From the Himalayas in the north, to the Nilgiris in the south – for a hundred years, little steam trains have climbed through the clouds and into the wonderful world of Indian Hill Railways.
THE DARJEELING HIMALAYAN RAILWAY
SERIES PRODUCER 3DI TV for BBC
ROYAL TELEVISON SOCIETY AWARD – BEST DOC SERIES
Indian Hill Railways could be in my top-10 list of programmes I’d lose an
eye not to have to watch. The romance of steam completely passed me
by. I’m a locophobic. All that Betjemanesque whimsy for branch lines and
unmanned halts is simply ghastly. I can just remember steam trains for
real. They were filthy and they stank. It’s a bit of Englishness I find as
embarrassing as it is dull. Neither can I abide the soft nostalgia for the Raj
— that imposed reverie of happy hot days playing at empire. So the
combination of old India and Tariq the Tank Engine is deeply unpalatable.
All it was missing was Michael Palin.
I began watching with a grim resistance, but it sort of crept up on me with
observance and careful charm. The railway was a linear motif that
chuntered its way through the stories of the people who work around it. It
became a chance to look at lives with a care and tenderness rare in
documentaries about foreigners. We tend to the anthropological, comic or
sentimental when filming abroad. This was oddly old-fashioned, like
Grierson or early Lindsay Anderson. It was a programme that began with
what all socialist documentaries used to begin with: a respect for the
dignity of lives that run uphill.
I was as much touched by the way it was made, and the assumptions
about people, and the role and purpose of the television eye, as I was by
the subject. Most television documentaries try to elicit empathy for or
inquisitiveness about individuals. They rarely attempt to use the individual
as a candle to illuminate the human condition. This was well done, not
least because it was so unexpected.
A.A.GILL