Neil McNicholas: Rare TV treat from Bard's rural tour

LIKE many people, I like to relax at the end of the day by watching the television, but as I move ever-closer to my dotage I find I am increasingly unwilling to waste precious time watching the dross that so often masquerades as entertainment.
Ian McMillan's new TV series has received a favourable review.Ian McMillan's new TV series has received a favourable review.
Ian McMillan's new TV series has received a favourable review.

It may be just me, but Friday and Saturday evenings are totally devoid of anything worth watching – clearly the deliberate choice of programme schedulers who figure everyone is out getting legless, so why bother?

It is therefore all the more satisfying to be well entertained by something as thoroughly enjoyable as The Yorkshire Dales and the Lakes, a new Tuesday evening series on More4 written and presented in his inimitable style by the “Yorkshire Bard” himself, Ian McMillan. As Ian himself might say, it fitted like a well-loved pair of slippers.

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Because of the setting – the Dales and Lakes – it felt like a continuation of a recent programme that took viewers on a bus ride through the Dales.

On the surface it probably didn’t hold out much promise of being entertaining and, indeed, nothing really happened and there was no sex or violence or foul language.

This was a gentle real-time ride through some of the most beautiful countryside you could hope to find, filmed as a passenger would see it looking out of the bus window.

There had been a similar programme some weeks previously filmed on one of the country’s waterway systems, two-and-a-half hours (in real-time) spent gliding through the countryside on a canal boat. The only “violence” was unavoidably disturbing ducks on the canal, and the only foul language was their fowl language as they quacked out of the way!

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Ian McMillan’s programme wasn’t in any way an attempt to compete with Countryfile or with The Archers – though it was “an everyday story of country folk”. It simply highlighted various interesting facets of life and the lives and occupations of people in that part of God’s own country and whatever part of the Lake District might belong to “that other place” (as they say in Parliament). And the story continues in the couple of weeks ahead.

My only criticism, and this wasn’t Ian’s fault, was stringing viewers along by starting a story segment but not completing it until later in the programme after one or two other segments were started but not finished in the way Countryfile started to do some years ago. It suggests that producers think they’ll lose their viewers if they tell one complete story at a time.

I have to admit that I am not easily entertained and it would take more than telling a story in bits to make me stick with it to the end. I could be watching a film or a drama and just before the denouement it wouldn’t be unusual for me to give up and go to bed and lose no sleep whatsoever over not knowing who dunnit.

What I do enjoy watching are documentaries and similar programming that is educational and informative which, to me, is what television should be all about. If I am going to sit there in front of the box watching some programme for an hour or two, I would like to feel better for it at the end and that it has been time well spent – which is also why I prefer reading non-fiction to fiction.

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Ian McMillan’s first episode in the series wasn’t unique in that respect, but it was an increasingly rare example of good, gentle, informative programming and, again, with no sex, violence or industrial language – of which there is no need whatsoever for a programme to be entertaining.

Like the canal trip and the bus ride, by the end of The Yorkshire Dales and the Lakes it felt and as if I had been there, 
and also that I now knew more about quite a few things than I did before I sat down to watch.

I also think Ian should have taken more credit than he did – his name only appeared at the end and we never yet saw him in person. I’m sure he was somewhere around during the filming even if his commentary was recorded later in a studio. They could have at least done a head-and-shoulders shot if he was wearing his well-loved slippers.

Neil McNicholas is a parish priest in Yarm.

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