1975: Infamous KIRKBY SKI SLOPE is Condemned | Nationwide | Weird and Wonderful | BBC Archive
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- Опубликовано: 12 сен 2024
- "The people of Kirkby really have been lumbered with a heap of old rubbish."
Martin Young visits Kirkby, near Liverpool, to see its great white elephant. The Kirkby Ski Slope was built without planning permission, out of rubbish, over a water main and on land not belonging to the council. It's also almost certainly the wrong way round, given that the base of the slope runs perilously close to the M57.
The ski slope, which has cost local rate payers some £140,000, is to be demolished. Not a single resident has ever skied on it. How has this happened?
Clip taken from Nationwide, originally broadcast on BBC One, Thursday 16 October, 1975.
You can watch James Hogg's 'skiing tour of the north' report, referenced in this piece, here: • 1975: A SKIING Safari ...
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(1:01) "..It started one lunchtime, in a pub down the road..."
After that, I find the rest of the story plausible, yeah.
Like something from Monty Python.... 😀
I’d subscribe to a channel called “It started one lunchtime in a pub”
Just like the pre-fab four... The Rutles.
@@WilxMusicThat is pretty much the Tom Scott channel
Makes perfect sense 😂😂
I thought I knew ALL the Monty Python skits! 🤷🏻♂️ 😂
Lol it defo just needs some background laughter. But no, i remember the ski slope well as I used to knock around Southdene.
You beat me to the punch
I kept expecting the Spanish Inquisition!
Or Ron Obvious
If all the conversations I’ve had in pubs came to fruition like this, the world would be a weird & wonderful place 😆
Best comment so far
No, you can't build a ski slope on the Moon. Cost of materials, for starters. Now, eat your pork scratchings...😊
I don't think the rate-payers of Kirkby thought that this particular weirdness was also wonderful.
John, i think i am related to you!
Somebody commented before watching the whole video.
Once a bad project is approved, it’s a slippery slope, downhill all the way. They had snow chance. The locals were piste off.
The thieving officials should be wearing a bloody mask, getting far too big for their boots. I heard they were also using foreign labour, using Poles. No wonder they axed the project after getting steeped in debt and slayed so much.
I think it's a shame to see the project get sleighted like this.
Fantastic Humourous Comments !!!! 😅😅😅😅😅
@@davidbray5982 Why skate around the issue?
This is what happens when people get snow board they start coming up with bad ideas
“It all started, at lunch time, in a pub down the road…” That explains a lot. Could have just ended the report right there.
Skied down it nearly every day as a child, unfortunately without skies, great memories.
Why didn’t they build a ski jump run, so you could sail over the slip-road and land on a sea of dumped mattresses? 😬
I had almost finished laughing, then I hit this comment.
At first,i thought this was satire.. Nice video of the old days..
Even more so half way through when he's abseiling down the side 😂
Very Alan Partridge
It’s true. You couldn’t make this stuff up. Every time I drove past it made me smile. Such an embarrassment. It really was the wrong way round and full of bumps.
I thought it was satire several times. Especially when the music of the outro started. Very Pythonesque
BBC truly has spectacular journalism from this time frame. Like an attitude of "You wouldn't believe this, but here it his anyway..."
This journalist is a blast from the past.
Sounds just like RUclipsr Mark Felton. 😂
Exactly what I thought. I was convinced it was him until I saw the presenter and realised the year. 😂
@@YOUTHOCD Could be him you never know
Mark is a time traveller!
My god, he does. Mark moonlighting?
David Jessel I think.
The wonderful and fortunate thing about these 'double-system' stores is that the soundtracks sound superb, being a magnetic track and not optical. Well done BBC Archive !
I would say optical is better??? Magnetic track on film can get sticky in the can and the oxide wears off?..
@@tonyjones9442 Double-system is the process of having film as the vision source and magnetic tape or film as the audio. It is then synced to each other. They are not both in the same medium.
I didn’t realise that’s why they sounded so nice. Top comment
@@marktubeie07 but then there's a chance they could get lost!!
@@tonyjones9442 Yep, that's correct and they often did - but that was the system that was used professionally for quality reasons which doesn't mean it shouldn't have been a avoid system. Working in television in the 70s our news gathering was on film using this system - you'll often see photos of a cameraman with a sound guy recording to audio tape next to him with the 2 formats linked together with a cable/timecode for sync.
I had a little look into this and it seems the three gentlemen involved were up to quite a bit of corrupt activities, including a housing scheme where some of the materials for the project ended up being used for a couple of extensions on their own houses!
Dave Tempest
Standard Council stuff, still goes on to this day. We have our own bit in my home town. The council decided they wanted some fancy new offices, so decided some contaminated land wasn't contaminated anymore so they could build on it. The ground started subsiding before they were half way done. It's cost the taxpayers millions and has been sitting abandoned for ten years now. No consequences for anyone involved, naturally.
Take it you missed the bit where it says it didnt have planning permission @@thecommissaruk
@@thecommissarukwhere was this?
Liverpool.
This is UTTERLY fantastic.
Every detail is better than the next.
this people, is why we have public procurement regulations
I love this channel lol Keep em coming BBC Archives 😊
if you drive down the coastal road in Southport we have exactly the same problem with a very bumpy road. The council asked locals to dump their rubbish where the road was going to go, my mother took our old pram and dumped it.
... Went to "PONTIN'S " at Southport around This Time, I would've been 4 years old... Brilliant Days.... 🏴🖖
There's a road in Arbroath, Scotland the same. One minute your fine, the next it's a roller coaster. Same thing, built over a tip 😂
Marine Drive, Marshside, is bumpy.
Here in Ottawa, there's a whole neighbourhood built on top of an old trash heap--all the roads are comically terrible and you can't plant food directly into the ground for obvious reasons. 12/10 way to city plan would plan city again.
Southport coast road is built on the track bed of the old Cheshire lines railway
One for all the people who think everything used to be better. Constructing a ski slope (?) without a tender or planning permission (??) by building up a mound of uncontrolled rubble (???) really is up there.
Not everything was better but there was a hell of a lot that was.
@benhemmings3852 name something
@@benhemmings3852 Not in this video there wasn't.
One for all the people that think things are much better now. Today an outdoor facility for physical exercise would never be approved by councils in an area like this (?) Instead this land would used for lucrative apartments or housing estate awarded to a developer for dubious/unknown reasons(??). The buildings will be constructed using poor quality steel, flammable cladding, improperly mixed concrete, shoddy foundations etc causing major faults a few years later, with costs falling 100% on the unsuspecting owners. (???) It really is SO much better now!
@@benhemmings3852 Yes, journalists were better. You won’t get this with GB News. Not much else was no matter what bollocks you spout.
3:55 the flare on those trousers!
Had several pairs just like it! They were the days!!
The most appropriate local phrase would be “lookit the kecks on you, la”
This makes Sheffield Ski Village look like Val d'Isère 😂
Anyone who can shoehorn Val d’Isere into a comment deserves a like.
@@steveblack610 😂 I just googled “posh ski resort” aaaaand copy+paste
Love it🤣🤣🤣👍🫡
😂
Just the phrase "Sheffield Ski Village" made me laugh till I cried.
Super, humourous journalism at it's best. Bravo 1970s BBC!
If only the bbc news was this this now…..
No-one does journalism like the BBC, at least not back then. ‘The slope is too high, too fast, and too bear the motorway.’ Beautiful.
Yeah, they did a great job of facilitating Saville didn’t they!
I don't agree that its too high and too fast though if anything it looks kinda lame.
Far better than the propaganda they sprout now
@@bhvillaman4401 LOL Very true.
I like how there was nearly a car crash at 1:48
None of those drivers would have had a test nor would their cars of had seatbelts at that time either and they were allowed to drink and drive 😂
So this is where the Marble Arch mound people took their inspiration from!
There's nowt as corrupt as local council civil engineering deals.
They did a good job levelling it because I never had a clue and have driven by that junction for decades.
There are crosswinds, sun in your eyes, it's steep and it's bumpy...yip sounds like a ski slope to me...hold ma beer !!
Born & raised in Liverpool & never knew about this.
Great little story that, like many, started one lunchtime in a pub.
There’s still a big mound of dirt where they demolished it. I remember my Mum telling me about the ski slope when I was a kid and asked what the hill was, I thought she was making it up lol.
I remember both the ski slope and the motorway being built.
Not only this but the adjoining athletics track in use for years was eventually discovered not to be the correct length around the track as in not 400 metres!
Brilliantly executed bit of reporting.
£140,000 and two year construction time for a Government project without having to compromise on the rubbish quality sounds like an absolute bargain these days.
Professional journalism something we rarely get now.
I thought the guardian's article about AI deepfakes was really good. Published in the last couple of days.
What a great bit of film though- nice camera work, great delivery (love the sardonic tone)... just... good. Well made. Love it.
If all ski-slopes had a run-off to a motorway island I would go out of my way to watch Ski Sunday!!! 😁👍🏆
Rossendale had (has?) an impressive drop at the end, down onto a dual carriageway.
Nothing like making a mountain out of a molehill
... HAAAAAAAA HAAAAA... Moderately Whimsical. You Stretched my Chuckle Muscle as "Doddy" calls It... TOUCHÉ 🏴🖖🫢 6:47
More likely a mountain into a molehill as it collapses into a heap of rubble 🤪
All done with the aid of a beer and a few gin and tonics 😂
What an excellent report, presented, written and filmed
Thank goodness we live in times where nothing like this could HS2ppen again!
I know which one I'd rather use. The ski slope
Jacob Rees Mogg saw this as a 7 year old, a few years before starting Eton and thought, "So that's how the UK procures things, huh? In that case I recon I might run a London based management consultancy and become a politician, seems like those two things in combination might work out very nicely, especially should there ever be a pandemic."
Where there many skiers in Kirby, needing a practice run before flying off the the Alps for their hols? 🤔
No learner slope, and for experienced skiers, it would pretty boring, no 'great snowy mountain view. You'd have to hire/provide all the skis, boots & poles just to have a go - so you need paid staff... apart from that, I think it was a great idea! 😆
Tried it once in Wales as a kid, was ok as a one-off, but that surface grid is hard and covered in nylon brush, when you fall and get your hand caught, it hurts like &*^%! Not like snow!! Couldn't use my hand for the rest of the holidays - though I did have a cool bandage. 😎
Apparently, though, this is where Eddie The Eagle first practiced, just before it was demolished... 😂
The bizarre thing is that there was a demand, which took until the 21st C to be filled. There is Chill Factore the home of the UK's Longest Indoor Snow Slope up the road in Manchester and a similar outdoor ski slope at Runcorn Snow sports Centre just a few miles away from Kirby. Runcorn Ski Centre is an outdoor dry ski centre, with 85m, 45m, and 25m slopes and 3 lifts to allow access. These slopes are also floodlit to allow skiing at all times of the day. 🙃😁
@@freemenofengland2880 What are those ski slopes covered with? Same mesh?
@@2degucitas Looks pretty similar TBF, just made properly this time, oh and not facing a motorway junction.
@@freemenofengland2880 that's completely logical
This is giving me Tom Scott vibes.
This must be his father. Same delivery.
@@Meddled I think Tom grew up watching this kind of content, albeit a bit later
First time hearing the Queen's English? Or is it the kings English now lol
Great slope and sportsfield. Pride of 70s . The wrinkles made it exciting to use. Fun memories. The area around smelt bad and there was open mud.
Why did they want to take the bumps out? They’ve got the best Mogul field the north has ever seen
Because with those sort of Dendex mats the mats don't sink with the bumps until someone goes over them, then the mat disconnects from it's neighbour to fill in the extra space, then you end up with dangerous gaps that hook ski tips. Dendex is pretty much retired nowadays because of the upkeep on non shifting slopes, let alone shifting ones! Stick a more modern material like Snowflex on that same hill and it would pass with a monthly realignment.
@@FlatDerrick thank you
Dendex is still being used at Gloucester slope, in fact not long ago they resurfaced the main slope with the stuff, but the other slope still has the older stuff, although they did the tubing slope up with some new material, I can't remember which one though, might be nevaplast!
I used to live in Mercer Heights in sight of this, legendary landmark! 😁
Did you ever have a go?😂
@@edmundblackaddercoc8522 Nah, no one was interested. It eventually became a tyre dump, featuring the inevitable fire every few years.
Brilliant! & I thought some modern politicians were corrupt & incompetent.
Good to see it’s always gone on,& not so good that it always will !
Five best ski resorts:
Aspen, USA.
Whistler, Canada.
Zermatt, Switzerland.
Val d’Isère, France.
Kirkby, UK.
Mate aspen isn't even the best ski area in Colorado 😂 😂 but solid comment 👍🏽
You forgot Mount Blackstrap, also known as Blackstrap Ski Hill, located approximately 51 kilometres south of Saskatoon!
Lol good one.
In this fast-moving, immediate gratification via Internet, culture we live in, I find rhis slow drawn out report refreshing.
But at least they used sturdy railings! That’s a good cm of wood panelling to get through before you reach certain death on the motorway.
53°28'28.67"N, 2°54'5.73"W
The Bell-bottomed business suit need to make a comeback
In the US state of Michigan they built a ski area on a landfill, known as Mount Trashmore. The biomass keeps the ground too warm for snow to acclimate on it.
Back in 1987, i was sent to do some work on the ski slope in Pembrey country park, west Wales. I arrived just as the white matting was being finished, with the last piece attached that day.
I was then told the whole lot had to be replacd as it was only usable when it was wet. So unless it was raining, there would be too much grip on ski's for it to be used at all. It was all taken up and replaced with "dry use" matting.
The wire rope system for pulling skiers up the hill was also going to be 'in line' with the centre of the pulley system TOWERS, so the skiers would have been pulled through the base of each tower, and not to one side of them around a wheel.
The concrette counter weight wooden mold, was also buried 'in line' with where the wire rope was SUPPOSED to be, and not in line with the towers themselves. so the towers would have eventually leaned sideways from any weight on the wire pulley system.
All these issues were caught by THE WORKERS on the scheme (manpower) and NOT by the engineers who designed it i.e. Llanelli borough council. But that's what happens when out of work skilled tradesman are put to work as cheap labour back in those days.
The level of knowledge between the 'manpower' guys was very large, them being made up mostly of redundant factory workers from the area at the time, several of them tradesmen from a local Steelworks, myself included.
Llanelli council couldn't organize a hole in the road, let alone a ski slope.
Wouldn't it have made more sense if they just ran some fairy liquid down the hill 😂😂
The only artificial ski slope with moguls!
Conceived whilst on the piste.
👏👏👏
This story is legendry in Liverpool for those in the know , looks like a total pxss take but 100% true.....Classic 👍Luv it 😂
RIP Martin
One of Aunty's finest investigative journalists
5:12 "I think you better haul me up, lads." *
* Note; No lads were involved in the making of this scene
I thought the same thing 🤣
Remember it well. Had a Raleigh Chipper, I was 7, and I went barreling down this thing and wrecked the bike. Still have a scar on my left knee. Only in Liverpool, huh?
🤣🤣🤣
"He dumped a couple of loads himself" lmao
All three men responsible for this eyesore were jailed on Corruption charges in 1978
Name something man-made in england that isn't an eyesore. You just can't.
I remember one built in Harlow in the 70s and I think it lasted about ten years. Some sort of town council oneupmanship at the time I guess.
Imagine when the biggest worry a town planner had was not having a local ski slope.
The Harlow ski slope was very successful and many people learned the basics of skiing there, under the management of Mike Hammond. He created a scheme to train some of the skiers to become instructors, who then could teach beginners. Mike was an excellent skier himself, despite losing half of one leg in a motorcycle accident. I myself joined his training scheme, and helped a number of people to learn, including one chap who was blind! Perhaps being an ex-paratrooper his fear level was lower than most people, but I was amazed how he trusted me to guide him down the slope using a ski pole held in front of us. There was a special section for disabled people, and I remember being in a bar on the slopes in Les Arcs when Mike and members of this group came in after a run. A one-armed lad was followed by others including one who was blind and Mike, who was skiing on only one leg that day, using skids on his ski poles. The skiers who had been bragging about their black runs fell silent at this spectacle! I passed the Ski Club of Great Britain's instructor test after Mike's tuition, and was able to get a couple of extra ski 'holidays' teaching schoolgirls, besides the trips taken with my own children.
@@donjohnson24 Sounds like at least it wasn’t a waste of time like the Kirkby slope but I still don’t understand why so many towns got slopes then. I don’t know where the sudden interest in skiing came from, not like we started winning Winter Olympic medals. Maybe it was aspirational.
Good news is that at least two of them ended up in prison later for corruption
you can look for this on google maps but the land must have been levelled because there's only grass and trees now
It was levelled in 1976.
Ha ha.. I remember the ski slope scandal. I don’t know when they got rid of it but it was there for years.
Wasn’t the motorway nice and quiet, when our country wasn’t over populated. Great video, shame about the ski slope.
"Oi mate, you're gonna need a loicence built that ski slope!"
The council put a large, impressive looking sign on some steep hills between Haydock and Newton, saying "St. Helens Ski Slope Centre". It was there for years. Never did get built. An absolute joke.
It’s nice to see nothing changes.
Look how quiet the roads are man, why do i have to live here now. I wish i had the freedom these guys had.
1:00 is soooo (with several o's) Alan Partridge 😂
“It’s what we call… a crack” 😂 that is classic English humour right there
All good decisions start in the pub 😂
49 years later and councils/government are STILL doing things like this.
I remember this.
The Contractor who employed me in the 1970s had the last laugh as if I remember we were paid to remove it. One problem was that as the money began to run out so the Ski Club elected to lay the surface themselves, not a good idea as it folded and rippled. As commented below there was a element of corruption at that time.
As a former ski jumper from Canada maybe I can offer a few suggestions to the bold British lads who might be taking up the sport.
Before rocketing down a massive ski jump it does one well to buckle one’s bindings.
Before building a huge ski jump, even with buckled bindings, it is often a good idea to plan an area to land.
Hope these tips help.
ps And, yes, during your first ride down the ramp, as your speed approaches the maximum, it is entirely appropriate to emit a blood curdling scream at the top of your lungs.
I live in the Adirondacks. There’s a couple failed ski slopes here too. All built on the wrong side of the mountain.
Did he just say “By Jove, I needed that!”?
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
The moguls were built in! I love how this little bunny hill is considered a “ski slope.”
The dukes of hazzard been waiting for this
I remember seeing that as a kid.
I bet there was a few back handers on that job
Love how he's like the bill was for 64,000 !!! Planing dept spend more then that on stationary now
Guaranteed I'm gonna have a cool snowboarding dream tonight 😜😜🤣🤣😜😜
Dave, Eric & George love to joke about it to this day. You should ask em. Every time you visit the pub down the road, givem a yodel
I remember driving past this, down the M57 next to it. It was such an eye-sore.
Runcorn built a ski slope around the same time and it's still going strong. What was it with the mid 1970s and dry ski slopes?
I worked for local government for 25 years until I could stand it no more. You will surely believe me when I say how many dickhole ideas started this way, 3 or 4 egotistical old blokes and a business plan on the back of a beer at, and it it wasn’t decades ago. The ”Millenium Celebration” era building craze was a frenzy of lunatic ideas; expensive sculptures, footbridges to nowhere in particular, and in my hometown a theatre nobody asks for. Built by the councils favoured contractor who didn’t meet safety standards, and the recently retired city engineer on a massive retainer to oversee it. One year and £4 million pounds later the bankrupt council was massaging the books and selling of every asset including kids play parks for housing developments.
I miss the old days!! 😂😂Having said that, it probably still goes on! 😉
The narrator sounds like Mark Felton.
Modern-day politicians evidently saw this and were like:
"Hold my beer"
I love his orange smock. Amazing. Also an amazing story.
I swear I've seen this plot line on The Simpsons before. 🤦
"Not on your life my Hindu friend..."
Wait. Is this basically the story of the Springfield Monorail, except true?
I literally drive past there using the underpass every day never knew the story! (its not still there :)
He could be describing the UK economy in 1975 and not a ski hill. Thankfully, Mrs. Thatcher is only 4 years away from saving it (the economy.....not the ski hill).
The unintentional innuendo is amazing 2:51
Free "tip" in Kirby, he proclaimed.
And they came in their hundreds, according to local lorry operator Alf Seddon; He dumped a couple of loads himself.
Funny thing is that it never got demolished. It's still there and sometimes people do ski on it.
Rea.ly?😂 that's brilliant
Are you serious?
30 seconds looking on Google Maps says chinny reckon.
Liverpool.
God bless the British dryslope scene, what a place 👏👌🔥🔥
Thank god that kind of corruption would never happen today.😂
My dad drove past that every day to his work in Kirkby industrial estate, he was in the building trade, everyone knew leatherbarrow was a corrupt businessman who drove the type of jag loved by criminals