Upper Intermediate Video script Unit 6

Unsung heroes

N = Narrator

N: Has a picture ever defined an age as clearly as this? It was taken at the height of

Victoria’s reign when Britain pushed the world through a revolution that changed every

last detail of our lives. Two hundred years ago Britain was the workshop of the world

but the only way you could move around it was on a horse. Brunel changed all that

with extraordinary bold and beautiful heavy engineering.

The Clifton suspension bridge in Bristol is perhaps the best known example. Brunel put

beauty into the beast of the industrial revolution. But he didn’t just build bridges, he

built railways, train stations, hospitals, sea walls and docks and he built ships the like

of which the world had never seen before. The Great Eastern, his final ship and

greatest mistake, was the largest moveable object man had ever created. Artists came

to paint it, journalists to write about it and for the first time photographers to record this

huge thing that was towering over the London sky line.

To build the ship Brunel went into business with a ship builder called John Scott

Russell, but it was a stormy partnership. They quarrelled over who was in charge and

work fell behind. The finances spiralled out of control. Money was so tight Brunel was

reduced to listing the contents of his house fearing he’d have to sell his silver to save

his ship. The company directors became so desperate for cash they even sold tickets

for the launch of the ship. Thousands came but the ship was too heavy to move.

Brunel felt publicly humiliated. Finally they got it afloat and the problems really started.

During trials six men were killed when a funnel exploded and on her maiden voyage

there were only thirty-eight passengers.

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 Upper Intermediate Video script Unit 6

There was simply no demand for a ship this big. So the Great Eastern became a

Transatlantic cable layer and then what? Where is it now? Well it didn’t sink, it didn’t hit

an iceberg like the Titanic. Its last days were spent as an advertising hoarding on the

River Mersey and then it was simply broken up for scrap. Brunel didn’t even live to see

the ship sail. Five minutes after he posed for this last photograph he collapsed from a

stroke. He died ten days later at the age of fifty three. The Clifton suspension bridge in

Bristol was completed five years later as a tribute to Brunel.

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 Upper Intermediate Video script Unit 6

World view

Li = Lizzie, Si = Sion, J = Jeanette

Li: I consider Nikola Tesla to be an unsung hero. He was an inventor and electrical

engineer in the late 1800’s and 1900’s. Um he worked a lot with Thomas Edison who

invented the light bulb and I think because of that Thomas Edison tends to overshadow

Nikola Tesla’s achievements. Um unfortunately although Tesla made a lot of money

from a lot of his inventions because he developed a reputation in later years as a bit of a

mad scientist he ended up penniless and in the gutter. So unfortunately I think we’ve all

forgotten about his achievements since then.

Si: Um a band that I think are an unsung heroes are a band, a German band called um

Neu, spelt N-e-u exclamation mark, from, they’re a German band from the early

seventies and they experimented with um they were one of the first bands to experiment

with electronic music. And they went, although they didn’t have any um hits at the time

and very peop-, few people know them they went on to influence some quite big names,

so David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Simple Minds people like that. Um and yeah they were very

innovative and nowadays hardly anybody knows who they were.

J: Um I think someone I’ve uh known about for a very long time was um Mary Seacole. I

heard about her um when um I was a child actually. I saw a television program and I

was amazed. I’d never come across her before. Um she lived during the Crimean War

and she heard about um the suffering of the British soldiers and decided to go out there

and help. So she used her own money, um set up a hotel very near to the front line and

risked her life by going and um bringing soldiers in and giving them medicine and food

and took care of them and when she came back to Britain um people forgot about her

really. She was um like very much an unsung hero.

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