Miniature Britain Brushing up on...

This may be my favourite television programme I ever made.

It's about small things - tiny, shortened, miniaturised.

-Good night.

-MUSIC PLAYS

Ha-ha, small joke to begin with!

The overwhelming impulse to take everyday things

and shrink them down to a scale we can lord it over

is as old as the human race itself.

For example, have you ever seen any prehistoric cave paintings?

Well, apart from them being really amateurish,

just how big are the bison and woolly mammoths in them?

What, about that big?

Come on, troglodytes, who are you trying to kid?

I should imagine when they first had a showing

they invited guests who would've said, "Yeah, it's really nice.

"Bit little, though, aren't they?" And then one or two others,

probably cavewomen, will have said, "Oh, I don't know, I like them.

"They're sweet." And so the tricky concept of 'cute' was born.

Welcome to the real little Britain.

JOLLY MUSIC

A particular "well done" to the fella riding the tiny bike in that package.

He is experiencing everything life has to offer, in my book.

They say about Sir Christopher Wren

that if you want to see his monument, then look around you.

But what of the Dobbins brothers,

for my money the greatest architects this nation has ever produced.

How might we observe their legacy?

You'll have to start by getting down on your hands and knees.

The Dobbins brothers. Southport in '57, Great Yarmouth in '61,

and Babbacombe in Torquay in '63.

Very important that we change with the times, keep up with the times,

that we must keep advancing every day.

We look for the news and we watch for the...

different things that are happening. If it's in the papers today,

you can bet that it will be in the village here tomorrow.

People love the sense of humour here, but it, er...

it has times has got me into trouble, yes.

A few years ago, there was a little beach here

where quite a few people used to go on in the nude.

So we made a little beach and we put a few nudes on just to be topical.

A reverend rang me up, and two ladies rang me up,

and one or two people complaining,

they never thought the model village would sink so low.

Me neither! You know, I'm no prude

but those figures were all a bit too...accurate for my liking.

There's no need for it.

Living opposite an open-air swimming baths, as I do,

I see enough miniature shrunken sex organs, thank you very much,

and we shouldn't be encouraging such decadence among the minuscule.

It's no wonder they closed down that open sewer in Southport.

Southport was doomed.

When I realised that the Southport model village was going to cease,

not only cease but be wiped off the face of the earth,

I was very sad.

Safeway's now is built on the old site of the model village,

and when the wife and I now go down to Safeway's, which we do...

Oh, I-I feel terrible.

To think that the old model village is no longer there,

and Safeway's now is on top.

I'll never get over losing Southport. Never.

Never. No.

Well, perhaps you should have thought about that, my friend,

before you began painting the pants off the tiny townsfolk.

Oh, I know what you're all saying -

"Come on, Dan, it's only a model village. What's so wicked about that?"

Well, I take it you know what they use to thatch

those adorable reduced-sized roofs with?

Human hair!

It may strike one as unromantic to lop pieces off a lovely girl's hair,

moth-proof it and stick it on the roof,

but it's all in a good cause, and it looks decorative

as well as lifelike, when it's in position.

The thatch is made of Chinese human hair

but that costs over £7 a pound, so now we use plumber's hemp.

Hemp!

So know we can add narcotics to the temptations available

in these perverted pint-size plots.

Where will the debauchery end?

Well, happily, on such a scale,

at least we may be spared any crass phallic imagery.

If you've seen model villages, this is the daddy of them all.

Four acres of it, the biggest and best in the world.

'Oh, really! What have we become? Tom Thumb, you unspeakable satyr!'

As you can see, this is Toytown as Sodom and Gomorrah!

And they're death traps, too. Look!

If all that wasn't enough, some aspects of these

what I now like to call "Mayhem Villages"

are seemingly designed to send you insane.

In 1935, a Cotswold innkeeper, Mr Morris,

decided to transform his own vegetable garden.

But this time it wouldn't be a make-believe village

but a miniature replica of the real place where he lived,

Bourton-on-the-water in Gloucestershire.

A model village of a real village must feature a model of itself.

That model village, too, must have a model, and so on.

This is the moment, with only a few days to opening,

when welders, modellers and site workers

of all sorts are frantically putting the finishing touches

to something that's been a completely new experience for all of them.

It's always rather a tense moment

when one of the major pieces arrives.

And with the appearance of Westminster Hall,

due to take its rightful place next to the Houses of Parliament,

you begin to see why.

There must be some kind of jinx on Westminster Hall.

Somebody lobbed a bomb into the real one a couple of years ago,

and now...this.

-CREAKING AND MOANING

-His bloody arm!

Get your arm out, mate.

SNAPPING AND CREAKING

-Don't drop it!

-Get it out.

It's going to mean a major patch-up job.

You know, the Elephant Man took thousands of individual match-sticks

and created a magnificent model of a cathedral.

Those blokes appear to be working on the opposite idea.

Mr Alf Tabb of Kidderminster riding the smallest ride-able bicycle

in the world, with three-inch wheels and standing only five inches high.

Mr Tabb is a cycle maker by trade, and the miniatures are his hobby.

But his physical prowess is particularly remarkable,

especially when you consider his age. 75, believe it or not.

Mind you, he's been doing it for a few years now.

I'm joined by the Reverend Sir Peter Boothbury,

a lecturer in scale tensile engineering at the University of Chicago.

So, Peter, we've had some fun,

-but is there a precedent for the miniature in theology?

-Well...

-PHONE RINGS

-One second.

Yeah, hello?

Oh, sure, no problem. OK, sure.

That was the producer.

According to Twitter, nobody cares what you've got to say.

They just want to see more Alf Tabb footage.

Model maker Bill has been building ships in his flat for over ten years.

The ship that's really taken over Bill's life and flat is the Corsair.

a 25-foot scale model of the luxury steam yacht

takes up so much room there isn't space to swing a cat-o'-nine-tails.

What do you do when you have company, Bill?

-I don't have any company.

-You don't bother?

-I don't bother with company.

Bill's not given to dewy-eyed romanticism.

He chose the Corsair not for its luxury, its opulence or its history,

but because, when it was finished, it would be the right width.

And it had dimensions...

sufficient to allow it to go through the window.

-Now, how wide is your window?

-It is 35 inches.

-Exactly?

-Yes.

-And how wide is the yacht?

-It is 31½ inches.

-31½? So you've actually got 3½ inches...

-I've got quite a few, yes.

You're absolutely sure about that?

There is the tape measure behind you.

So you found a boat with exactly the right width,

-but what about the length?

-Well, that sort of crept up on me.

How did you feel when it started to creep into the bathroom?

As I say, I was committed then. I'd built one half of it,

I couldn't leave a half a boat, so I just carried on.

I see you've had to make one or two not-so-fancy alterations to the flat.

This was my own cupboard structures,

which I hammered out to accommodate the bridge.

Have you been able to calculate how many man-hours have gone into that?

About 20,000, I should think.

If Bill remains out of work,

he reckons he can finish the Corsair in 18 months.

If he finds a job, it'll take ten years, working evenings and weekends.

A job would be ideal coming at the end of this, really,

because then I could probably borrow the firm's lorry,

if I drove a lorry or something, and it would be equally...

I could take it in two halves, join it up on the lake and sail it.

For those of you thinking, "He should get out more," he can't.

But how could that man be unemployed?

My wife's been waiting for me to level up the legs on our kitchen table for three years.

He built an oceangoing liner in two.

Then again, I live in a house, not a dry dock.

Who could put up with that? Well, not many, is the answer,

and thus a good deal of our dedicated model-makers

appear to be solely married to their craft.

They live with balsa wood brides, which can be easier.

Not so many awkward questions.

-That's very fine work, Ken.

-Yes, it is very fine work.

-It's a very fine-edge file.

-Need a good pair of eyes for that job.

Oh, you've got to have very good eyes.

If you've got no eyes, you can't do the job at all.

-Ken, everything you make is wood?

-Everything is wood.

The pinpoint detail of the tiny engines at Banbury Sheds

is repeated on a grander scale in Ken Rotherham's masterpiece,

his seven-foot long by four-foot wide model of Paddington Station,

headquarters of the old Great Western Railway.

-This facade is magnificent, Ken, isn't it?

-Yes, it is.

-You started when you were 16.

-Yes.

-You're 41 now...

-And I'm 41 now.

-..and you've been working on it ever since?

-And I've been working on it ever since.

I think of it while I'm at work,

and, er, when I get home, tea's ready,

sometimes I have not got time to even eat my tea

because I long to get on my model.

And sometimes I can't sleep cos it's a worry on my mind.

Don't you ever take a holiday from it, Ken?

Well, when I go on holiday, I take it with me, and sit on the beach.

-Well, wh...

-And I take it shopping with me.

What does the missus think with you going along with her, you know,

-with a bit of wood?

-Well, at one time she used to get annoyed.

Every time we were going out, I'd say, "Wait a minute,"

and she said, "If we've got to wait for you, we'll wait all day long.

"You'll never get away from that at all. I'll be glad when you've finished it."

Well, in another three years, anyway, you'll have finished it.

What are you going to do then?

Well, that's often crossed my mind,

and I don't know what I'm going to do with it.

As, er, my wife says, it's too big.

At the end of the show, there will be a phone number for anybody

who has been affected by the issues raised in tonight's programme.

We'd particularly like to hear from other men whose wives

won't let them bring Paddington Station on holiday with them.

Obsessive modelling is nothing to be ashamed of.

We want you to know you're not alone.

Although, actually, you probably are.

So, what is it about the allure of little locomotives in particular

that so governs the male senses?

Yes, you.

How long is this programme?

Because, if you ask me a question like that,

I can go on quite happily for the next 3½ hours.

Oh, I see. These hams are only economical with material

when it comes to hammering away at the hobby.

The layout represents part of the old Great Western line

in South Devon, as it was about 1935.

Great Western was described, probably by Brunel, rather aptly,

as a line built by gentlemen for gentlemen.

It isn't so much a question of playing trains here.

We operate an actual timetable,

taken from the Great Western's operating timetable of 1938.

Of course! Otherwise the whole thing would be pointless.

We work it, as far as we possibly can,

to the actual signalling regulations

that the Great Western were running under in 1938.

The signalling apparatus is simple enough.

These two are double line absolute block instruments,

these are the bells relating to them.

If we were going to have a trip out, we were offering a stopping train forward.

We should call the signalman's attention with one beat on the bell.

That would be answered by a single beat.

Then, we should describe the train -

in this case a stopping passenger -

three beats, with a pause and one beat.

BELL RINGS THREE TIMES

BELL RINGS

And then, he would give us the "line clear" on his instrument.

I shall have to do it.

We have an interesting problem in that the LMS have offered us

the Aberdeen sleepers, approximately two hours behind time.

Very well. Geoff?

Hello, Ted?

Aberdeen's two hours down.

And I've got a stopping freight through for you.

Can you take it as a 341?

OK, Ted.

I'll put it online to you as that.

BELLS RING

Things are a little more complicated here

because we don't work to ordinary time.

Obviously we can't spend 24 hours in here working

through a 24-hour schedule.

So, we have a clock which has been doctored to run eight

times as fast as any normal clock.

We work to this.

This gives us a schedule of 180 train movements within 24 hours,

within a compass of three hours of actual time.

Meanwhile, back at the font, newborn babies are having to christen

themselves because Casey Jones there has got a loose caboose.

Still, it can't be a carefree life knowing your entire universe

is always just one power cut away from total paralysis.

Then there are the natural hazards any major network has to face.

Always a good train this, all the way from Glasgow.

Now going up through St Pancras.

What's happening now?

Got a train stuck at St Pancras.

Have to go up there and see what's wrong.

You do get these things go wrong sometimes

and here's one gone wrong now.

I think we'd better go and have a look at it.

Think it might be a crash?

-No.

-Derailment?

No, it wouldn't be a derailment. It might be mice.

Blooming mice with their flipping insistence on the empirical -

denying the otherwise obvious

reality of the 9.25 from Glasgow Central to London, St Pancras.

Calling at the kitchen, the downstairs toilet,

the back porch and that little cupboard under the stairs.

I mean he had the hat on and everything. Mice!

I bet it was that stuck up Angelina Ballerina and her friends.

Them and all their exquisitely furnished homes.

Dennis Hillman lives in Sussex, his wife goes out to work

and he works at home, all alone.

A Louis XIV commode, oak frame, veneered with Makassar Ebony and

panels of padauk,

lined with ofara and inlaid with tulipwood,

rosewood and iron.

Marble top and ormolu mounts.

A little drawer at the back to hold the keys in case they get lost.

The chevron veneer is the most difficult to do,

as one is bending it against its will.

Of course, it didn't reckon with Dennis Hillman.

I suddenly realised, when I was holding a piece in my hand,

that the models are not miniature to me, but are in fact full-size.

His pieces fetch between £60 and £1,200.

But if you bought one, you would get something that would last.

And it's not even glued yet.

Not even Dennis Hillman would try to sit in one of his chairs.

In the world of infinitesimal fixtures and fittings,

putting your full weight on a piece is the acid test

to see if you have a genuine Dennis Hillman.

That one's a fake.

The studio seems to be full of miniature animals today,

because a few weeks ago, Megan and Gwyneth Northwood of Warwickshire

wrote to us to tell us about a very rare breed of miniature cow.

Tell me, is Nicky old enough to be milked yet?

No.

How old will she have to be before you can give your dad a hand

-to milk her?

-Erm...two.

You'll be able to give your dad a hand when he does the milking.

Will he use a machine or will he use his hands?

He'll use his hands.

You'll be able to have a go at doing that, won't you?

Have you any idea why a milking stool has only got three legs?

Shall I tell you?

Because the cow's got the "udder".

-Get it?

-Who the hell is this rube?

Anyway...

We've got a chance to compare this one with a full-size cow -

it's not a Guernsey,

but it is another Channel Island breed called a Jersey,

and we have Gwyneth's sister coming in now, this is Megan with Delilah.

# My, my, my, Delilah. #

Isn't she gorgeous?

Now, Megan, what about her? Is she being milked at the moment?

-Yes.

-How many gallons of milk a day does she give?

-About five.

-Do you get lots of cream from her?

-Yes.

Well, they're both tucking in, aren't they?

Do you get nice Jersey cream?

Yes.

What does your mum make with the cream?

Can you turn round this way? Then we can see you.

What does she make with the cream?

Milkshake.

Wonderful - Jersey cream milkshakes. That's tremendous.

Thanks for coming along.

Now, we've got time for the dressing up....

I'll get it right in a moment.

Simon Groom putting the udder into shudder there.

Every presenter's worst nightmare.

Time suddenly standing still - except it didn't.

In those drowning moments before the next segment seemed to bring

the sweet release of death, there was enough time to count out

a heavyweight boxer - watch.

One, two, three, four, five,

six, seven, eight, nine, ten!

-You're out - that's it.

-Some news about the...

dressing up which I was telling you about earlier...

Somebody wasn't paying attention at the read-through, were they?

"Simon? Simon?

"Are you getting all this?" "Yep, yep.

"Little cows, cute kids,

"the gag about the stool - it's all in here, got it."

Then come showtime, yes, the miniature beef but

what about the MASSIVE egg - and all over his face!

Attention to detail, Simon, that's the name of the game.

Just look at her.

Isn't she a thing of delicacy and beauty?

I know. De-lickassy. I've never heard it pronounced that way.

And I've heard polo ponies pronounced "poloponies".

But we can overlook that peculiar delivery

because that man is the titan of the titchy,

the Maharaja of the model kit - Mr Bob Symes,

whose TV career covered anything and everything

that came in a kit form and simultaneously

assembled himself a sizable set of simian stalwarts along the way.

Roy Dealy is using me as a subject for one of his military models.

Roy, is this pose all right?

Yes, that's fine, Bob. Hold it right there.

What I'm doing now, I've got the pose

and I'm going to apply your beard.

And this we put on with a liquid plastic.

It does take a little while to harden off.

Once it's hard, it is, in effect,

welded onto the base plastic and becomes part of it.

The hobby now has developed to such an extent

that it is a true art from.

For instance, this model of the Western Front in 1916.

You can actually show people what it was like to be there.

Let's turn to the lesser horrors of the Second World War's battlefields.

Well, there's your finished self, Bob.

Yes, I wish I was as slim as that nowadays.

Well, let's put you back into the mid-war years in the Western Desert.

Go and have a cup of tea with some of the boys.

I suppose I look slightly out of place amongst all these soldiers,

but I was there all right.

I had a car just like this and I wish I still had it.

Unfortunately, I wrote mine off at Silverstone some time ago.

These radio-controlled model racing cars hit speeds of more

than 60 miles per hour,

which if you scaled it up,

would be well in excess of 400 miles per hour.

The accidents look horrific but, of course, they're never fatal.

Well, that was pretty exciting.

When we talked about this place, it seemed to have real,

live people in it.

Yes, over the course of building we have, in fact,

-built up a real living community.

-Have you got a mill?

Yes, the mill's no longer working, I'm afraid, now.

Old Mr Hobbs passed away a few days ago.

I see you have some sheep in the pen in your goods yard.

They've been recently sold, have they?

Yes, Quibble and Cuss, the auctioneers,

sold them to the local abattoir.

Now, along the railway line, next to the station, you've got Hobbs.

It's now been taken over by the son of Hobbs, the miller,

-as a transport business.

-It's got a good position for that.

And right behind Hobbs is the church

and I see the grave-digger is digging away there.

-You've had a recent bereavement.

-Yes, Mr Hobbs, the Miller.

Oh, that's sad, but I presume his son is carrying on the business.

Yes, he is indeed.

In the days when Dr Beeching chopped off branch lines

with a blunt axe, I tried to resurrect one of them,

the Waverley line, the line that runs between Carlisle and Edinburgh.

Unfortunately, nothing came of it.

Well, Bob, you said bushes so now let's put in some trees.

The prescription for trees,

some hairy string from your friendly newsagent.

-Just ordinary string.

-Just ordinary, hairy string.

-And there is your tree.

-I think that is quite remarkable.

OK, boys, lower it in.

WINCH SQUEAKS

Well, there it is.

The great Bob Symes, who, at his peak, was selling

20,000 boxes of his beard in kit form every week.

Indeed, so popular an accessory did it prove that in 1971,

his facial hair-construction sets surpassed the sales of similar

replica beards of James Robinson Justice

and post-Beatle Paul McCartney combined.

It wasn't until Christmas four years later, that he was toppled from

his perch as the nation's favourite dealer in the undersized,

when a pair of shrunken sporting sensations began to sprawl

across Britain's carpeting, Scalextric and Subbuteo.

Go!

-Yours is off.

-Where's yours?

-Mine's off!

You've got it the wrong way round.

As a product showcase, this couldn't be going better, could it?

Is yours going, Val?

-Which track am I on?

-I will play four then.

-Down the bottom there.

-Who's winning, by the way?

-I am.

At least you could blame the props there.

Everything you are about to see can only be classified as human error.

-There's the Welsh team, playing with flippers, by the looks of it.

-Yes!

Bella, come on!

It's a game of delicate skill,

speed and mental ability.

Who do you want to avoid in the draw?

Only McGiffen.

By the second day of the competition, the two fiercest

rivals in Subbuteo had been drawn to face each other.

Carl Young is the maverick of the British game, highly

critical of Subbuteo's rulers and by his own admission, highly strung.

By contrast, the McGiffens are Subbuteo's first family,

part of the game's establishment.

John is among the top six in the world

and the man who has helped put him there is his father, Bob, former

player, now international referee and elder statesman of Subbuteo.

By the morning of the game though,

Bob McGiffen stood accused of trying to sort out his son's opponent,

man-to-man, and Carl Young was furious.

In front of a coachload of people,

as I got on the coach with him,

he started spitting at me, pushing me down the aisle

so as I sat down, he put two fingers...

tried to poke my eyes out and as he got off the coach,

he elbowed me in the back of the head.

Witnesses confirmed Carl Young's story

but Mr McGiffen was having none of it.

I don't know how he can say that.

After the evening meal last night, we had a bit of...

good-humoured banter that he didn't want to participate in.

OK, I will declare a disinterest here.

The only thing that leaves me colder than Subbuteo are blokes who

play Subbuteo. Haven't they noticed there is no game there?

All that ridiculous apparatus and you could just as easily

waste the same time with a pea and two matchboxes.

But such a football junkie am I, that even with this wee nonsense,

I just have to know how this big weeing contest turns out.

We join it at 2-2.

-He's in the shooting area.

-Yes.

-With a gap.

-And takes full advantage of it.

-Absolutely good goal.

No shouting now. It's all concentration.

-No time now for McGiffen. It's all over.

-That's it.

Carl, jubilant with victory there.

Heard Carl Young shouting 'justice' there.

Well, these two had a score to settle and it has been settled in favour

of the Welsh boy, Carl Young. John McGiffen doesn't want to know.

Well, there has been bad blood between these two.

Let's hope now it's settled once and for all.

HE SIGHS

People of Earth, you can

pray to whatever God you like but is there any better example

that as long as blokes run this planet, there will never be peace?

So, how now to retrieve what should've been the nicest show in this series?

Well, I had to look back into my distant past and under regression,

try to find why it was that the prospect of parading

miniature creations tonight so warmed my heart. And I found it.

A little series that acted upon me as a child,

like wrapping my newborn mind in a velvet blanket -

Tales From The Riverbank -

tiny world, tiny props, tiny cast.

It's been a huge pleasure. Good night.

Guinea pig appears on the scene.

Well, fellas, you've wandered a little far from home, haven't you?

The guinea pig suggests that perhaps he could give them

a ride back home in his car. Hammy accepts immediately.

Hammy has a terrible job trying to get into the car. He's so excited.

What a fuss.

Please can we start?

Oh, dear me. I wish they'd go.

Now, that's what I call a good run.

# Driving that train

# High on cocaine

# Casey Jones is ready

# Watch your speed

# Trouble ahead

# Trouble behind

# And you know that notion

# Just crossed my mind. #