In a world where manned spaceflight has been accomplished, and where Britain and France are on the cusp of delivering supersonic commercial air travel, Tomorrow’s World comes down to earth, to consider the efficiency of day-to-day public transport in Britain.
Producer Paul Ferris travels from his Putney home in London to the BBC Dickenson Road Studios in Manchester – on foot, bus, underground and overground train and plane – to see if England has a public transport system fit for the space age. How fast can he make the trip?
Clip taken from Tomorrow’s World, originally broadcast on BBC One, 6 January, 2013.
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What a pillock 😂😂😂😂 that walk to the station could have been done down the backroads and even across the rail bridge in 10 minutes. And why would you go underground into the fetid miasma when you could just have awaited the next District train at Earls Court. Complaining about space on a bus before paying to wedge into a flying tin-can? Somebody needs to give him a good slap, a cup of tea and a chance to get over himself
Did i hear the word erotic timetable?
Silly me I’m referring to his pathetic attitude towards the people he’s dreaming to ingage with 😂
not one silly Plasticine protester I sight – I miss the old days
Why’s nobody shouting “nothing in your pockets. No liquids” as this chap approaches the terminal? 🤔
never realised Tomorrow’s World was that old! I remember it from the 1980s before TOTP.
'Caught in the urban gluepot'…brilliant!
Presumably, Raymond Baxter lived in that old church in Manchester.
Fantastic
Manchester Pier B is still in use today. Every time I travel on a Low-cost carrier my memories of my first day at the Airport in the sixties smell of new paint and Lino and Fuel. So very Modern.
A deliberately, I suspect, tedious route to Manchester could have got there from Euston in at least an hour less.
"Putney Bridge, which is famous for its traffic jams" – well nothing at all changed there then. Really puts the incessant whining and whinging on Nextdoor and similar places into perspective – it was literally the same situation 60 years ago.
This is a Monty python sketch , right?
If he's struggling to find Putney Bridge station from where he got off the bus, perhaps he shouldn't be allowed out without his carer
Doesn't he whine a lot.
From the Wikipedia article on WCML:
A new set of high-speed long-distance services was introduced in 1966, launching British Rail's highly successful "Inter-City" brand[25] (the hyphen was later dropped) and offering journey times as London to Birmingham in 1 hour 35 minutes, and London to Manchester or Liverpool in 2 hours 40 minutes (and even 2 hours 30 minutes for the twice-daily Manchester Pullman).
I've just seen the end of this film… and I'm at Dickenson road in Manchester ! 😲
Whete are all the black Britons?
It's not retro transport. It's vintage. Get it together BBC
He could have taken HS2 if he had a spare £100b and didn't mind walking the last 50 miles.
Ah yes the West London air terminal , I remember travelling to that in 1970 to go to Heathrow to catch a plane to Rome. After 1977 ( I think) when the Piccadilly line was extended to Heathrow it then became a Sainsbury supermarket, until I believe it was redeveloped.
"… it slowly dawned upon me that travelling by public transport meant that I would have to use different kinds of transport and travel with the public. The unalloyed horror of this situation was enough to make all my hair fall out…."
I do wish YouTube wouldn't recommend these videos to me, they always leave me melancholic and yearning for a nation that no longer exists.
It would probably helped if he'd done some research beforehand, but I guess there wasn't the internet to look things up on! He does seem to taken a strange route within London….
Moany git. He lived near the stations and routed and complained he didn’t understand them.
Love that scene of those codgers, with their papers, all flying. Wouldn't half be whiffy.
Never mind,, they can all toodle off to " the cove" for some fun 😮
When London was pleasant to inhabit : full of British people , not overcrowded, affordable and not “diverse” …..
1 year earlier he could of easily driven on the unrestricted roads quicker, pre 70mph limit.
I think that if someone fell into a coma in an international airport in 1966 and then woke up today, they wouldn't see a lot of difference. The design of major airport buildings – their architecture, their furnishings and the typefaces and graphics of displays had been firmly established by 1966. They would, of course, be intrigued by the information technology and irritated by the time it now takes to get from the inside of the terminal building to the inside of the plane. Beyond the way you pay and the way information about your journey is communicated to you, the world of 1966 looks remarkably like today. Yet imagine how different 1966 was from 1907 – or for that matter, how different 1907 was from 1848!
What a ridiculous and pointless palaver! London Euston to Manchester Piccadilly, 3 hours in 1966. And that’s city centre to city centre without all the poncing about getting to and from airports in the outskirts.
I love all the newspapers and books. We've always been "antisocial" on public transport!
I think the main takeaway from this video is the central London bus terminal for the airport was not a good idea even if you lived only a couple of miles away. The direct trains to Heathrow, instead of relying on the urban infrastructure to take you to the centre, seem much more sensible.
I'd always read that the central air terminal was discontinued mainly due to traffic jams delaying the takeoff of certain flights, as the passengers were already "checked in". And I'm sure that was the straw which broke the camel's back. But it seems like it was all just a bit of a faff even when it worked well, for not much gain — seemingly less time waiting in the central terminal than getting to it!
HS2 it ain't…
This is great. Interesting that nothing has changed
"Airlines have girls" is not a comment you'd hear much these days……
I love those 1960s Street lights. They were in Belfast too.
At least in 2066 there might be a high speed rail line between Euston and Piccadilly then Metro Link to Media City if it's still open.
1966: British Gent Struggles with Basic Public Transport and Wonders Why Planes Don't Have Ticket Inspectors
I was two years old in '66, absolutely fascinating to see this short clip. Very nostalgic indeed. 😀
Shoes always looked uncomfortable then.
Plane passengers “looked cosmopolitan ..from Chicago..”. LOL. Today the word cosmopolitan has a different meaning
Leaving at 930 from home , should of already been at work and left from there. That’s a late start from work eh
Jeez that’s a long way round. Just take a bus from Putney to Hammersmith Broadway and save all that faffing around at Earls Court and Gloucester Rd…..
Now substitute the narrator's voice with Michael Palin's (or perhaps Eric Idle's) and you have the quintessential Monty Python sketch…
That wasn't the fastest way in 1966. Back then you could get from Euston to Manchester Piccadilly by train in 2.5 hours, so door to door would have taken less than 4 hours.
What a great advert for owning a car.
Great video, England as it was before we got all these e premises living here
Well, that was … cultural.
Watched this and just realised the BBC studios he is going to is right outside of my student accomodation haha, there is a plaque commemorating it on the houses opposite us.
Air Bus so funny
He's such a stereotype.