Catherine Johnson

In April 2013 I walked the Pennine Way -- a 268-mile trek from Edale in
Derbyshire up the spine of England and into Kirk Yetholm in Scotland.
Almost exactly two years later, on 24^th^ April 2015 the Pennine Way
reached its 50^th^ anniversary as the first national trail in the UK. To
celebrate, the BBC produced a four-part series about the trail hosted by
Paul Rose. The programme examined the historical origins of the trail,
which had its roots in the protests on Kinder Scout in the 1930s for
ramblers to have the 'right to roam' across England's countryside. The
fight for a national trail in England was not simply about escape, but
also a political battle between the rights of landowners and citizens
about who owned the country. As one campaigner, Sylvia Franks, claimed
in the programme, 'We fought for this country. We fought for the rights.
We fought to be free men. And we want to walk our countryside.

The combination of archive footage, interviews and long shots of the
trail's dramatic landscape in this episode is characteristic of the
style of this documentary. Each episode explores one part of the Pennine
Way combining shots of Rose trekking on short sections of the trail with
longer sequences in which he learns more about the environment within
which he is walking. Here the episodes highlight the history of this
stretch of England from the working conditions of its lead mining
industry to the literary inspiration of the South Pennines for the
novels of the Brontes. [Rose also tries his
hand ](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02np4rn)at a range of
adventurous outdoor activities, from rock climbing in dramatic Malham
Cove to white water rafting over Low Force in the river Tees.

In this respect, the series works hard to promote the culture, nature
and heritage of these regions of rural northern England and the value of
the countryside as a site of labour, leisure and adventure. Indeed, the
series is positioned as being for and about the north of England, having
been broadcast on BBC One but only in the regions of Yorkshire and
Lincolnshire, the North East and Cumbria, the North West, and Yorkshire
(although all episodes were available through the BBC iPlayer and look
to be broadcast nationally on BBC Two this summer). In fact, it was only
because I happened to be walking in Yorkshire this Easter, retracing a
few favourite sections from the trail, that I chanced across a reference
to the programme in a tourist brochure.

Despite being a celebration of a walking trail, then, *The Pennine
Way* is far less about walking than other programmes about UK trails,
such as *Wainwright Walks: Coast to Coast* (BBC, 2009). In this latter
series, presenter Julia Bradbury did actually take on the challenge of
walking the entire 192-mile route from the west to the east coast of
England.

Using aerial footage, combined with voice-overs from Alfred Wainwright's
classic guide to the trail, this series is far more interested in
explaining the nature of the walk itself. In fact, *Wainwright Walks* is
very much focused on celebrating Wainwright as the trail's creator and a
strong advocate for walking, particularly in the Lakeland fells. The
series contains far more shots of Bradbury walking and explaining the
features of the landscape around her than in *The Pennine Way*.
Typically the programme depends on static shots as she walks to or away
from the camera, interspersed with a few steadicam sequences following
her along the route and aerial shots that offer majestic views of the
dramatic countryside. In this sense, *Wainwright Walks* is far more
successful than *The Pennine Way* in conveying the experience of
undertaking a long distance walk in the UK.

However, as an avid hiker, I have been struck by how difficult
television seems to find it to capture the experience of walking,
despite the fact that is has been the subject of a number of
documentaries over the past decade in response to a [growing interest in
hiking as a pastime within the
UK](https://www.thebmc.co.uk/participation-in-climbing-mountaineering).
What is missing from these documentaries in particular is what it feels
like to walk *through* a landscape. This is not only the physical
sensation of foot striking ground or rain lashing face, but the sense of
passing through space and witnessing the landscape moving around you. It
is the sensation of looking back over where you have walked and forward
towards where you are to go, of seeing how the landscapes and vistas
shift as you are afforded constantly changing perspectives on the
countryside you pass through. It is also the way in which the experience
of walking becomes all encompassing, calling your mind to concentrate on
the task at hand (not losing your footing, not getting lost) while
equally freeing it to wander into unstructured thinking in ways that I
always find generative and restorative. Indeed, on my walking holidays
now I frequently prefer to take short videos with my ipod held at
shoulder height as these are far more effective in capturing the
sensation of the walk than a photograph. (The video below comes from a
wonderful holiday last September in the Spanish Pyrenees.)

These shaky, amateurish videos are also a useful reminder of the
technological challenges of videoing while walking, both in terms of
managing the weather and (in this instance) the rise and fall of the
bodies' movements which Steadicam was designed to compensate for.

Of course, the moving image is never going to be able to capture fully
the physical experience of undertaking a walk. But two recent movies
about walking have been far more effective in conveying what it is like
to undertake a long distance hike than these television series. The
movie *Wild *(2014), based on Cheryl Strayed's wonderful book about
walking the Pacific Crest Trail in the US, uses a far more
impressionistic style to convey the physical and psychological
experiences of long distance walking. Unfortunately none of the clips on
YouTube show the walking sequences from the movie, but the first twenty
seconds of this featurette about the movie give some sense of the ways
in which the film uses techniques such as rapid cuts, interior
voice-over and point of view shots to take the viewer inside the head of
the walker.

In this regard, *Wild* has much in common with the less
well-publicised *Tracks *(2013),* *which uses similar conventions to
tell the extraordinary real story of Robyn Davidson's 2000-mile trek
across the Australian dessert.

It is, perhaps, unfair to contrast television documentary series with
these far more personalised stories about the psychological challenges
and rewards of long-distance walking. Clearly the aims and intentions of
series like *The Pennine Way *and *Wainwright Walks *are quite different
from these movies, whose focus is on using walking to explore the
psychological journey of the central characters. At the same time,
however, television's propensity towards seriality, which gives it the
ability to trace journeys over time would seem to make it ideally suited
to explore what it actually feels like to undertake a long distance
walk. It was for this reason that I was fascinated to see BBC Four
broadcast an uninterrupted two-hour canal boat journey, *All Aboard! The
Canal Trip*, on Tuesday 5 May. With no voice over, just the hum of the
canal boat and the sounds of the changing landscape, this hypnotic
programme invited the viewer to immerse themselves in the sounds and
images that make up the experience of travelling by canal boat. The
programme was part of BBC Four's 'Slow TV' series, inspired by [the
success of slow TV for Norwegian public service broadcaster
NRK](http://www.channel4.com/news/slow-tv-nrk-train-journey-ship-video-125).
In 2009 NRK broadcast a seven-hour train journey from Bergen to Oslo
shot using a camera mounted on the front of the driver's carriage, with
no commentary or music. Other programmes in Norway's slow TV movement
have included eight uninterrupted hours of a burning fireplace and 134
continuous hours of the voyage of a ship from Bergen to Kirkenes. BBC
Four's series also included three thirty-minute programmes capturing the
process of crafting objects by hand and *Dawn Chorus: the Sounds of
Spring *(conveying the dawn chorus in three different UK locations),
with each programme placing a strong emphasis on observing things as
they happened.

In *All Aboard! The Canal Trip*, the camera starts in long shot, behind
the canal boat as it enters a lock. It then moves onto the boat itself,
as we observe the water rushing into the lock. Graphics providing the
programme's title and the name of the canal are superimposed over the
lock gates themselves, akin to plaques or etchings in the landscape.

![All
Aboard](http://cms.cstonline.net/resizeimage.php?width=350&height=196&image=http://cdn.cstonline.net/assets/image/user_94/all%20aboard%20canal%20trip.jpg "All Aboard"){.addCaption
.aligncenter loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="350" height="196"}

Once the lock gates open we begin our slow and gentle journey along the
canal. At moments throughout the journey short pieces of text emerge
within the landscape (on the canal water, on bridges and on boats). At
other moments the film superimposed archival photographs over the image
to create the experience of moving through the past (see the point at 17
minutes for example).

These moments convey the kind of information that would typically be
provided through voice over or interview. Far from a distraction,
historical and factual information here becomes part of the landscape
and the journey. In doing so, the programme makes everything about the
journey to do with the experience of travelling through the landscape of
the canal. While I have never been on an canal boat, this programme was
far more effective at capturing the sensation of moving through a living
landscape that encapsulates walking than any of the many TV series that
have been produced about hiking.

*All Aboard! The Canal Trip* captured an audience of half a million on
its initial broadcast. While some viewers complained on Twitter that it
was the most boring programme ever broadcast, others praised it as
a ['proper telly
programme'](http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/tv/news/all-aboard-the-canal-trip-bbc-fours-most-boring-tv-show-ever-is-surprise-ratings-hit-10228762.html).
The season's programmes certainly have resonances with the intervals
that were broadcast by the BBC in 1940s and 1950s, such as the sight of
waves or a potter's wheel.

While these early intervals were designed to encourage discriminating
viewing, slow TV is positioned by the BBC as a different kind of
interruption -- [a break from the emphasis on rapid editing, heightened
drama and over-scoring that characterises much contemporary television
documentary](http://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/may/01/gently-does-it-from-canal-trips-to-birdsong-bbc4-to-introduce-slow-tv),
and an invitation to watch in quiet contemplation. It is also cheap
television, a means of being innovative while filling airtime for our
cash strapped public service broadcasters. What should be celebrated
about this programming is the attempt to convey a different kind of
experience. While *The Pennine Way* and *Wainwright Walks* work almost
too hard to make their content interesting, *All Aboard! The Canal
Trip*invites the viewer to find interest within the journey and within
the landscape itself. Although journeys of various kinds seem to be a
favourite subject matter for slow TV, I am not aware of any programmes
within this movement that have taken on the subject of walking. It would
be interesting to see whether the emphasis on capturing experience as it
happens and working to convey a sense of movement through landscape,
might translate to the even slower experience of walking and whether
this might go someway towards conveying the wonderful experience of
walking through the countryside that makes it such a rewarding pastime.

 

**Catherine Johnson** is Associate Professor at the University of
Nottingham. She is the author of *Branding Television* (Routledge, 2012)
and *Telefantasy *(BFI, 2005) and the co-editor (with Andreas Fickers)
of *Transnational Television History* (Routledge, 2012) and (with Rob
Turnock) of *ITV Cultures: independent television over fifty
years* (Open UP, 2005). Her latest book is *The Promotional Screen
Industries *(Routledge, 2015), co-authored with Paul Grainge. Her
research is characterised by an interest in the production cultures of
the media industries (primarily television) and she pursues this through
both contemporary and historical research. She is currently researching
the development of online television.


In April 2013 I walked the Pennine Way – a 268-mile trek from Edale in Derbyshire up the spine of England and into Kirk Yetholm in Scotland. Almost exactly two years later, on 24
<sup>
 th
</sup>
April 2015 the Pennine Way reached its 50
<sup>
 th
</sup>
anniversary as the first national trail in the UK. To celebrate, the BBC produced a four-part series about the trail hosted by Paul Rose.

Postagens de Rogue Scholar

ALL ABOARD SLOW TV: CAPTURING THE EXPERIENCE OF WALKING ON TV