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The Railway: First Great Western on Channel 5

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Sidious

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Is the entire series on FGW? The reason I ask is that East Coast have in the last couple of months had posters up on trains advising people that their staff are being filmed for a TV documentary series too?
 
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Muzer

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I only watch online. With adblockers, precisely because of the amount of advertising. No TV and no live broadcasts. That saves me £145.50 a year.
People who use ad blockers don't get enough criticism. Adverts are how these things are funded, you do realise? Using an ad blocker with free content is almost as bad as piracy in my own opinion.

I only ever block ads where they make a webpage unusable - usually because of poor placing of them obscuring content. I also block all plugins including Adobe Flash by default for security and performance reasons (I have to click a little icon to enable them).

The thing I hate the most is websites that assume I'm using an ad blocker when I'm not, because my connection is slow or because their ad servers are down - I'm looking at you, Blip TV. It is in these cases that I am most likely to download the content directly, bypassing adverts, out of spite.
 
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Flamingo

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I know one of the guards the film crews were following, and she has had nobody telling her what to do or how to behave, and the film crew have been following her on her normal shifts.

Of course, some things are down to editing, and I haven't seen it yet, but I'm not aware of any stage-management, word of it would have got around very quickly.
 

Captain Chaos

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I know the RPI in the trailer myself and he wouldn't do stage managing either. A good, down to earth and sensible man.
 
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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

Well said! Couldn't have said it better myself.
 

jon0844

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I know one of the guards the film crews were following, and she has had nobody telling her what to do or how to behave, and the film crew have been following her on her normal shifts.

You mean you're not in it? I wanted to see you flapping your wings. :(
 

ChiefPlanner

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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.

Think you will find that long distance commuting on FGW and ECML etc started way before 1996 - and not just for rich commuters -around 30 LT tube drivers used to come in from Doncaster ....
 

anthony263

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Is the entire series on FGW? The reason I ask is that East Coast have in the last couple of months had posters up on trains advising people that their staff are being filmed for a TV documentary series too?

Already mentioned on a thread a while back that Sky were filiming a documentary on east coast.

All we need now is for ITV to joing the club seing as the BBC, Sky and Channel 5 are all doing railway documentaries
 

bnm

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People who use ad blockers don't get enough criticism. Adverts are how these things are funded, you do realise? Using an ad blocker with free content is almost as bad as piracy in my own opinion.

The criticism has a little justification, but only on an individuals moral interpretation. If the tools at my disposal allow me to do something within the law, then why shouldn't I use them?

Avoidance versus evasion. It has a parallel with rail fares. Is exploiting ticketing loopholes, the NRCoC, or Routeing Guide, to save money 'as bad as piracy'?

You may counter with the argument that if everybody watched commercial television online on catch-up with adblockers then the programmes would never be made, as there would be no income. Equally, if every passenger used all the tools at their disposal to save money on their rail fares then the whole rail fares house of card may come tumbling down.

Both are a moral argument and I'm happy with my own morals. Others may disagree, but what I'm doing is within the law so that's all that concerns me.

Should I be concerned about the greater good? Maybe. Maybe not. However, I'm not going to lose sleep over my choices when those choices are within the law. My moral compass is governed by what is within the law.

And where there isn't a law, I'll make my own decision, which means RailUK is white listed on my browsers and I'm happy to be advertised at here.
 

47245

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They've been filming at Dawlish today for the program whilst the air show was on.
 

RPI

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I've seen a few colleagues being filmed and there is certainly no brainwashing going on and no one has been told what to say or what not to say, should be a good show!
 

island

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If this series on FGW proves to be as popular as we think it will be how long before one of the other toc's aka Virgin decide they want to the same?

I think there could be too many arguments about editorial control if Beardy is involved...
 

trainophile

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Woohoo I've just discovered there is a channel 5+1 on Freeview, channel no. 44. I'll be travelling (on a train of course!) until nearly 9.00, and didn't want my husband to miss any of the prog coming out to collect me as he loves all the railway progs. Now he can see the first half, pick me up and see the second half on 5+1 :D.

I was even considering buying another ticket and wasting the one I've got just so he/we wouldn't miss this!

(I know technology moves on, but video recorders were wonderful for this sort of situation.)
 

jon0844

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Buy a Freeview+ box so you can record it. They're dirt cheap, although some low end ones can be rather clunky.
 

jon0844

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Far easier now. The guide is on screen and you (likely) press the record button on the remote. You can even set it to record a whole series.

Better still, don't watch it when it starts. Watch later (even just 10 or 15 minutes after it startes) and you can skip the adverts and catch up by the end!

YouView is a pretty good system (not as cheap unless you're with BT or TalkTalk) that also hooks up to the net for other channels, including many Sky channels.
 

Muzer

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The criticism has a little justification, but only on an individuals moral interpretation. If the tools at my disposal allow me to do something within the law, then why shouldn't I use them?

Avoidance versus evasion. It has a parallel with rail fares. Is exploiting ticketing loopholes, the NRCoC, or Routeing Guide, to save money 'as bad as piracy'?

You may counter with the argument that if everybody watched commercial television online on catch-up with adblockers then the programmes would never be made, as there would be no income. Equally, if every passenger used all the tools at their disposal to save money on their rail fares then the whole rail fares house of card may come tumbling down.

Both are a moral argument and I'm happy with my own morals. Others may disagree, but what I'm doing is within the law so that's all that concerns me.

Should I be concerned about the greater good? Maybe. Maybe not. However, I'm not going to lose sleep over my choices when those choices are within the law. My moral compass is governed by what is within the law.

And where there isn't a law, I'll make my own decision, which means RailUK is white listed on my browsers and I'm happy to be advertised at here.
But ads cost nothing for you to watch except a small (insignificant) amount of time, and unlike avoiding tax or train fares, there's no way at all for the "loophole" to be plugged in a significant/permanent way.
 

bnm

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But ads cost nothing for you to watch except a small (insignificant) amount of time, and unlike avoiding tax or train fares, there's no way at all for the "loophole" to be plugged in a significant/permanent way.

12 minutes of every hour (one fifth) is not an insignificant amount of time. And there is a cost. The point of advertising is to get you to buy things. Watching them, I may be tempted to purchase something that I don't really need.

I still fail to see how adblocking is akin to piracy. Is using Sky+, Freeview+, TiVo and the like and forwarding through the commercials also piracy? Was fast-forwarding on a VCR recorded programme back in the day also piracy?

You watch the commercials if you want. I'll choose when and when not to accept advertising through my PC.
 

jon0844

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I believe that on the latest software on Sky and Virgin TiVo boxes, it will record when you fast forward through adverts. It means the advertiser won't have to pay the broadcaster for those showings.

So, even doing that (and given I rarely watch anything live, purely so I can ffwd through ad breaks) will mean someone losing money.

Sky (and possibly Virgin?) do have the ability to force you to watch ads by not allowing forwarding - but I am not aware of them ever using the feature. I think the only thing they've done at times is stop you pausing some broadcasts. I think that's even the case on some football matches screened live (although you can record them and fwd/rwd as much as you want later).
 

anti-pacer

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Watching this now and getting angry at the "blame culture" of some passengers!

By the way, what services do 180's run on?
 
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