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| Chris and Pete battle an Avon barbel |
Chris has kindly given us his take on the
series “A Passion for Angling” and the response from various folk. [Please excuse the poor quality of the images, lifted from the book of the series].
T W E N T Y Y E A R S O N
In 1993, when ‘A Passion for Angling’ was first broadcast,
I never imagined that, twenty years later, I would be stopped in a London
street by a group of teenagers who wanted to enthuse about the series. They’d
obviously not been around for the original showing, but they’d watched the
repeats on Discovery and then again, ‘loads of times,’ on video or DVD. ‘That
moment,’ said one of them, ‘when you kinda morphed into the scarecrow at
Redmire. And those amazing carp. And all those unbelievable waters.
Brilliant!’
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| this idea did fool the Redmire carp |
It was a very merry meeting, yet not, I suppose,
all that surprising. Over the years, I’ve found that whenever they get a chance
to see the programme, this kind of reaction from today’s generation is not
uncommon, though it doesn’t usually result in such enthusiastic buttonholing on
a city street.
While there have, of course, also been a
few adverse comments made about the project, some of which I agree with, the
majority of viewers, including TV critics, have been fulsome in their praise;
and it’s this wonderfully positive response, not just from anglers, young and
old, but from people with no interest in fishing, that has, for me, made the
whole experience of ‘Passion’ worthwhile. There were times during the actual
filming when I felt that we – Hugh, Bob and I – must have been completely daft to
have undertaken such an absurd task, especially when the weather turned against
us and all the fish disappeared on the first day of a week’s shoot.
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| one of the four 24lb carp we caught at Redmire |
But then, if we were lucky – and we were
quite often very lucky – Izaak came to our
aid; the wind dropped, the sun smiled and a whopping fish picked up a bait. And
then I’d fire up the Kelly kettle and, once again, (poor fools!) we were sure
the final scene would be wrapped by teatime. It was, therefore, quite a joyous
moment when, after four years, the last cast was made to Hugh’s satisfaction,
the last fish was landed and we could thankfully go home. We were quite pleased
with the finished, edited product, but of course we could not possibly foretell
how it would be received by a wider audience.
The first programme, ‘Childhood Dreams’,
was broadcast almost exactly two decades ago as I write this, and it garnered
just under a million viewers, which seemed a huge number to me, but that figure
rose fourfold by the final episode, putting the programme into the BBC’s top
ten.
Suddenly, all the difficulties, all the
highs and lows that resulted from us trying to convey the magic of angling on
camera seemed worth the graft. It wasn’t, though, just the high viewing figures
that delighted us, it was also the countless appreciative letters that we began
to receive then and which, two decades later, are still, amazingly, being sent.
And then there are the occasions when someone on the riverbank, or even in the
street, recognises one of us as a Passion participant and just has to share
their enthusiasm for the series with us.
‘Which was your own favourite part of the
programme?’ asked one of the youngsters I chatted to in London last May.
There were plenty of bright moments to
consider, but probably the most memorable was when a twenty pound carp snatched
my surface bait during our very first week of filming, at Redmire Pool, in June
1979.
‘And the worst?’
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| big barbel took over from carp as Chris's passion |
I’m not sure whether I suffered more having to wait
endlessly for the River Spey to rise just an inch so that a salmon might show
(the fish never appeared), or when I lost a monster barbel on the
Hampshire Avon (luckily, not on camera!]
There were five teenagers in the group and
I asked them if they had any reservations about the series. Because they were
all mad tench fishers they were sorry their favourite species only featured in
one programme, but apart from that they loved everything about it.
Personally, I’ve always felt that the
overall look of the series is rather too much the image of the perfect rural
idyll. We should, perhaps, have included a few more days of rain and riotous
weather, and encountered some of the more mundane problems, like insensitive
dog walkers and canoeists, that would have made it closer to the average angler’s
experience. This could have been done humorously, avoiding any note of sourness
on our behalf, but though we did sometimes discuss such things when we were in
the planning stage it seemed unnecessary then to include them. It has, though,
delighted us that most people seemed to have appreciated A Passion of Angling
just the way it is.
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| right time, right place - a perfect sunset on the Kennet |
