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I'm somewhat bemused, but also quite proud that Fred Dibnah has appeared here.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Dibnah

I'm British but was completely unaware of the early stuff he appeared in, but the late 90s, early 2000s stuff crept into the public consciousness.

Our equivalent of OSHA is "Health and Safety" and Fred held a dim view. Fortunately his legacy is continued by "British scaffolders" - a famous sub-group within construction, who you can still see to this day getting utterly shit-faced in a pub on cider over lunch, before returning to site.

Not sure if this division of construction labour exists elsewhere. If you pay a builder to so anything in the UK, they'll subcontract any erection of scaffolding to separate company, with a noticeably more cavalier attitude towards potential death and injury. Then your primary contractor will do the job, and the scaffolders will return to remove the infrastructure.

> Fortunately his legacy is continued by "British scaffolders" - a famous sub-group within construction, who you can still see to this day getting utterly shit-faced in a pub on cider over lunch, before returning to site.

'Fortunately'?

I'm not up for prissiness and stupid rules but hefty metalwork being put in high places - there's nothing good about mixing alcohol with that.

Edit: I'll go further - I'm disturbed that you can endorse macho bullshit culture that can get themselves or worse, any bystanders, mashed up or killed.

I assumed it was the same everywhere because it doesn't make sense for a company to keep all kind of scaffolding equipment when any given site will only need a small subset of it.

Ah least in France and Belgium, scaffolding is also generally erected by a specialised company (except very large public construction companies which do everything themselves, but then it's still separate services inside the company).

Fred was a British TV star in the 80s young person. Back before HD TV and DVD quality.

I grew up around people like Fred (and they may have known him from his steam engine work) - good at hardware. Luckily software came along for me to not lose eyes and limbs to my job as would have been the case otherwise.

> you can still see to this day getting utterly shit-faced in a pub on cider over lunch

I worked in the construction industry in London in the late eighties and I witnessed builders drinking 6 pints in the half hour lunch and then going back to working at height with heavy machinery. I couldn't say anything.

Wow. That's amazingly mesmerizing and cathartic for free soloing. Thanks for posting. It's a stark contrast to the Magnus Midtbø and Alex Honnold free solo video [1] released today. The Magnus video made my palms literally drip with nervous perspiration.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cyya23MPoAI

That's so inspiring. Alex gives advice that might as well be about programming and the fear of starting a complex project. Don't look back or ahead, just this move is easy, this move is easy and you will get there!
That's a really interesting and somewhat tension-causing experience to watch. Tension level increased once they switched to the go-pro.
Couldn’t even watch this video - I had to skip to the end. Way too stressful! The frank admissions of fear at the outset really set the tone and it just gets more intense from there. Insane.
Great video. It shows how much climbing (and lot of other things) is in your head and your repeated experience. The route (5.9/5a/VI) must be laughably easy for Midtbø who climbs 5.15/9a/XI+ yet he is quite understandably fighting for life while Honnold is walking around, enjoying no-hand rests and recording. Gradual exposure takes some of the scariness away I guess.
Great video, thanks for sharing. I had the same feeling of my palms sweating during some of the shots.

It also sparked my interest for climbing, I'll give it a try for sure (with rope).

A bygone era. I have fond memories of going to similar building sites/factories in north west England, 4-5 years old with my old man before I was old enough to go to school. Sitting on the wheel arch at the back of a rusty old van amongst loose tools/building materials bouncing around, being taken up some rickety scaffolding being told stay away from the edge, careful on the ladder, passing tools while my old man worked stood on stacked milk crates several floors up.

Today that’d never happen and you’d be sat in front of a judge. 30-40+ years ago where certainly different times in working class nw England. Maybe it’s because I grew up in it but looking back, back then it seems work was work, not pushing Jira tickets, one on ones, 360 degrees, agile, navigating office politics just to get shit done.

There’s a complete series about Fred on YouTube, well worth watching.

> back then it seems work was work

Back then, the amount of workers dying from work accidents was also an order of magnitude higher than it is today.

Individual surviving workers might have good memories of their job, but I'm not sure if it was actually better from a more general point of view.

This one is my favorite- where Fred ladders an overhang.

https://youtu.be/3R3-YwDZrzg

Thanks for the link. What percentage of the population nowadays would do that? And would every climber feel ok about doing it? Fred was great as witnessed by the comments!
Came across this at random, and finds it a fascinating contrast to my (and probably lots of others on HN) daily job.
It's like adding functionality to legacy code
as a tradesman mechanic, seeing an old-timer like Fred at work makes me swoon. in the states due to OSHA regulations, there are quite a few reasons why this sort of work would never get done, but Freds attention to safety and detail cant be missed.

Mr. Dibnah is a master craftsman. he makes scaling this chimney look like a sunday stroll.

OSHA... I have never once seen, nor heard of anyone who has seen, someone who works for OSHA.

I'm starting to think they aren't real... everyone is so sure that "OSHA won't like [that which is about to be attempted]" and it hasn't ever stopped anyone from doing profoundly stupid stuff, except for new guys. Still, I've never seen them, been alerted to their presence, or met anyone who has (I've been asking for 20+ years.)

obviously they are real, but they are in no way the ever-present threat they are made out to be.

Are you sure you watched his videos? Fred had virtually no attention to safety.

He would proudly promote that he would climb those towers after drinking pints of beer down the pub. He's a lovable person and I've watched nearly all of his TV work but safety was not his priority.

> there are quite a few reasons why this sort of work would never get done

Doing those chimney climbs safely, with fall protection, is pretty easy these days. It's so easy that I've seen videos of urban explorers, base jumpers, etc. using perfectly good fall protection, even while doing illegal things!

Remember we're looking at a video from 1978: modern fall protection gear simply wasn't widely available back then.

Does anybody here feel a sense of sadness watching a video of a middle aged man from the mid 90s? I am closer to his age now than I am to myself in age from back then. Every time I watch an old movie (eg. The Godfather), I can't help but see myself in the younger folks then and realizing how old they are now. Makes me want to make the best of my time now.

Do you folks feel that way?

Sure. When I see a scene from Seinfeld now, I can't help but think that I'm now older than the protagonists, while they are stored in my memory as older people.

It's less striking with videos like this, which I hadn't seen until a few years ago, when The Algorithm started pushing it.

Part 1 is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F04dGK1_wYA

They're a great watch!

Around the 3:50 mark: "that's where the beer belly comes in handy" :)
The steam engine stuff is great too
I'm glad this stops before he has to negotiate the lip of the chimney as I was already getting the willies, having never fully recovered from watching John Noakes climbing Nelson's Column on Blue Peter all those years ago,
There is also the mast on the Royal Navy land based training base, HMS Ganges.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSuZXlUxwbk

Indeed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGZ-h70IK9s . And the camera-man presumably did the same thing first, with camera in tow...
If anyone likes this kind of vibe of old video my dad got me to "acquire" a show called "Jack Hargreave's Old Country" which is the titular man meandering across the English Countryside talking to people.
Fred was a national treasure. Really enjoyed his show when I was younger.
I wonder why the ladder isn't just built into the chimney permanently, like via ferrata.
There would then need to be ladders over most of the surface of the chimney, and with the anchors for the ladder mortared into the chimney, and the whole point of climbing the ladder in the first place is to repoint the mortar, you couldn't rely on the anchors being sound.
What material wouldn't degrade over the lifetime of the chimney?
Lots of Fred’s fantastic TV shows can be easily found on YouTube.

Is there a modern equivalent of those shows? Nothing comparable comes to mind.

In a sense something like 3Blue1Brown or a good DIY channel is almost a modern equivalent in terms of content but the thing these old documentaries (not to be overly patriotic but often British ones) have that most (almost all, really) YouTube videos have is the expertise and creative bottleneck of being made by a proper TV studio.

Bottleneck I say? From limitation and oversight comes restraint and clever tricks, and that is a good way of making good media.

There's a wonderful culture of tradesmen posting YouTube videos of their work.

My most recent binge has been Perkins Builder Brothers, but also check out Essential Craftsman or Samson Boat Co. They lack some of the gravitas of the old guys, just because of their modern tone. But they're great.

What is this particular regional accent? The narrator sounds like Tyson Fury.
Specifically Fred's accent is from Bolton, which is just NW of Manchester. It also encodes social class signifiers in that it is distinctly working class. It is also dated, accents have evolved a fair amount in the 50 years or so.
Some context might be of interest here.

The chimneys that Dibnah worked to demolish were usually attached to cotton mills in and around Manchester in North West England. The cotton industry was in steep decline there in the 1970s and 1980s and one by one these mills became unprofitable and closed down. Even if the mill building could be repurposed the chimney wasn’t needed and would be expensive to maintain.

I suspect Dibnah got the work because he was the cheapest and the mill owner would typically be very short of cash.

This video is about maintaining a chimney, not demolition.
I wonder if any early rock climbers used the sort of wood blocks to install pitons as Fred uses (most visible in Part 1). It seems like the wood blocks make the pitons a bit less destructive.
I’ve never seen that. I don’t think it would work. In this case he is not protecting against a shock load, he is pretty much ensuring a constant force on the anchor by tying the ladder tightly and directly to the anchor.

Climbing anchors need to withstand extreme loads as you could fall tens of feet before your fall is arrested and you load the anchor, plus the substrate is usually more strong than brick and mortar so you can make a much tighter (higher pressure) insertion before the wall crumbles.

I used to have a video clip of Fred demolishing a chimney from the top-down one brick at a time for new labourers watch.

It was the perfect example of not being intimidated by a big job: Just get at it and keep moving forward.

this puts all those guys who work on the giant antenna towers to shame, what with all their belts and harnesses and other safety equipment. Sometimes, they even have elevators to take them part of the way up.
Used to be wind turbine posts were just big enough for a ladder inside. Then they got big enough for a one-man elevator (that climbed the ladder). Its floor and ceiling popped open, just in case. Now the posts are big enough for a saloon car, which is good because it takes a whole crew, up top.
I have a really dim view of people who hold a dim view of health and safety, especially around stuff like this. This sort of old-school machismo is encouraged by industry because doing things with a higher margin of safety is slower and more expensive. Often not by much, especially compared to the volume of money being made overall, which is what makes it even more reprehensible.

Falls from heights are a huge cause of workplace deaths in construction: https://www.osha.gov/fall-protection

It doesn't take much height to do so: https://cdn1.hardhattraining.com/wp-content/uploads/how-high...

Any time an employer or company encourages you to take risks or pressures you to not observe safety regulations, find another job, fast. Your life is not less important than profits or productivity. Ever.

Edit: not impressed at all. This guy is an asshole - aside from the fact that multiple clips show him picking something off chimneys or towers, giggling, and throwing them casually off - here he is laughing about how he and a coworker purposefully dumped a bucket of cement water off the top of a tower and came down to found they'd damaged a guy's nice sports car. Which he thinks his hilarious: https://youtu.be/ezX_o0H5FuE?t=217