Hmm, 12 is a lot but it is something I will watch with interest. I hope the TOC shows he good and the bad, otherwise it is unbelievable. A bit like the BBC one where both good and bad sides of railway were shown.
FGW one of the most hated TOCs around, nice to see them try and defend themselves. Although my summation of the problems on the GWML are as follows.
-You moved out into the nice countryside along the nice part of the thames valley and used your new expensive cars to drive along M4 into London. Railways got underused and therefore declined.
-Surprise surprise the M4 got full and you all decided you wanted to use the trains again.
-Surprise surprise they are full and can't take the traffic.
-You moan.
People moved out into the countryside along the GWML (and many of them far beyond the Thames Valley) because of the High Speed Train, which made long-haul commuting feasible - before 1976 only the hardened few were doing it. The HST also put Reading within 20 minutes of Paddington, which you weren't going to manage on the M4 even then. And then more and more people cottoned on to the idea of whizzing up and down on a 125 and then more and more houses got built in places like Reading, Didcot and Swindon (or places like Abingdon, Witney, Wantage/Grove within striking distance of stations) and more and more people wanted to use the trains, a process which continues to this day.
FGW just happen to be the ones trying to deal with the results of that process - same would apply whoever's name was on the trains and they would get the same stick, not that I necessarily think the charming types who post abuse on FGW's facebook and twitter pages are exactly a representative sample of passengers anyway - and FGW kindly provide a forum for them to do it. Does DafT offer somewhere for people to abuse it about the state of traffic on the M4, M25, etc?
I expect that they will be at it again as soon as this series starts, burbling about it all being one-sided propaganda for FGW, failing to portray the true horror of their daily commute, etc, etc