Infill the WRG Movie Channel

infill Movie time!

What’s your choice for film night? Full Montgomery or Last Kango...

WRG Movie Night

Coming soon on the WRG Movie Channel...

Some new and not-so-new titles to entertain you on that mid-week night on a canal camp when you realise there are only so many times you can watch the WRG Health & Safety video, and start to wonder if you can find something else to watch that’s even funnier than the Navvies editor knocking a pile of bricks over...

The Full Montgomery Six unemployed London WRG volunteers strip to raise funds for a new Burco. And then find they can raise more money by promising to keep their clothes on... Guardians of the Waterway

A group of intergalactic misfits must pull together to stop a fanatical warrior with plans to build a housing estate in Froghall

The Dam Rustlers

The incredible story of how, against all the odds, the heroes of WRG removed an inflatable dam from deep in CRT territory to enable the restoration of a lock, loading the giant slime-covered balloon into a car boot before bouncing it seven times across the Montgomery Canal and into place page 38

The Incredible Bulk

A canal restoration volunteer finds that he is transformed into an unstoppable huge green monster by cake, beer and lasagne

It’s a Mud, Mud, Mud, Mud World

A group of WRG minibus drivers hear about WRG Logistics’ hidden stash of grubbing mattocks and race against each other around the canal restoration sites of the country to get to it [Note: how this differs from any normal Saturday during a WRG summer camps programme is not entirely clear]

Dig Hard A canal camp leader tries to save his cook and several D of E volunteers taken hostage during a Cotswold Christmas camp by IWA terrorists at Unit 4 in Brimscombe Port

Vertigo A retired WRGie who suffers from Acrophobia (a fear of Acrow Props) is trailing an attractive lady to check she is following safe practice for working at heights

Last Kango in Paris A young French canal camp volunteer meets a middle-aged American canal camp leader who demands that their clandestine relationship be based only on hired power tools The Bantam of the Opera

A young WRGie becomes the obsession of a disfigured and murderous mechanical genius who lives in a small diesel push-tug on the River Seine

This selection of titles and plot synopses (*) comes to you courtesy of Dr McFloodbush. I’m sure that the film fans among the Navvies readership can suggest some much better ones! Please do, and we’ll include them in the next issue.

(*) Is that really the plural? I guess Synopsises sounds even worse...

Happy birthday...

Adrian ‘Velcro’ Sturgess, famous for being difficult to shift from the seat of his beloved excavator, celebrated a birthday on the recent Montgomery Canal. So what better way to mark it than to decorate his digger with festive balloons! [See also page 37]

You know it’s been too long since you’ve been doing WRG stuff when...

...your inkject printer still has red ink in it, after it’s run out of all the other colours. Yes, that did actually happen to the editor recently. A sign of the times. A rare chance to use the word ‘unprecedented’ and really mean it.

And finally...

A story briefly made the national press recently concerning a little-known but picturesque Norfolk waterway with a curious name. In fact it was the curious name that made it newsworthy. A boater on the Broads posted a message to the Love the Norfolk Broads Facebook group to say that she’d moored her boat on Cockshoot Dyke. This was way too much for Facebook, which promptly removed her posting, saying that it contained “violence and sexual content”. Facebook banned any mention of the waterway under its ‘hate speech’ algorithms, and local folks using the group took to referring to it as “The waterway that shall not be named”.

In fact the name Cockshoot is derived from the hunting of woodcock birds, and ‘dyke’ (from the same origin as ‘ditch’) is used to mean a raised bank, sometimes to hold back water in a channel, or as in this case the channel itself.

The group’s administrator Steve Burgess felt it was “a bit heavy handed” and that the social media giant had “put two and two together and got 58”. Good job he didn’t say ‘69’.

Meanwhile at Navvies, (“edited by people, not algorithms”) we can’t help wondering what Facebook would make of a volunteer clearing junk out of Black Cock Bridge on the Birmingham Canal Navigations, or restoring Nob End Locks on the Manchester Bolton & Bury... page 39