Fred Scuttle's Channel Tunnel

A current-affairs reporter visits the site office of Fred Scuttle, a northern entrepreneur who has grown tired of official delays and started digging his own tunnel under the English Channel. Scuttle mangles every question, boasts about his oddly qualified recruits, quotes a suspiciously precise budget and explains that paying his men in French money will keep them moving. A filmed tour of the works then shows the opposite: the crew golf, stash beer in a well, mix lunch in a cement mixer and burrow into the beach huts of sunbathers, while Scuttle blows up a colleague and leers his way into trouble. The reporter's closing words end when he walks onto a covered shaft and sinks out of sight.

The sketch aired in December 1973, the year Britain and France signed an agreement for a government-funded Channel Tunnel. Construction on that scheme began in 1974 but Britain cancelled it in January 1975; the tunnel that opened in 1994 came from a later project.