James Walton

A documentary about the M25 that will make your heart soar

Plus: John Logan’s Penny Dreadful: City of Angels is embarrassingly solemn and self-important

The dead spaces under the M25 turn out not to be dead at all: BBC Four's The Hidden Wilds of the Motorway. Image: Rare TV 
issue 04 July 2020

When a 90-minute documentary is introduced with the words ‘This is the M25’, you’d be within your rights not to feel your heart soar. Nor would you necessarily expect what follows to be full of wonders of all kinds — natural, historical, literary and scientific. Yet this is exactly what happened in BBC Four’s The Hidden Wilds of the Motorway, presented by Helen Macdonald.

Macdonald is best known for her 2014 bestseller H is for Hawk, which mixed memoir and falconry with a biography of the author T.H. White. In Tuesday’s programme, she was on similarly genre-blending form as she set off on a television journey that, in a rare twist, was an actual journey: clockwise around the M25 from junction one in Kent.

At times, the road served largely as a weird background presence — or what Macdonald arrestingly called ‘a vision from another world’ — amid a much older Britain.

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