, Portillo is complicit but unthreatening, and that’s what programme-makers want from a presenter these days.
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There are noble antecedents to this form of programme. In 1973 the BBC got John Betjeman, the poet laureate, to follow the railway tracks out of London into the commuter belt in an excellent documentary called Metro-Land. If Portillo is a posh clarion, Betjeman was a whimsical slide whistle embedded in a minor string chord. While Betjeman spent his time picking at the strangeness of suburbia with great lyricism and melancholic irony, Great British Railway Journeys just points Portillo at a place, points a camera at Portillo and lets the booming commence.
And so he wanders the British midlands in bright-red trousers or a salmon-coloured jacket (his clothes also boom), usually accompanied by a hint of a smile and a swelling string section. This is a musical motif that suggests Britain’s sunlit uplands are just around the corner even though these sunlit uplands have been sold from under the British people by Portillo’s own party. In fact, thanks to Tory asset-stripping and privatisation, British train tickets are now so expensive I imagine the main reason he does this show is to get his for free.
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In Wednesday’s episode Portillo wanders up to Stratford-upon-Avon, home of that talentless hack William Shakespeare. “British theatre has the great advantage of the English language, which is now spoken all over the globe,” says Portillo, skilfully avoiding the reasons for this. And then he goes to Moseley to see the prefabricated homes given to soldiers at the end of the second World War. “Cosy,” he says, by which he means, “I live in a house the size of an airport hangar.” I also know what you’re thinking: Ah, support for the arts and public housing, two more great legacies of the Tory party.
The show frequently seems to imply that Britain’s ambition and greatness are things of the past. But this is, I suspect, an emergent property of modern Britain rather than an explicit intention of the programme makers. It bubbles away beneath the surface of Portillo’s jaunty baritone, a tone he even maintains on Thursday while visiting disused nuclear bunkers in Kidderminster and exploring the racist legacy of Enoch Powell in Wolverhampton. It’s a testament, in a way, to TV’s ability to transcend deep reflection.
My favourite bits are in Wednesday’s episode, during a segment about Britain’s under-construction high-speed-rail network, in which he is wearing a hard hat and gazing down at a building site. “But now the first high-speed intercity line, HS2, mired in controversy and cut back from the original plans, is under way!” Portillo says triumphantly, throwing his hands in the air with happiness as though he hasn’t noticed the words “mired in controversy” and “cut back from the original plans” are there at all.
A French man then takes him on a tour of some railway tunnels being created beneath Long Itchington Wood, in Warwickshire, and shows him a “boring machine” named after the Nobel-winning chemist Dorothy Hodgkin that is being used to drill the enormous caverns. He doesn’t hold his thumbs aloft and say, “Oi! There’s only one ‘boring machine’ here, Frenchy, and that’s yours truly!” No, instead he says, “Dorothy is shaking every bone of my body.” “Ooh, matron!” to quote another lost treasure of the British past.
Speaking of sexy history, I believe you can study it at Trinity now. The details are largely the same as for its normal history curriculum, but in sexy history the kings and queens of the past, notoriously freakish oddballs in reality, are reimagined as attractive actors who own electric razors and skincare products. Becoming Elizabeth (Saturday, Channel 4) is probably on this curriculum. Channel 4 pitches it as the story of an “orphaned teenager embroiled in the politics of the English court”, which implies the ginger urchin is moments from belting out, “The sun’ll come out tomorra!”
Sadly they do not go down this route, because this particular urchin was really a nepo baby who has an era named after her and was related to the guy who started the company. Thankfully, Americans don’t know this, so a whole export industry of British actors, crews and stately homes has developed to make the ascension of Elizabeth I seem fraught with unexpected possibilities, like a series of Succession or Newsnight.
In fairness, it’s a zippy, well-acted tale of three siblings and an assortment of nefarious courtiers orbiting a crown. There is nudity. There is blood spurting from wounds. There are nice frocks. It’s basically the country that feudal poshos want to return to. All that’s missing is Michael Portillo booming on about the craftsmanship of the swords.
