Episode 4 The One Show - Best of Britain

-Hello from Cheshire in the North West of England. I'm Joe Crowley.

-And I'm Carrie Grant.

Over the next half an hour, we're going to be bringing you

the best of Britain, as seen on The One Show.

Do not adjust your set. It really is this posh.

We've taken up residence at the stunning Tatton Park,

near Manchester, for this special edition of The One Show.

We'll be serving up a banquet of The One Show's finest films,

those rich stories that were lovingly crafted

-and thoroughly deserve to be seen again.

-Absolutely.

And how lovely to enjoy them here with this neo-classical mansion and 50 acres of landscape gardens.

So, give your butler the night off cos here's what's coming up.

Top Of The Pops, or maybe not.

# It's just like rock 'n' roll... #

It's excellent! I love it!

Carrie gets to the bottom of those mysterious 1970s records.

They would do 12 tracks in a day.

It had nothing at all to do with the television series,

but amazingly, the BBC hadn't trademarked the name.

Would you let your doctor deliberately give you a heart attack?

Dr Sarah Jarvis watches it happen.

Now, Peter, if it gets really bad, let us know

and we can always give you some powerful painkillers.

'Peter is having a heart attack.'

Plus, there was a nun, a cricketer and St John the Baptist.

No, it's not a joke.

If God said, "No cricketing for you, Phil.

"I want you to be a prophet." Then you would have wanted the desert.

And street barber Michael Douglas takes the scenic route between Settle and Carlisle.

The trolley looks a bit wobbly. I always think you'd spill a cup of tea on somebody.

-Have you done that before?

-No.

-Yes, you have! You must have done!

-No, I haven't!

Now, this mansion was once home to Wilbraham Egerton.

In 1887, he embarked on the groundbreaking scheme to link

Manchester with the sea, 40 miles away.

It was the Manchester Ship Canal and this is a picture of it being built.

It cost the equivalent of £1.6 billion in today's money

and it meant that ships from across the world could sail right into the heart of the city.

And when they arrived there, they'd be greeted by dockers,

talking in a very distinctive way.

Alistair McGowan gets his tongue round the local accents.

I've always been fascinated by accents.

Listening to them, identifying them and copying them.

But now, I want to know more.

Why does Matt Baker sound so different from Gyles Brandreth?

Oh, yes! And why does Mike Dilger sound so similar to Neil Morrissey?

'So, I'm teaming up with accent expert Patrick Honeybone

'and we've picked a great city in which to start.'

So here we are at the home of one of Britain's most identifiable,

iconic and frankly very doable accents.

Down by the Mersey and this is where Liverpool English began.

'Liverpool has been a port for centuries

'and the original dock responsible for the development of the city

'and its accent can still be found... underground.'

This dock changed Liverpool's history.

So it really was this wall, as we see it today,

which gave rise to the way you speak today.

-Yeah, definitely.

-So John Bishop owes a lot to this particular wall!

'From the 18th century, Liverpool's docks

'brought in ships from all over the world, especially from Ireland.

'These dockers know their heritage is key to the city's accent today.'

My ancestors came from Ireland, they came over from Ireland,

which, the vast majority of people in Liverpool have got some

Irish connection with them.

If you take someone like Dara O Briain,

-someone like that, it doesn't sound to me very similar to Liverpool.

-We're heavy on the "A".

Your Ma, your Da. Your Pa. I remember being in London just speaking with a guy.

He said to me, "What part of Ireland are you from?"

I said, "I'm from Liverpool." He said, "That's good enough for me!"

And I just laughed.

'The Irish accent may have dominated, but Scouse is a complicated

'linguistic recipe, with lots of other ingredients from around the world.'

You had the biggest concentration of Scottish people living outside of Scotland,

people coming from Wales, you had people coming from bits of Lancashire and everything.

So what you had in Liverpool,

especially in the 19th century, is just people from everywhere.

Scouse is incredibly distinctive.

The remarkable thing about accents in Britain is that they all have borders.

And just 16 miles down the road in St Helens, there's proof of this.

You think this is where the Liverpudlian accent,

-the Scouse accent, ends?

-I'd say so, yeah.

My sister lives in Rainhill, which is probably a mile away.

She has got a Scouse accent now.

-It's as tight as that, a mile?

-Yeah.

Patrick, talking to Mark, I'm not hearing a trace of

Scouse in your accent at all.

It's surprising how little similarity there is between

real Scouse and real Lancs, which is kind of what you're getting here.

People in St Helens don't have Scouse accents

because their traditional industries, coal and glassblowing,

generally drew on a more local workforce.

What amazes me is that the North West of England boasts yet another

instantly recognisable accent.

Manchester was a giant of the industrial revolution

and it was the people who came to work on the mills who

created their own distinctive way of speaking.

So what do you think are the specific sounds of a Manchester accent?

Two that stand out to me would be

the final vowels in words such as "Manchester", for example,

and a word such as "happy", which sounds more like "happ-eh".

So next time, I shouldn't say "The Happy Mondays", I should say

-"The Happ-eh Mondays".

-Something like that!

Or just do the whole thing as Frank Gallagher from Shameless

and then it just sort of falls into place. Know what I mean?

'Frank Gallagher sounds different from Steven Gerrard

'because the cotton mills in Manchester didn't attract

'quite the same international flavour of economic migrants as the docks in Liverpool.'

In Liverpool, you've got more people from different areas,

partly cos it was the docks and so people could get there easily.

You certainly had people coming from all over to live in Manchester.

You had people from Ireland and Scotland, but probably just less than went to Liverpool.

So that's the secret.

St Helens is close to the traditional native accent

of the North West. Manchester piled lots of other accents on top,

but mainly other British accents, while Liverpool went all

the way with a good helping of international flair.

Industry has shaped our accents.

As this fascinating corner of the world built itself, it also built its own unique sounds.

Or is that "sewnds"?

Or "shawnds"?

Better go and ar-sk.

Ask!

The many voices of Alistair McGowan.

-So what do you prefer, the Liverpudlian or the Mancunian accent?

-Erm...no!

-I'm definitely not falling for that one!

-Was that Liverpool?

No, they are equally dear to my ears.

-They're beautiful accents.

-So, Norwich it is for you!

That's right, boy!

Sitting on the fence, rather healthily.

Well, over the years, The One Show's had some amazing medical films,

but I don't think there is anything that can beat this. Dr Sarah Jarvis.

Peter Jones lives with a heart disease that means the simplest

tasks put him at risk of cardiac arrest.

He could simply drop down dead.

Peter suffers from hypertrophic cardiomyopathy.

His heart has grown excess muscle that interferes

with its pumping action.

Extraordinarily, the best way to cure him is to give him

a deliberate heart attack on the operating table.

We're actually targeting a very specific area of muscle in the centre of the heart, in the septum,

where this bulge is impinging on the path of blood

flowing from the heart to the body

and will create a small area of cell death, a heart attack, in this zone.

They're going to trigger Peter's heart attack with a lethal

shot of neat alcohol.

Alcohol is very soluble in cell membranes.

The minute it hits biological tissue, it dissolves through the cell wall

and immediately creates chemical mayhem just inside the cells.

It's a very effective toxin.

Peter will stay awake throughout,

so he can tell doctors how much pain he's feeling and where.

-How are you doing?

-Fine.

I'm thinking about what I can do after the operation.

First, the team thread imaging equipment up the main artery

that runs through Peter's groin, straight into his heart.

That's it.

The precise target area will be pinpointed with an extremely

fine guide wire.

It's 14,000th of an inch thick and we'll steer it round the bends

so that this wire lies exactly in the artery we seek.

Dr Stables will have to navigate his way through a complex

web of minute arteries.

And now, we're in the exact place.

And I now have a continuous hollow channel between my hand

on the surface of the table and the depths of the heart.

The team now has to use echo contrast dye to double check

they're in the right place before the alcohol does its damage.

But there's a problem.

Now, this is an example of how precise we have to be.

The bulk of the material is arriving too far to the right

and that means that we're actually distributing this not

precisely into the perfect target zone.

They've missed the right turning by fractions of a millimetre.

They'll have to try again.

We go back, we find another branch. We keep going till we find the right one.

-It's going to be a bit of a battle.

-This is really challenging stuff.

Peter's heart is so expanded, the muscle is so dense, that the

surgeon can't even move that incredibly delicate wire,

except when the heart is relaxing between beats,

so not only does he have a moving target,

but he can only proceed for half a second in every second.

These are anxious moments for Peter.

-You're holding up?

-Fine.

The team continues their search.

A little test there, are we taking the correct branch?

No, we're not. So I need to come back, turn left here.

It's a battle, but it's worth fighting for.

Yes! Spot on! Spot on!

Finally, after nearly an hour, they're on target.

Dr Stables is going to use just half a teaspoonful of neat alcohol.

Now, Peter, if it gets really bad, let us know

and we can always give you some powerful painkillers.

Here we go. Feel it?

Peter is having a heart attack. Drop by drop,

the alcohol is killing an area of his heart the size of a thumbnail.

That is absolutely spot on.

Fantastic.

He has a smile on his face.

And now, so do you!

'It's been very challenging, but Dr Stables is delighted with the result.'

So on a scale of one to ten,

how happy are you with what you found, where you pinpointed?

Well, in terms of localisation, it's a nine or a ten.

In terms of personal satisfaction about the degree of difficulty,

it's an 11!

If the procedure has worked, Peter should be able to live

a normal healthy life again, almost immediately.

-What an incredible story.

-Absolutely remarkable.

And since that film, he's gone from strength to strength.

-And here he is now, Peter. How are you feeling?

-Great.

-Yeah, really good.

-You look really healthy.

-Thanks.

It's made a massive difference.

I can do things that I never dreamt of doing in the last 15 years.

What sorts of activities can you now do that you couldn't do before?

-Going and doing 10-15 mile bike rides.

-Miles?

-Yeah. Crazy, isn't it?

That is absolutely incredible.

Playing golf without any pain. Everyday things that people take for granted.

Was there ever a point where you thought you may not get to this age?

Yes, there was. There was gloom and doom for months and months.

I've lived the last 15 years,

feeling as if I could drop down dead any minute.

It's an incredible film.

-You're a brave man, with a camera crew filming you!

-Yeah!

It was mad, really.

Very heroic surgery. Let's have a look at your scar.

Is that it?

-It's a party stopper, that is!

-Wow!

-I've got spots bigger than that!

-That's incredible!

-It's huge, isn't it?

It's fair to say you're a pretty big fan of Dr Stables' work?

Yeah, huge fan! Done a hell of a lot of good work. Fabulous.

We congratulate you and we wish you well

and we set you off on your way, don't let us hold you up!

Take care, Peter.

Now, I think it's time for our flame-haired disco diva to set

the record straight on a certain 1970s phenomenon.

When I was growing up, Sunday was always

the Chart Show on Radio One and Thursday was Top Of The Pops night.

Kids like me built their lives around those two events.

They told us the latest music and also the kind of records

we should be buying. And if you're a certain age,

you'll remember you could go to your local Woolworths store and buy

a whole Top Of The Pops album of hits for the same price as a single.

Between 1968 and 1984, these albums cashed in on the success of

the real Top Of The Pops by offering cover versions of the current hits.

They became chart toppers in their own right.

So who was behind these albums

and how on earth did they get away with it?

Record collector and music historian Keith Richards is fascinated by the albums.

-Where did it all start?

-It was the idea of a chap called Alan Crawford.

He came up with the name Top Of The Pops, which, of course, was the name of the popular BBC pop show

at the time, so that was a masterstroke, really,

because most people, myself included,

assumed that it was related to the TV programme.

But of course, it wasn't Top Of The Pops.

No, it had nothing at all to do with the TV series, but amazingly,

the BBC hadn't trademarked the name, or weren't able to,

so Alan Crawford was free to use the name for his series of LPs.

Two of the albums topped the album charts.

The reason they were selling so well was because of their price.

They were 75p, whereas a regular album at the time cost about £2.10.

-# No New Year's Day... #

-To keep the price that low, unknown session singers sang the songs.

The voice you hear doesn't belong to Stevie Wonder,

but Martin Jay - a chart topper you'll never have heard of.

Martin sang on over 200 Top Of The Pops cover versions.

But now, almost 30 years since the release of the last album,

I'm about to go and meet this secret pop star.

How were you expected to learn the songs?

You were expected to go out and buy the record and you'd

hunt around for the record and then literally write the lyrics down.

-Yourself?

-Yourself, yeah. If you wrote the lyrics down by hand,

by the time you got to the end of it, you pretty much knew the song.

Was the recording process quite fast?

They would do 12 tracks in a day.

I want to see if you've still got your chops today!

-Are you sure?

-I'm going to send you into the studio and see

if you can still sing some of those old Top Of The Pops tracks.

First up, we've got a little bit of T Rex, with their 1973 hit single 20th Century Boy.

# Friends say it's fine, friends say it's good

# Everybody says it's just like rock 'n' roll... #

That's excellent! I love it!

The next one I'm going to give him is by this fella, Dave Edmunds.

-Good to see you. Back in 1970, you were at number one for a whole six weeks.

-That's right.

-Christmas.

-And the song was called?

-I Hear You Knocking.

This is Dave's original version of the track.

# You went away and left me long time ago... #

Here's Martin's version.

# Now you're knocking on my door

# I hear you knocking

# But you can't come in... #

-First thoughts?

-I always thought this was a record that couldn't be covered.

-I think I'm right.

-I don't think the record companies were very happy about these.

No. The publishers wouldn't mind cos they have to get paid,

but the artists, of course, would not get paid because they're not on the record.

Shall we go and see Martin? Let him out of his misery!

Come on, let's go!

'Martin has never met any of the singers he has covered before

'and has no idea that Dave is here.'

# I hear you knocking... #

We've heard Martin. How about the two of you together?

'Is this a first? A chart topping musician singing alongside an unknown

'Top Of The Pops cover singer?'

# You went away and left me long time ago

# And now you're knocking on my door

# I hear you knocking

# But you can't come in. #

The final Top Of The Pops album hit the shops in 1984.

By then, a whole new era of compilation albums had arrived.

And these hits were the real deal.

Looking back, I'm surprised they got away with it for so long.

Did it say anywhere on the sleeves that they weren't the original

-artists?

-No. You didn't know till you got it home.

-You only did that once!

-Yes!

-Talking of original versions,

not only do we have THE Carrie Grant, but next up, we have THE Michael Douglas.

-I'm not talking about Hollywood imitations.

-Authentic!

-I'm talking about the real deal.

-Yes!

-THE Michael Douglas.

-Cool!

-The One Show street barber.

I've been told to come here to the station bright

and early to catch a very special train.

A train that's going to take me on a magical trip that I'll never forget.

And with all that, it can only mean one thing - I'm going to Hogwarts!

CRASH

OK, so it's not the Hogwarts Express, but a trip on the famous

Settle to Carlisle line is still a memorable journey.

The Settle to Carlisle line was constructed in the 1870s to

open up a new rail route into Scotland.

It runs from the market town of Settle in north Yorkshire,

right up through the Yorkshire Dales and North Pennines to Carlisle in Cumbria,

and the views from the carriage are said to be the prettiest in Britain.

-I think if anybody needs their hair doing, it's perhaps you.

-Oh, thank you(!)

So, this is the lovely Linda and she works here on this train line.

-That's right, isn't it?

-I do. I work on the trolleys.

And what is so special about this particular journey?

Obviously, the scenery plays a big part. The history, the people.

A lot of tourists, a lot of day-trippers.

I think one thing I noticed more than anything is how

-chatty it is on this train.

-Because of the rural environment

-and there's no pressures of a day-to-day life of commuting.

-Yeah.

The whole trolley thing looks a bit wobbly though. I always think you'd spill a cup of tea on someone.

-Have you done that before?

-No.

-Yes, you have!

-No, I haven't!

-You must have done!

-No, I have not!

-How's that?

-Oh, that's absolutely lovely. Thank you. I'm very happy, thank you.

-Thank goodness!

That there is Yorkshire's answer to Table Mountain.

Otherwise known as Pen-y-gent, of course.

There are nine stations between Settle and Carlisle.

The whole line was once seriously threatened with

closure by British Rail and only a nationwide campaign saved it.

This is David, and you have worked on the train lines for a long time,

-have you?

-45 years in railways, yeah.

I'm right in thinking in the '80s that the line nearly

-closed down altogether.

-It did.

BR saw it as surplus for their requirements and that's

when the big fight started.

It became quite a national thing and people travelled from all

over the country and all over the world to travel on this line.

There's something kind of brilliant about this particular train track.

It feels like you've gone back in time.

It's hardly changed from the 1950s.

It's still got the original signalling.

-Did you have to have a man in a box, pulling levers?

-That's right.

-Really?

-And they have them on this?

-Just opposite you. In that box over there.

-Oh, right. Wow, yeah!

OK, take a look.

It's all right. Very good. Thank you.

I don't know if he's happy.

This 72-mile line was certainly a feat of engineering worth saving.

It took 6,000 men more than six years to construct it.

So this is Drew and he is the manager of this wonderful train line.

It's fantastic and it does get under your skin. You really start to believe in it.

-Especially when you know the history of the line.

-Tell us some interesting historical facts.

Probably one of the things that you have to realise about the line

is the cost in human life to build it.

-Really?

-Yeah. Reports vary. It's in the hundreds.

Hundreds of...mainly Irish navvies died building this railway,

so today it's a bit of a living memorial to those people.

-What about the weather?

-Yeah, we get the minus 15s, we get the floods.

-You're still going through minus 15?

-Yeah.

-Wow!

The diesel fluid starts to coagulate a bit, but they still keep going.

-Take a look. What do you think?

-That's amazing!

The frame's lovely, but the picture's still lousy.

You don't look that bad!

This spectacular rail journey lasts less than two hours

and before I know it, we arrive into Carlisle.

The Settle to Carlisle line has managed to transform

itself into something quite magical.

A busy line that's as much a tourist attraction as it is a vital

service to its commuters. And I am going right back again.

I tell you what, we could do with a hairdressing service on the London Underground.

-I'd love that!

-Now, here we are in the drawing room at Tatton Park

and there are some spectacular works of art.

This one over here particularly catches the eye.

It's The Stoning Of St Stephen, by Van Dyck.

-Quite a powerful, scary, violent image?

-Yeah, horrible. it's going to hurt, isn't it?

I'm not sure I'd want it in my front room.

I'm not sure it would fit in my front room, quite frankly!

But two people who have a soft spot for gory religious art

are Sister Wendy Beckett and Phil Tufnell.

St John the Baptist is one of the most distinctive

characters in the New Testament. He had an unusual flair for fashion.

He wore wild looking clothes made from camel hair

and a leather belt around his waist.

He lived in a desert wilderness. He ate locusts and wild honey.

And preached about the coming of the Messiah.

He was called John the Baptist because he baptised people

with water as a sign that they had repented their sins.

He even baptised Jesus himself.

'Sister Wendy has picked out two paintings from the fabulous

'collection at the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, here in Birmingham,

'which will tell us more about this extraordinary figure.'

It's a fascinating picture

because not many artists have shown that, John starting his career.

They usually show John baptising when Jesus came to him.

But there's John at the beginning.

He has no idea what life's going to hold out for him.

-He went to live in the desert.

-Why the desert?

He wanted to prepare himself,

in solitude and austerity

for this great vocation of preparing the world to listen to Jesus.

Now, I don't believe for one minute that he

went as a kind of gangling adolescent.

That's a very young John.

I'm sure he was grown up, so it's an interesting picture.

But I don't think Neri's got the drama of it.

I mean, John looks rather miserable to me!

I would be though, going off to the desert just to eat locusts and honey.

No, you wouldn't, not if you had a vocation.

If God said, "No cricketing for you, Phil.

-"I want you to be a prophet."

-Yes.

-Then you would have wanted the desert.

-I would have done.

But you can see his parents who have agreed to it -

and they've both got halos, they're saints -

are miserable because he's their only child.

I wish he'd turn and wave to them. That thought wouldn't occur to Neri,

who was a very down-to-earth, straightforward kind of painter.

Although, Neri isn't a great artist, it tells the story so clearly.

'Sister Wendy's second choice shows us

'St John the Baptist about to meet a tragic fate.

'John had got into big trouble by condemning the marriage of

'King Herod to his former sister-in-law, Herodias.

'Herodias got her revenge after her daughter, Salome, impressed Herod so

'much with her dancing that he offered her anything she wanted in return.

'Salome famously asked for John's head on a plate.'

Now, this is how a 19th century artist sees it.

The Impressionists who were his contemporaries were very

impressed by him because nobody was doing this kind of thing.

They weren't doing religious paintings.

There's John perfectly poised in the middle.

Absolutely equidistant on either side.

He's a sacrifice and the light glowing behind him shows that.

And the worldlings who want to destroy him,

silly little Salome and a man who kills for hire.

They just don't matter.

All that matters for John is that he's giving himself at last to God.

Do you think it's a good representation of the story?

-Well, it tells us the story.

-Yes.

And it tells us the story in a very striking way.

But I can't believe in John.

When I look at it, I'm much more impressed by the style,

the elegance, the grace,

far more than I am by any spiritual feeling.

-It's almost as if he's not really there.

-That's what I feel, you see!

-Yes. His spirit's already gone.

-Yes!

-And that is just his body.

There's a body there, going through all the right motions.

But what is John feeling?

What is his heart saying, as he faces...within a few seconds

he's actually going to be looking at God?

I don't get any feel of that.

Now, I said all that because I can't get this out of my mind.

Well, thanks so much for sharing your thoughts about the paintings.

-It's been a delight.

-We enjoyed it, didn't we?

-You shared your thoughts too.

-I did. I thoroughly enjoyed myself.

And a huge thank you to Sister Wendy for all the films she's

-made for The One Show over the years.

-I love her.

I'm afraid we've come to the end of the show,

-but one hopes you've enjoyed it as much as one has.

-One certainly does.

-We're off to take some tea now. Goodbye.

-Cheerio.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd