Mark Williams - Industrial Revelations and other stuff
Discussion
Really like the type of program Mark does. Informitive and amusing. Don't seem to be on main TV but just satalite channels. He must be into all sorts of engines and equipment to have the entheusiasim for these programs.....or a good actor... Nah he must like the stuff. Wonder if he has any daft things like Chris Barrie?
Scotty2 said:
Really like the type of program Mark does. Informitive and amusing. Don't seem to be on main TV but just satalite channels. He must be into all sorts of engines and equipment to have the entheusiasim for these programs.....or a good actor... Nah he must like the stuff. Wonder if he has any daft things like Chris Barrie?
Yes, he's very good; seems to be genuinely interested in the subject, and not just a famous face reading a script.'On the Rails' is another of his to look out for. Recently they were all shown back-to-back in one day.
Which was nice.
Mark Williams is as much a fan of our industrial past as the late Fred Dibnah. 
The Independent in 2005 said:
In Jerusalem, William Blake famously lamented that "dark satanic mills" were blighting "England's green and pleasant land". Samuel Taylor Coleridge, meanwhile, was even less complimentary, damning the typical northern English mill town as "a Sodom and Gomorrah manufactury". Mark Williams, the actor and presenter, is rather more positive. He views those towns as the cradle of the Industrial Revolution, and as a remarkable and enduring tribute to the ingenuity of British engineering. He celebrates the creativity of the era in More Industrial Revelations with Mark Williams, a series starting on the Discovery Channel tonight.
You get swept along by Williams's sheer love for his subject, and may well find yourself learning something along the way. Did you know, for example, that workers in hat factories in the 19th century treated the felt with their own urine? However, as many of them were taking mercury to cure syphilis, the fumes from that were slowly driving the workers insane. Hence, the phrase "mad as a hatter".
Williams conveys such facts with an almost evangelical sense of passion. To many, antique devices such as knitting-machines, cropping-frames, steam engines, water wheels and ploughs may appear to belong in some dusty, cobweb-strewn museum. But not to Williams. He is keen to bring them back to life, trying out as many of these ancient machines as he can.
"I just can't help being enthusiastic when I'm talking about this stuff," he says. "We take all these things for granted now, but I'm trying to conjure up the extraordinariness of what these industrial pioneers did. Think of the sheer bloody-mindedness of the people who went against conventional wisdom to construct the first iron steam ship or decided to level the land between London and Birmingham to build the railway."
On screen, Williams has the same eagerness as one of the puppies he starred opposite in 101 Dalmatians. It's here that his hands-on approach pays off. And when it comes to manual labour, he knows what he's talking about. In his time, he has worked as a waiter in a chip shop, a carpenter, a builder, an electrician, a gardener and - get this - an artificial inseminator of cattle.
"I want to show people what it feels like to use these machines," says the 46-year-old. "Otherwise, it's too arm's-length. You have to get your hands dirty in order to communicate. For instance, you can't work out what making paper feels like till you've done it yourself. So only when you have had to lean into a vat of slurry and pull up the mould against the huge water suction do you realise why all paper-makers had terrible backs."
The other reason for making the programme in this way was to avoid the "curse of the Open University": endless dreary talking-head shots of bearded academics plugging their latest books. "That's such a terrible cliché, and those documentaries are so slow," says Williams. "We thought we'd try to get in among it and involve viewers, rather than preach at them."
So what does the series teach us? "The human experience is that we often rely too heavily on the wrong things," says Williams. "The Victorians relied too heavily on coal, and they destroyed their cities and their children in the process. We're no different today. We've been the same organism since Neolithic times. We think we're cleverer than our forebears, but we're not. We still bring up our children in the same haphazard way, and if there is more than one switch, we still don't know which one turns the light on. The Americans spent millions of dollars trying to invent a pen that would work in space. Then the Russians went into orbit and found that the humble pencil worked perfectly well."
Brought up on a council estate in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, he recalls proudly that when he won the school history award as a 13-year-old, he requested as a prize a copy of RA Buchanan's Industrial Archaeology - clearly a sign of things to come.
Now 44, he is an ardent Aston Villa fan, although, as he lives in Brighton, he has a fair way to travel for home games. He and his girlfriend Nicola have a young daughter. Williams is also a keen cook. He says that "actors always have to try to make ends meet - that's why they're often very inventive cooks. They wonder, 'What shall I do today? I know, I'll buy two pigeons because they're 50p at the market, and learn how to cook them.'"
Williams went to Brasenose College, Oxford. But after graduation, he was not an overnight star. A man with pleasingly lived-in features, he says: "I think it took longer for me to succeed because I've got a face like the corner of a crocodile handbag. If I was a gorgeous young actress, it would have happened a lot quicker."
"I don't want anyone to suss me out, so I'm keeping my head down. It's like staying up late as kid - if you keep your mouth shut, you can watch telly for longer. That's why I'm not interested in fame for its own sake. You also have to work so hard to be famous, eating thin air, smearing yourself in St Tropez and changing your car every year. I'm quite happy with my camper van, thank you very much."
The actor is equally unfussed about the industry obsession with getting older. "I'm not bothered about ageing," he says. "All I care about is what I'm doing. My only career plan is: keep working. My mate, when I was a carpenter, used to say, 'Rule one: get up; rule two: go to work.' I have to make sure I don't blow it because I really like my job. I want to be working till I can't remember my lines any more."
You get swept along by Williams's sheer love for his subject, and may well find yourself learning something along the way. Did you know, for example, that workers in hat factories in the 19th century treated the felt with their own urine? However, as many of them were taking mercury to cure syphilis, the fumes from that were slowly driving the workers insane. Hence, the phrase "mad as a hatter".
Williams conveys such facts with an almost evangelical sense of passion. To many, antique devices such as knitting-machines, cropping-frames, steam engines, water wheels and ploughs may appear to belong in some dusty, cobweb-strewn museum. But not to Williams. He is keen to bring them back to life, trying out as many of these ancient machines as he can.
"I just can't help being enthusiastic when I'm talking about this stuff," he says. "We take all these things for granted now, but I'm trying to conjure up the extraordinariness of what these industrial pioneers did. Think of the sheer bloody-mindedness of the people who went against conventional wisdom to construct the first iron steam ship or decided to level the land between London and Birmingham to build the railway."
On screen, Williams has the same eagerness as one of the puppies he starred opposite in 101 Dalmatians. It's here that his hands-on approach pays off. And when it comes to manual labour, he knows what he's talking about. In his time, he has worked as a waiter in a chip shop, a carpenter, a builder, an electrician, a gardener and - get this - an artificial inseminator of cattle.
"I want to show people what it feels like to use these machines," says the 46-year-old. "Otherwise, it's too arm's-length. You have to get your hands dirty in order to communicate. For instance, you can't work out what making paper feels like till you've done it yourself. So only when you have had to lean into a vat of slurry and pull up the mould against the huge water suction do you realise why all paper-makers had terrible backs."
The other reason for making the programme in this way was to avoid the "curse of the Open University": endless dreary talking-head shots of bearded academics plugging their latest books. "That's such a terrible cliché, and those documentaries are so slow," says Williams. "We thought we'd try to get in among it and involve viewers, rather than preach at them."
So what does the series teach us? "The human experience is that we often rely too heavily on the wrong things," says Williams. "The Victorians relied too heavily on coal, and they destroyed their cities and their children in the process. We're no different today. We've been the same organism since Neolithic times. We think we're cleverer than our forebears, but we're not. We still bring up our children in the same haphazard way, and if there is more than one switch, we still don't know which one turns the light on. The Americans spent millions of dollars trying to invent a pen that would work in space. Then the Russians went into orbit and found that the humble pencil worked perfectly well."
Brought up on a council estate in Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, he recalls proudly that when he won the school history award as a 13-year-old, he requested as a prize a copy of RA Buchanan's Industrial Archaeology - clearly a sign of things to come.
Now 44, he is an ardent Aston Villa fan, although, as he lives in Brighton, he has a fair way to travel for home games. He and his girlfriend Nicola have a young daughter. Williams is also a keen cook. He says that "actors always have to try to make ends meet - that's why they're often very inventive cooks. They wonder, 'What shall I do today? I know, I'll buy two pigeons because they're 50p at the market, and learn how to cook them.'"
Williams went to Brasenose College, Oxford. But after graduation, he was not an overnight star. A man with pleasingly lived-in features, he says: "I think it took longer for me to succeed because I've got a face like the corner of a crocodile handbag. If I was a gorgeous young actress, it would have happened a lot quicker."
"I don't want anyone to suss me out, so I'm keeping my head down. It's like staying up late as kid - if you keep your mouth shut, you can watch telly for longer. That's why I'm not interested in fame for its own sake. You also have to work so hard to be famous, eating thin air, smearing yourself in St Tropez and changing your car every year. I'm quite happy with my camper van, thank you very much."
The actor is equally unfussed about the industry obsession with getting older. "I'm not bothered about ageing," he says. "All I care about is what I'm doing. My only career plan is: keep working. My mate, when I was a carpenter, used to say, 'Rule one: get up; rule two: go to work.' I have to make sure I don't blow it because I really like my job. I want to be working till I can't remember my lines any more."
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