Chapter 5 – Current context
5.7 TV programmes about walking
Finally, television has been and continues to be a source of popular images and ways of thinking or engaging with landscape. Ways of presenting landscape and walking have altered since the early TV programmes (in the 1980s) with Eric Robson and Alfred Wainwright exploring some of Wainwright’s walks. The programmes were not fashionable or mainstream and were aimed at an elderly or conservative audience. They used a static camera which restricted the variety of shots available. Much of each programme has the two men talking in front of an impressive mountain scene and perhaps a bit of walking, before moving to the next scene where the camera has been reset. The walk became a series of set tableaux. Wainwright was old when the programmes took place, so some of the walks were restricted. Both men wore cloth caps, Barbour jackets and knickerbockers – a far cry from today’s ubiquitous fleeces and Gortex. The programmes already had an old-fashioned style of colour-bleached, grainy films of two men talking together whilst leaning over the parapet of a bridge.
TV programmes featuring walking have become more prevalent over recent years with programmes such as Wainwright’s Walks and Canal Walks, and Coast being popular. Many of the current programmes are on BBC2 or BBC4 and aimed at the older viewer. Presenters tend to be in their late 40s or 50s. Although not peak viewing, the
programmes must have a considerable audience since they are often repeated on
Channel 4. Outdoor walking became a regular feature of TV with Coast which began in 2005 (screened initially on BBC2). The first series had as a central feature Nicholas Crane walking around various parts of Britain’s coast. There were stories about archaeology, fossils, geography, industrial archaeology, points of historical interest, wild-life and ecology. It was a rich mix of landscape and points of interest, an eclectic hotchpotch of what interested the presenters. This was a great change from the rather stilted programmes on Wainwright fronted by Robson. Technology (and funding) could now provide mobile walking shots and helicopter shots along the coast, and there is a sense too of the world opening up to explore all the different associations of a place.
Coast rarely discusses art or artists in relation to the coast but delights in picturesque views of cliffs and beaches and swooping helicopter shots. It also presents the lone walker/archaeologist/geologist/biologist walking along a sandy beach or up on the cliff
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tops. This is a more experiential presentation than earlier walking programmes and relates to a multi-layered sense of being in a particular environment, aware of historical, geographical and archaeological associations. Coast has proved to be a very popular programme. It is now in its 9th series (started in 2005) and has branched out beyond the UK coast to Europe and Australia. One of the enduring motifs of Coast is of the walker striding along the cliffs to the next point of interest. This is a programme where people are on the move and, as with any walk, meet interesting people along the way or see interesting sights. It is essentially a gentle programme that only rarely deals with more disturbing stories such as the Irish Famine or the Highland Clearances.
An example of one of the specialist walking programmes was Gryff Rees Jones’
Mountain (first screened in 2007) where each programme dealt with one particular climb up a mountain. The programme on Ben Nevis was realistic showing Rees Jones ascending in a mist and being unable to see anything at the top. He was accompanied by a guide who provided stories of dangerous ascents and accidents on Ben Nevis, which made the climb sound dangerous and exciting. There was though a sense of Rees Jones feeling let down at the end of the walk, led on by the challenge of the mountain but being bereft of the tremendous view from the top. It is assumed such a view or revelation would have somehow made the walk complete and that the walker had been cheated of the full experience. The series was set up to understand why people would climb mountains, and Gryff Rees Jones’ answer was that the beauty of the landscape inspires people to climb mountains.
Nicholas Crane presented a documentary programme on – Munro Mountain Man September 2009. Munros are named after Sir Hugh Munro (1856–1919), a member of the Scottish Mountaineering club who produced the first list of Scottish hills over 3,000 feet in his Munros Tablesin 1891. Some walkers aspire to climb (‘bag’) all the 282 Munros, and a few people having completed the Munros will then start again. The programme presented the story as a competition between Munro and the Reverend Archie Robertson over who would be the first to climb all the Munros and which peaks counted as Munros. The programme used images that draw on Romantic ideas with many shots of high mountains, views of other mountains from the tops of peaks, views to lakes and the sea. The programme ends with Nicholas Crane doing a dangerous, scary climb of the Inaccessible Pinnacle on Skye. Ostensibly this part of the programme is about whether this could be counted as a Munro but it gives the
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programme makers the opportunity to present something dramatic. There is a personal story as well in that we learn Nicholas Crane was taken there with his father as a child but was not allowed to climb it then. So the climb represents for him unfinished business and a triumph over his own fears.
Wainwrights Walks have been very popular, leading to two series and the spinoff Canal Walks. The programmes are aimed at a slightly younger audience than the original Wainwright programmes. They draw heavily on the Wainwright tradition in that the presenter, Julia Bradbury, is often shown as alone. She would, of course, be
accompanied by a TV photographer and sound recordist but the image is of the lone walker although she does meet a few interesting characters along the way. In general, the programme is non-confrontational and non-threatening. This presents walking as fun, and achieving a personal challenge. The views are dramatic and the focus is on achieving the top of a fell, as Wainwright favoured. One programme showed Julia Bradbury walking up a fell in the mist with no views. However, at the end of the programme there was the familiar helicopter shot giving a dramatic view of the top of the fell in fine weather. In other words, presenting the viewer with what “should” have been the point of the walk. In this, it is like the Gryff Rhys Jones programme of Ben Nevis where the payoff for the walk is to get to the top of the mountain to see the beautiful view of the world spread out below.
TV programmes reflect some of the new diverse approaches to walking, finding interest not just in the landscape as scenery but concerned about history, geography and
archaeology. The idea of climbing up a big hill and getting the view from the top remain central to programmes specifically about walking, reinforcing the idea that these are the important things to do on a walk. The walker is still often presented as a lone figure, contemplating the landscape in the way of the Romantic hero, sometimes facing inner demons such as Nicholas Crane climbing the Munro, or at least facing a hard climb or long walk as with Rhys Jones or Bradbury. These are sublime landscapes, presented as awe-inspiring. The way Wainwright saw and thought of the landscape has become enshrined almost as a myth – the Lake District is revered, as is the image of a lone walker in an unpopulated landscape.
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5.8 Conclusion
There are a lot of similarities in the way landscapes, walking and the countryside have been conceptualised nowadays with traditions from the interwar years. There have been some shifts in thinking as well which this chapter has demonstrated.
People now walk with a number of groups, and there are some signs that the older organisations like the Ramblers and the YHA are struggling to maintain membership numbers. Cities are no longer primarily places for people to escape from into the healthy countryside. However, walking remains popular and access to what was private land has a greater acceptance through organisations like the National Trust and the National Parks (although there can still be flashpoints where access is contested). The countryside is still, as in the inter-war years, presented as an arena for health and peace.
What is striking about the visual context for walkers is the number of recurrent motifs from the picturesque and Romanticism in different media. Thus guidebooks and TV programmes will provide shots of “great views”, with underlying assumptions of what makes great views. There is the continuing interest in old abbeys, castles, standing stones, and stone circles in guidebooks or on TV. Walks are often constructed around walking to one of these sites of interest.
Romanticism lives on in the continuing popularity of the Lake District for walking. This can be seen as a line stretching from Wordsworth and Coleridge walking in the Lakes and making the place central as a romantic ideal, through Wainwright’s guidebooks, to the translation to TV of Wainwright’s Walks. Magazines, guides and television often concentrate on the dramatic views of the Lake District, as if this part of the world were the epitome of good walking and the goal for all walkers. It is this, rather than flat, featureless moorland that makes up the bulk of images. Images of the dramatic hills of Derbyshire, peaks in Scotland, the rugged coast of Cornwall, or the Romantic castles of Northumberland are far more likely to occur in the various different media than images of the Cheviots or the landscape of the North Pennines. Northern landscapes in the current context appear therefore to be largely the landscapes of the Romantic imagination.
There is above all the recurrent motif of the lone walker as Romantic hero/heroine striding off in high remote places pausing occasionally to look at wonderful views of
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nature that are a reward for undertaking the climb. There are countless (and apparently endless) representations of this in guidebooks, magazines and on television. Few of the visual elements reviewed in this chapter show large groups of people walking.
Guidebooks and magazines encourage a construction of the countryside for walking largely as a suitable place to aesthetic contemplation, unsullied by signs of modernity and the messiness of real people. Land art might have brought art and ecological concerns to visitors but it often remains an incidental pleasure to other activities.
Much of this material which helps form discourses around walking and the countryside appears to be largely unchanging and uniform. There have been slight shifts from the interwar years in relation to an acceptance of rights to access, and the widening interest in ecology. Other concerns such as health seem to have narrowed, wanting to construct the countryside as a green gym. Set against these are the long-standing traditions such as the Romantic hero-heroine but these often appear in the various media to be
superficial, albeit widely accepted ways of thinking about and constructing walking and landscapes. The next three chapters move on from the contextual chapters to present findings from the interviews. These investigate how much of this context is engaged with by regular walkers in the countryside, and what influence it might have had in their constructions of walking and landscape. The interviews allowed for individuals to express their own interpretations. Thus although walkers might be surrounded by images, cultural artefacts, ways of thinking in popular media that produce a certain discourse of how landscape is engaged with at a macro level, the interviews were able to capture distinctions and variability at an individual level.
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