Sir John Betjeman was made to explore the polite suburban sprawl of Metro-land, and this 1973 BBC film is the much-loved peak of his TV career. The marketing term Metro-land justified the Metropolitan Railway’s Tesco-style land-grab along its route north of Baker Street into the countryside of Middlesex, Hertfordshire and Buckinghamshire. Annual booklets of the same name idealised its suburban estates’ swamping of rail-side villages as rustic oases linked to urban work by train. 1910 footage shot along the then-rural line from a carriage contrasts with Betjeman’s leisurely journey through 1970s suburbia, in the territory where The Good Life was filmed.
As a presenter, Betjeman is quizzical, prone to poetic reveries on his past in these places, and ready with a jolly grin at, say, the Wurlitzer organ a family man’s quiet obsession has moved from the Empire Leicester Square to his Chorley Wood front room. “A speculative builder let himself go,” he wryly observes of a 19th century mini-castle in a Middlesex street, one of many residual follies and local foibles along his superficially prosaic route. It’s Iain Sinclair-style psycho-geography, minus the heavy Beat style. At over-grown Varney Junction, where Victorian dreams of this railway linking Manchester to Paris via a Channel Tunnel petered out, Betjeman almost sighs with relief at the English countryside’s eventual triumph. “Goodbye, high hopes and over-confidence,” he concludes, with an elegiac flourish. “In fact, it’s probably goodbye England.”
The extras in this nicely designed if pricey release are identical to the 2006 edition: Metropolitan-related news footage, including a 1946 crash in Neasden and the last steam train on the line in 1971, as well as a booklet written by the programme’s producer, Edward Mirzoeff. It’s an ideal package for railway enthusiasts whose enthusiasm partly rests in the odd English corners railways have run to.