TUBE NIGHT Featuring Arena
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TUBE NIGHT Featuring Arena: UNDERGROUND A Celebration of Life Under London TUBE NIGHT Sunday 18th March 2007 from 8pm An evening of classic British Tube Television Presented by Robert Elms featuring Arena: UNDERGROUND A Celebration of Life Under London 9 pm Directed by Zimena Percival Produced by Martin Rosenbaum Series Editor Anthony Wall In association with London’s Transport Museum for further information contact Serena Kenyon t: 020 7765 0020 Arena, Grafton House, 379 Euston Road, London NW1 3AU www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour TUBE NIGHT Sunday 18th March 2007 from 7pm featuring Arena: UNDERGROUND Following the success of last year’s BBC FOUR BUS NIGHT, BBC Four and the flagship arts series BBC Arena have commissioned a new film by the same team to celebrate the extraordinary world of the London Underground. Arena: UNDERGROUND will form the centrepiece of TUBE NIGHT, an evening of television presented by Robert Elms, featuring treats from the BBC’s drama and documentary archive plus a rarely seen 1950s gem from the vaults of Transport for London and the mother of all tube feature films from Universal Pictures. 7pm METROLAND (BBC, 1973) John Betjeman’s journey through the world‘s oldest tube line is coated with his poetry and observations of the people and places of rural and suburban Middlesex, where he spent his early years. The film visits key Metropolitan line stops like Neasden ‘home of the gnome and the average citizen’ and was called at the time by the Observer’s Miles Kingston, ‘the most satisfying TV programme, on all levels, that I’ve ever seen’ 7.50pm UNDER NIGHT STREETS (London’s Transport Museum, 1958) A classic atmospheric London Transport account of what happens at night in a 1950s Underground, produced by the legendary Edgar Anstey - a former collaborator of John Greirson’s. The man-in-the-pub narrator tells us how while you’re pressing the mattress these fluffers, scrapers and track gangs are all doing their gritty jobs with cheerful determination while a saucy foreman rides the tracks on a tube tricycle... 8.10pm DESIGN CLASSICS: LONDON UNDERGROUND MAP (BBC, 1987) Harry Beck was an out of work engineering draughtsman when he designed his now world-famous and much copied map. He was paid just five guineas for what is now Transport for London’s most valuable asset. Design Classics looks at the whole history of this brilliant invention and follows its influence on a whole world of underground map makers. 8.35pm DR WHO: THE WEB OF FEAR (BBC, 1968) Unable to film through the night for this rare episode of Dr Who, the BBC built sets of stations and tunnels which were so realistic that London Transport accused them of sneaking a film crew in without authorisation. The episode, featuring a web-spraying Yeti who terrorises the tube, was considered so frightening that the doctor of the day, Patrick Troughton, had to make a special announcement before the programme aired. www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour 9PM ARENA: UNDERGROUND (BBC, 2007) The Tube is the world’s oldest underground railway system, with its own unwritten rules of behaviour and protocol. This Arena begins 150 years ago in a Victorian London of slums and gaslight and takes the viewer on a thrilling and mysterious adventure through tube history, using unique voices (including tube staff) to contribute to this celebration of a parallel universe, underground. 10.00 UNDERGROUND ERNIE (BBC, 2006) Using the voice of Gary Lineker to embody the character of Underground Ernie - a conscientious member of Transport for London’s station staff - this animation for children gives trains their own identities and voices, including a Sherlock Holmes look-a-like with pipe and deerstalker, ferrying passengers up and down the Bakerloo line. 11.50 40 MINUTES: HEART OF THE ANGEL (BBC, 1989) At the end of the moneyed eighties, award-winning film-maker Molly Dineen recorded a day in the life of a station and a staff in much need of love and attention - and investment. The Angel has since become a state of the art flagship station with London’s longest escalator. Heart of the Angel has some resonance with Under Night Streets, shown earlier in the evening, which also contains heroic fluffers and track gangs, but this version takes place at the end of a very tired Thatcher administration whose cuts had allowed tragedies like Kings Cross to happen just 2 years earlier. www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour Mother and Child from Arena: UNDERGROUND Dr Peter Collett, Behavioural Psychologist from Arena: UNDERGROUND www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour Arena: UNDERGROUND 9pm Sunday 18th March 2007 The Tube is the world’s oldest underground railway system, with its own unwritten rules of behaviour and protocol. A staggering 3 million passengers use it every day. In Arena: UNDERGROUND we travel 150 years through a thrilling and mysterious world on an adventure through tube history, using literature, music and film inspired by the Underground. Throughout the journey, something very familiar, that we take for granted, is turned inside out using unique voices (including tube staff) to contribute to this celebration of a parallel universe, underground. Key Characters … Mother & Child A family who travel through tube time zones from 1863 to 2007 as ordinary passengers, bearing witness to London and world events through the melting pot of London’s underground community. They are played by Zoe and Darius Teverson - a real family. Dr Peter Collett – Behavioural Psychologist Peter was one of the original psychologists on Big Brother but is perhaps best known for fronting the Channel 4 series Bodytalk. Peter’s contribution to the film is a vital one, as he travels through time to comment on the unique , sometimes downright weird - and particularly British - behaviour to be found on the London Underground. Peter shares his thoughts with Arena on everything from fear to sex - below ground … Margaret Barnett Margaret sheltered on the platforms of Hampstead underground station as a child during World War 2, but she hasn’t been there for 60 years. Arena takes her back to the station and to the last time she ever felt safe, with intense emotional consequences. Margaret also highlights how the nature of safety in public transport systems has altered irreparably since the last major world conflict. Ted Batchelor Ted works at the Lost Property Office. He’s a quizzical Antipodean who has a passion for London. His daily lot involves matching the sublime and the ridiculous with their absent minded and stressed out owners. Normally speaking, an item gets auctioned after 3 months. And usually, the wierdest thing he could cite as being left on the tube is a pair of false teeth or a coffin. But Ted has kept one item on the shelf for nine years, something he is so attached to that he wishes it a Merry Christmas every year. That item is an unidentified urn of human ashes. Annie Mole Annie runs a world famous London tube website - www.goingunderground.net - with access to all the weird and wonderful characters on the tube in our capital city today … including terrorists. Her apparently flippant website became a nexus for all things underground on July 7th when the official London Underground sites couldn’t keep up with what was happening. Annie shows us the world she opened up before and after the atrocities of that day. Arena: UNDERGROUND has been made in association with London’s Transport Museum. Director: Zimena Percival Producer: Martin Rosenbaum Executive Producer: Anthony Wall www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour Margaret Barnett, a WW2 child tube shelterer from Arena: UNDERGROUND Annie Mole of www.goingunderground.net from Arena: UNDERGROUND www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour.