Steam job

IT’S the stuff of nightmares for BBC Radio 2 executives. Not one, not two, not even three, but four Russell Brands. They prove one of the few bright notes in Beehive, a new all-female comedy sketch show.

I say comedy, but there’s precious little to laugh at as the quartet of Sarah Kendall, Alice Lowe, Barunka O’Shaughnessy and Clare Thomson dress up (as Brand, among others), say rude words and play at women behaving badly. What a shame they didn’t succeed in being women behaving funnily.

You expect misses among the hits in any sketch show, but Beehive manages to be almost totally dud. They dress as men, impersonate Steven Spielberg, one puts on a duck costume, they all put on silly wigs. All to no avail.

“It’s going to be physical, hot and relentless,”

warns the voiceover on Dangerous Jobs For Boys. What on earth could this week’s task be? Making a porn film, perhaps. Or a date with Russell Brand?

The truth is more mundane – driving a steam train. There was a time when being at the controls of a train was the dream of every young boy. Nowadays, they’re more likely to have their hands on the controls of computer video games than standing on the footplate of a steam train, shovelling coal into the firebox.

Former EastEnder and The Bill actor Todd Carthy and 11-year-old son James are the pair bonding over steam trains.

Their objective is to drive a train from Grosmont to Pickering across the North York Moors. If they succeed, James will become the youngest driver ever to complete the route.

Although he likes video games and computers, James has been passionate about trains since reading Thomas The Tank Engine. Father and son have just one week to learn how to be railwaymen.

The narrator does his best to remind us that the railways were a risky business in the old days as the third most dangerous profession after mining and the merchant navy. In the 1870s, an average of 682 workers were killed every year, most on the line, although some met a gruesome end trapped between carriages.

Todd and James have little time to worry about the dangers as they’re cleaning the engine, the first job of any footplate man. In Victorian times, it would take three apprentices up to four hours every morning to clean a single engine.

Clyde, their railwayman teacher, isn’t impressed to find the pair messing about, throwing greasy rags at each other, after just 20 minutes on the job.

Coal cracking – that’s breaking lumps of coal, soon shuts them up.

Todd is sent into the firebox, not as a punishment, but to inspect the space for cracks and sleeping bodies. It’s not easy for him to get into this dark, dusty space just 3ft wide and 5ft high. “Getting out is harder than getting in,” he says, forced to become a contortionist to escape the black hole.

Training at the Bluebell Railway in East Sussex completed, the pair head for Yorkshire to be driver and fireman on a steam train along the 18-mile Grosmont to Pickering route, built by George Stephenson and opened in 1836.

Their locomotive is the Repton, a 1930s train that can hit speeds of 95mph. But beware, our friendly narrator warns, if you don’t get the steam pressure right your boiler will explode.

Lovers of steam will be in their element at the sight of all the billowing smoke and gleaming metal. The rest can share in the delight of an 11-year-old playing with the biggest train set in the world.