I don’t have much time for ‘Reality TV’. But there is one series I’ve watched which could be called that. Channel 4’s Narrow Escapes shows the reality of the lives of people who have chosen to live on canal boats.
There’s no presenter trying to cajole the participants or impress the viewers. Nobody ‘wins’ and at the end of each programme no one gets… well, ‘sunk’ would be the equivalent I guess.
Instead it tells the stories of real people. Why they opted for such a life. What it’s like to travel slowly. The pleasures and the difficulties. The ordinariness. In some respects, it’s another version of ‘Slow TV’.
We follow those getting their vessel for the first time to seasoned Boaters and continuous cruisers. There are those who live alone and those who have children and animals and grow plants on the roof. Some run cafés and shops and one who gives piano concerts while travelling the canal. All of them negotiate the locks and the tunnels of the surrounding countryside, towns and cities.
One particular Boater was very worried about being in tunnels. Would it collapse? What if they got stuck? Or met another canal boat coming through? And of course there was the darkness…
Building up to going through one very long tunnel – one which also had a bend in it so you couldn’t immediately see the light at the other end – we witnessed their worry (and, in contrast, their partner’s excitement).
First, they did a practice run through a shorter tunnel. Something to try and calm some of their anxiety. It helped, albeit not completely.
And then the day came. The tunnel awaited. A check to make sure no one else was coming through and off they went.
Eventually going round the bend (not mentally – although it was perhaps a close thing) and there was the light at the end. Their partner had a torch to aid navigation and we saw distance markers on the tunnel walls. First, those that told them how far they’d gone. Then the midway point and, with ever decreasing numbers, the distance to the end: the slowly increasing light an accompanying reassurance.
We all experience the reality of living in a tunnel at times. Those periods when life seems very dark. When there is, it seems, no light at the end of the tunnel and we can’t see where the bend is.
It is at times like that that we need someone alongside us. Those who will help us do a ‘practice run’. Fellow travellers who understand the difficulties, shining a light through the darkness. People who can help us see the distance markers: how far we have come and how far there is to go.
When the Boater reached the end of the tunnel and emerged in to daylight they had, yes, a sense of achievement – but it had also been hard.
Life is like that too. We can come through our dark times but it will have been hard. That is ‘Reality living’.
And it is in such reality that God exists. Travelling, accompanying, shining the light and showing us how far we have come. We don’t always know how much further there is to go but the light will always shine in the darkness and the darkness will never put it out.
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