Peter Rhodes on canal tales, flattering the Brits and a soft spot for a little town
Owing to what we used to call the magic of the microchip, some versions of this column a few days ago omitted the name of the Staffordshire town whose accent Timothy Spall adopted when playing Barry in Auf Wiedersehen, Pet. It was Hednesford.
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In 2003 I was dispatched “up the cut” to write a series of features which later became a book, A Black Country Voyage. It was not all plain sailing. On our first night we were harassed by some teenage scumbags at Walsall and forced to sail off into the sunset. The next likely mooring, a pub, was taped off as a police crime scene and by the time we reached the next moorings at Hednesford it was pitch-black. We were cold, knackered and miserable and someone had forgotten the bacon.
