To Travel and to Stay at Home: Exploring Canal TV

The canal is a fascinating site of contradictions, on UK television and beyond. It is both urban and rural, a man-made structure in Britain that changed our landscape forever and a wildlife haven where flora and fauna have thrived, shot for its spectacular beauty as well as its dingy confinement and dilapidation, a site of both leisure and industry, at once a symbol of modernity and also the location of traditional ways of living out of step with contemporary life. This article explores television's long-standing relationship with the UK canal network. From the first BBC canal-side outside broadcast to contemporary docuseries and TV travelogues (for example, Channel 4's Great Canal Journeys (2014–21) and Narrow Escapes (2024–) and the BBC Four's Canal Boat Diaries [2019–]), it explores the pleasures and contradictions of the canal narrative on TV. The article firstly maps the history of canal representation on British television, crossing a range of genres (travel and leisure series, children's and schools television, crime drama and, most prominently, documentaries and current affairs programming) to make the case that the introduction of television in the mid-twentieth century coincided with a period of reimagining the canal and its past, present and future. This programming also begins to establish the picturesque representation of narrowboat travel and its connection to both rural idyll and what Richard Mabey (2010) calls the ‘unofficial countryside’ of more urban settings. Secondly, I expand my focus to look at contemporary canal-based programming, extending arguments I made in my earlier writing (2011; 2016) about the spectacular aesthetics of the television landscape. I examine the deployment of drone photography in contemporary landscape television, and argue that the canal is presented on UK TV as part of the fantasy of mythic rural England.