M1: The Road That Made Britain, review: it turns out that motorway history is not a wildly exciting
Motorways are a source of necessary tedium, are they not? Mile upon monotonous mile of tarmac, along which we travel at a dispiriting national average of 43 mph. Be that as it may, our oldest six-lane freeway is all set to be 60 years old some time next year. To mark the occasion, and to make sure it got there in time, M1: The Road That Made Britain (Channel 5) set off slightly more than a year in advance.
It turns out that motorway history is not a wildly exciting corner of the televisual archive. One Ernest Maples, the transport secretary who later fled to Monaco before he could be done for tax fraud, declared the whole project open in black and white. The thing was built in 18 months. They knocked up a bridge every three days. Nowadays a crew would need that just to lay out a stretch of cones. Early on, drivers had roadside picnics, while others rejoiced in the lack of a speed limit, enabling two racers to get up to 180 mph. Good luck finding an open stretch to do that now.
The M1’s history encompasses the British Midland plane crash in 1989 and the funeral cortege of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997. There didn’t seem to be much to say about either. There were plenty of bamboozling stats. Who knew that every hour the M1 is closed costs the economy around a million quid? (And which clever-clogs worked that out?) The most eye-opening fact was that the AA used to warn of obstructions up ahead by lighting rags and throwing them across the road. Road safety meets the Molotov cocktail.
It would have been nice to hear more about the compulsory purchase of all that farmland and how much it cost (one great uncle of mine did quite nicely when the road ploughed through his fields). Best of all, meanwhile, was a fun little section on the new motorway signs, a design classic that is so irreplaceably good it’s still in use. Who could have guessed that, for the conveyance of information, calming lower-case beats the screech of capital letters.
