Just Another Day: Waterloo Station (BBC2 5th April 1983)

• published: 21 Jul 2015
• views: 25

A look at the quite different Waterloo of the nationalised era (before even the semi-marketisation / quasi-privatisation of the sectorisation era, which was in fact a stroke of genius which overcame many of BR's problems and would have killed actual privatisation if only it had been given long enough to bed in), as seen in a film directed by Kevin Lygo (what a knack this series had at using directors who would be important figures in British television's third age - if the era of pure-Reithian BBC and much more openly commercial ITV is its first age and the time roughly from Pilkington to the 1990 Act is its second - because the previous edition had been directed by Adam Curtis). This appears to have been filmed around the Hallowe'en / Guy Fawkes period of 1982; someone talks about "the beginning of October", the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester were in Southampton on 2nd November (the Times' ritualistic printing of the Court Circular can come in useful, sometimes), so it would appear that the children who seem to be heading to boarding school were going back after the autumn half-term. I can't help feeling for some of them; quite apart from the multiple wrongs inherent in such schools' very existence, it would be naive to imagine that some of them, if they were indeed boarders, never suffered racism from other people within their schools and probably from local residents as well. The roadway through the concourse and between the platforms is long defunct, not least because more platforms had to be added to enable the same intensity of service to be operated from less space when the Channel Tunnel terminal - obsolete after a mere fourteen years - forced the regrettable demolition of the Windsor station, and to be honest it's hard to imagine cars and lorries casually passing through an enclosed public space with such a huge number of people today. A new upper level, principally of shops, was added in 2011/12 to make more space on the concourse, and many of the jobs seen here are doubtless long defunct, at least in that precise form. The range of food available, as pretty much everywhere in the UK but especially in London, is of course now much greater and more global. Ticket barriers disappeared, then returned, albeit in a wholly different form, and the last time I saw it, the adjacent Tower Building was looking even worse than everything else Poulson spat out (which is some kind of perverse achievement). But it's still a special place if you have the memories I have / live where I do ... Many thanks to Martyn Graham for this. The original showing is absent from Genome because of a Radio Times strike, but here's a later repeat showing (this is from the last repeat on 25th January 1992): http://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/e776e8ab642442ce9df858edac61ef4a