STARTING weeknights in June there are 10 new one-hour episodes of the popular Canal Boat Diaries with Robbie Cumming, as he offers a personal take on life aboard his narrowboat home the Naughty Lass.
The filmmaker and waterways enthusiast explores the landscapes, towns and cities of the Midlands before heading south down the Grand Union Canal. Along the way, he shares his passion for industrial heritage and celebrates the lesser-known stretches of our most challenging inner city canals.
Robbie says: “The show has moved to a new channel and that’s given me the opportunity to make more of the programmes I love. I’ve packed a load into this series and encountered some of my toughest trips yet. There are parts of the Birmingham Canal Navigations not for the fainthearted – it was hard going at times but ultimately an amazing adventure which makes great telly I can share with you.”
Filmed over the summer, autumn and winter of 2023/24, the journey takes him from Braunston, Northamptonshire – considered to be the spiritual home for narrowboaters – through Birmingham’s maze of canals before he heads south. Expect peace and tranquillity, but also plenty of drama that comes with boating along underused stretches of England’s canals. Along the way Robbie gets marooned in the mud in Perry Barr, breaks down on a remote section of the Ashby Canal in rural Leicestershire and is even forced to call in an underwater dive team to help recover his smartphone after he dropped it into the Stourbridge Canal – it’s thrills and spills at four miles an hour.
The new series of Canal Boat Diaries will be on weeknights at 7pm on the Yesterday Channel and available on demand on UKTV Play from the beginning of June.
