Great Canal Journeys TV show really a 'love story'

The son of actors Timothy West and Prunella Scales, who have both died within the last two years, said their TV show Great Canal Journeys was really "a love story".

Samuel West returned to the marina in Braunston, Northamptonshire, where they moored their boat, to unveil a plaque to their memory. He also opened this year's Historic Boat Rally.

The All Creatures Great and Small actor said the support his family received when the show covered his mother's dementia was "enormously moving".

Unveiling a plaque at the Grand Union Canal, he said: "Sooner or later, all canal roads lead here, and all canal journeys end here."

Surrounded at the rally by about 90 of the last remaining working boats on England's canals, Samuel West recalled childhood holidays on the "cut".

Aged 10, he was introduced to the idea of spending several days on a narrowboat meandering through the countryside at a top speed of 4mph.

He realised that many children might have described that experience as rather slow and boring.

"They only say that for the first day", he said.

"Everybody's a bit itchy on the first day, but, as my father pointed out, if anything goes wrong, you can always walk wherever you were going quicker!"

When West and Scales presented their first Great Canal Journeys episode in 2014, it is unlikely anyone involved in the production knew what a phenomenon it would become.

Series one began with them celebrating their golden wedding anniversary on the Kennet and Avon Canal.

As Scales' dementia took hold over 10 series, the couple talked openly about the condition and how they were coping with it while the cameras followed their boat.

Samuel said: "My father thought it was a show about industrial architecture, [but] those of us who'd seen it knew it was a love story.

"It was important to talk honestly about her dementia - lots of good things came out of it.

"It was enormously moving when people would stop and say 'your programmes have made a difference to us', and my Dad loved that feeling."

He remembered visiting beam engines at Erith, where the 183m (200-yard) walk from the entrance to the working engine "took us about two hours to get through all the well-wishers who wanted to tell us how much they enjoyed the canal programme".

Unveiling a plaque, he said: "My parents' canal journeys ended here in 2019, but they moored here for 20 years before that."

West said the chugging of the narrowboat engines, the bright colours of the decorated canalia atop the boats and the smell of hot diesel fuel reminded him of a phrase his mother used to utter as dementia took control of her mind.

"My mother used to say 'I don't always know where I'm going, but I always enjoy getting there'.

"I don't know any better motto for life than that."

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