Currie and Waterman to front regional BBC1 docs

Pete Waterman and Edwina Currie

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Edwina Currie and Pete Waterman are to explore the effects of the closure of many of Britain's rural railways in the 1960s in a series of regional programmes for BBC1.

The broadcaster has commissioned nine indies to make half-hour documentaries exploring the impact of the notorious Beeching Report of 1963 in their area. Ten programmes will be screened simultaneously across ten regions in a primetime pre-watershed slot in October.

The indies include Rock Hammer, Kingfisher Television, Viewpoint Productions, Denham Productions, Grace Productions and Eye Film & Television.

Currie will front Kingfisher's programme for the South East and London, while railway enthusiast Waterman will look at the East Midlands for Rock Hammer, which is also making a doc for the West Midlands.

Meanwhile in Eye's film for East Anglia, Coast presenter Nicholas Crane will uncover an ambitious plan to put the railways on the map.

The programmes support a BBC4 season dedicated to Britain's steam railways, The Golden Age of Steam.

Joining the previously announced Doctor Beeching documentary Ian Hislop Goes Off The Rails will be The Last Days of Steam. The documentary, part of the Time Shift Strand and produced in-house, will tell the story of the men who built steam-powered locomotives, the trainspotters who championed them and their history.

Another in-house Time Shift film, Between the Lines: Railways in Fiction and Film, novelist Andrew Martin explores how trains shaped the writing of writers from Charles Dickens to JK Rowling.

Six-part series Railway Walks, from indie Skyworks, will feature Julia Bradbury travelling along old railway tracks, through overgrown cuttings and across ancient viaducts to tell the local stories behind the growth of the railways. Skyworks

A Nation on Film special, The British Transport Films, looks at the documentaries, travelogues and natural history films made by Edgar Anstey and his team of film-makers at the state owned British Transport Films unit after World War Two.

BBC4 controller Janice Hadlow is overseeing the season and commissioning editor, specialist factual, independents Mark Bell commissioned the individual programmes.