Jeff (Graham Fletcher) is playing with his glider one day when it is blown off course by a gust of wind and ends up behind the fence in the nearby railway yard. Foolishly, instead of going to ask for help there, he sets out to fetch the model plane back himself and starts wandering around the tracks just as the freight carriages are being rolled down towards him - he is spotted by one of the workers who raises the alarm and runs after the boy to stop him ending up harmed. But it is the worker who breaks his leg in a desperate attempt to save Jeff...
Although trains featured heavily in the plot of Night Ferry, they were more the backdrop to one of those Children's Film Foundation efforts, this from where the organisation was beginning to feel the pinch from television which offered more of a distraction to Britain's kids than visiting the cinema to catch one of these on a Saturday morning might do - watch this instead of seeing the Phantom Flan Flinger on TISWAS? For many children there was no contest. That the style of these films had not changed too much in the almost thirty years since its inception was not helping the general opinion of their being hopelessly dated either.
So it's little surprise they began to be sold to television, not only in the United Kingdom but throughout the world as well, around this era in the Foundation's lifetime, and Jeff's adventures did come across as the sort of story that you could tell on the small screen over a few episodes without too much bother. However, along with the now de rigueur C.F.F. clichés of the kids foiling the bad guys, in this case a gang of Egyptian mummy thieves led by master of disguise Bernard Cribbins, there was a serious message to impart about not messing about near trains which was slightly confused by the fact that our plucky heroes do just that to stop the crooks in their tracks, if you'll pardon the pun.
British Rail was thanked in the credits, and it was clear without their co-operation Night Ferry wouldn't have happened. The service of the title was the predecessor to Eurostar, where the train and its carriages, holding both passengers and cargo, would be sailed across the English Channel on a ferry, so this was nothing if not educational. In Jeff's band of crusaders were Nick, the boy (Engin Eshref) whose father owned the sandwich van parked outside the villain's lair (under a railway bridge, of course) and Carol, Jeff's friend whose dad he inadvertantly caused to be injured that fateful day he also caught sight of Cribbins and partner in crime Aubrey Morris (stalwart of this kind of material) smuggling the sarcophagus in the back of a hearse.
Carol was played by Jayne Tottman, who would either be recalled by Brits of a certain age as one of the peregrine falcon obsessives on the Sky Hunter strand of educational show Look and Read, or even more notoriously, as the little girl who screams "JIMMEEEE!!!" in that public information film about not going into electricity substations to get back your errant frisbee, so you can see there was an improving theme to her work. That said, the demands of the narrative here see her behaving fairly recklessly in her pursuit of Jeff and Nick. Jeff is hiding in one of the baddies' packing crates, playing the junior sleuth, and Nick gets drugged into unconsciousness and wrapped up in bandages in Cribbins' subterfuge - surprisingly callously he plans to drop him into the sea to drown, not something you'd expect from the narrator of The Wombles and umpteen Jackanory tales on kids' TV. Carol has connections in the transport police, which help save the day in an adventure showing signs of repetition, but also a glimpse of seventies London worth capturing. Music by Alden Shuman.
[This has been released as part of the London Tales DVD, a three films on one disc bargain of C.F.F. works from the B.F.I.]
