In praise of Prunella Scales

As I’ve got on in years I’ve been fairly successful in eliminating vices – most of the debauchery of my teens and twenties is a distant, hazy memory. But as I reached my fifties I found I had fallen into the grip of a compulsion that was as powerful and unshakeable as any drug. My name is John and I am addicted to Great Canal Journeys with Prunella Scales and Timothy West. 

During my condition’s worst ravages I found myself staying up half the night binge-watching this endearing elderly couple navigating their way around the historic waterways of Britain at 2mph. The pottering about, the occasional prang while entering and exiting locks, the odd glass of wine in the afternoon ­­– it was the most addictive TV I’d seen since The Wire. I found myself sweating in anticipation of getting home to do Shropshire or the Kennet and Avon. Within a few weeks of discovering the programme I had seen every episode ever made (and it ran to 12 series) – some several times over.

But soon just watching it was no longer enough. I felt the need to see Prunella and Tim do their thing live, as if I were some pop group-obsessed teenager. So it was that, in the spring of 2019, my wife and I drove the not inconsiderable distance to Braunston basin on the Grand Union in Northamptonshire, where Pru and Tim were the headliners at a weekend of readings and talks related to barges and canals. It was a sell-out (and one of the only events I’ve been to in recent years where we actually brought down the average age of the audience quite substantially).

Pru and Tim were in scintillating form, bringing all the charm and erudition devotees of their programme would have hoped to their live set. I don’t think I had ever enjoyed a talk of this kind at any festival as much ­­–  in all the years I traipsed to Hay, say. 

When they took questions at the end, I felt an irresistible urge to ask one, not because I was seeking any particular insight but to give me a chance to interact with my heroes. I concocted something about their tips as a couple on avoiding marital squabbles while touring by boat. They both laughed at the implication that they perhaps hadn’t entirely mastered avoiding these, and were delightful in answering. Afterwards we went up to say hello. Pru fussed over our dogs. It was all very nice. 

Throughout all this I became deeply fond of them both, but particularly of Pru. And that was because her turn as Sybil Fawlty had been a constant for most of my life, from the moment my parents first introduced me to Fawlty Towers in about 1976, to the time 30 years later when my wife and I showed it to our own children many, many times. As a child I had found Manuel most amusing; as a young adult it was Basil, to whom I have often been compared; but as I got older it was increasingly Sybil I was drawn to. She kills me. 

My wife and I went on to take a couple of barge holidays ourselves, on the Llangollen Canal and then the Monmouthshire and Brecon, and found they were just as enjoyable as they’d been depicted – and that avoiding bickering on board was not easy and opening wine in the afternoon was tempting (which didn’t help avoiding those lock prangs).

But it was in London that we found ourselves running into Pru and Tim again – when we ended up seated next to them at a concert in Cadogan Hall in Chelsea a year or so after that festival talk. By this point I was fully under the delusion that they were old friends. And rather than responding as if I were mad when I greeted them, which in a sense I was, they behaved as if they were indeed old friends and we had a very pleasant chat. 

In 2020, Pru’s declining health led to them making their final episode of Great Canal Journeys, and last year both Tim and the couple’s son, actor Samuel West, spoke movingly in interviews about her worsening dementia and the toll it has taken since her diagnosis in 2014. I had therefore assumed that Pru, now 90, had abandoned any public life. 

So it was to my great surprise that I was to encounter the pair again recently on a night out in the West End. They and I had gone to see The Unfriend, a dark farce starring Amanda Abbington, Frances Barber and Reece Shearsmith which was playing on Piccadilly Circus. The Criterion is something of a subterranean theatre, and their seats being front and centre of the stalls meant there were quite a number of stairs down for them to negotiate. They had no visible assistance and Tim, 88, looked absorbed in his own descent – so I offered Pru my arm. 

‘How gallant,’ she responded – and took it. And we chatted briefly as we walked down together. It was clear she had retained all her charm. 

Of course, she wouldn’t have remembered me even if she didn’t have severe memory issues by now. But it was quite the highlight of my year.