TV Producer David Parker’s two-part series ‘The Golden Age of Steam’ broke audience viewing records when it was first transmitted on BBC Four. Yet the series almost never got commissioned. Using superb home movie films of Britain’s steam railways and the locomotives that ran on them, alongside testimony from some of the men and women who ’saved our steam’, David will talk about what happened, why the series was ’touch and go’ and how, having persuaded the BBC to support it, he was able to tell this remarkable story.

David is another great Festival favourite, having previously enthralled audiences with talks about Laurie Lee, Johnny Kingdom, and the Flying Scotsman, as well as leading two wonderful Laurie Lee themed walks from the village of Slad.