BBC4 : Spotting the Train Potty Training Documentary

Thanks to an astute blogger friend, I dialed up the BBC4 Website, where, due to their extreme generosity, people all over the world can tune in some of their programmes.

I spotted a stream for a new series on...

TRAIN POTTY TRAINING.

A new breed of trainspotters are training themselves to only evacuate when a train LEAVES a platform. The idea is to truly schedule their bowel movements. "It's the civilised way to live your life," enthuses Ian McMillan, or "Ass 66" as he's known. He's one of nearly 100 assholes around the country who are time-tabling their turds, wiping themselves with toilet tissue wadded up and shaped like throttles, exchanging tips.

Here he is, calmly waiting along with others who love to document their train-related doings.

Mr. McMillan pays little attention to traditional trainspotters, or as he contemptuously calls them, the "Loco Motives." He feels trainspotting is crazy. He also disdains Saskia Griffiths-Moore, a mousy, plain singer-songwriter. "She's a revolutionary," he complains. "She's revolting!" Saskia believes in a "pay what you wish" plan for the railways. She has been raising money to help publicise her cause, believing, "it does take money to spread the message."

"I'd rather just spread my legs, wait for the chug of the train taking off, and take pride in, well, dropping off the kids, you know. Unloading the luggage. Having a jolly, steam-driven dungaree."

Most people couldn't give a shit about trains, and think of them as a now-archaic and undependable form of transit. "How sad," muses Mr. McMillan, "I used to be positively housebroken about it. We must once again learn to live on the trains and consider our homes as temporary dwellings. Oh, I think nothing is better than a week on a train, looking at the countryside, eating my meals in the dining car, going to sleep in the sleeper, and shitting in my pants. I feel closer to nature, doing that."

Mr. McMillan, who like most people can't really afford to travel by train, is glad to at least be on the platform so often. He observes: "My body is healthier for being on a timetable of eating, sleeping and dumping. Of course, on a bank holiday I'm full of shit."

Mr. McMillan was nicknamed the "Flying Scotsman," years ago. Back then he wore a kilt and, if a train roared in and wasn't making a local stop, he could race toward the privacy of a trash container or obese lady, and unseen by others, lift his kilt and flop some intestinal haggis before the train whistle blew and it disappeared in the distance.

"There's something romantic about the sound of a train whistle, especially along with the eruption of a long, low contrapuntal fart. Ah, then that finishing SPLAT! Oh, it's sheer poetry, I tell you. It reminds me in fact, of the poems of William McGonnagall." Mr. McMillan has written his own odes, and later in this multi-part series funded by the NHS, he will be shown at the Didcot Rail Centre, reading from his manuscript, "Timetables and Toilet Paper," which indeed, is poetry written on timetables and toilet paper.

"Once I forgot my pen, the station had no timetables, and I was seized with inspiration, and dysentery. My first gushes came tumbling out. Yet, I still had more in me. I wanted it truly leave a mark. So, dipping my finger into my anus, I began writing a shitty poem on the train station wall. But just as I finished it, someone rushed up, scrawled BANKSY underneath, and it was instantly sold for ten thousand pounds."

The BBC4 is hoping that more Brits will develop interesting, useful hobbies like standing around staring at trains, timing their bowel movements, and going to boot sales to buy singles "that did not chart." It's what makes the country great. "After all," cautions Mr. McMillan, "you don't see those hummus-faced filthy Muslims doing it, now do you?"

"Ooh, maybe you do," he gasped in shock and awe. A train arrived, actually on time, and a quavering voice in the crowd shouted, "Allah be praised!"