(1:01) "..It started one lunchtime, in a pub down the road..." After that, I find the rest of the story plausible, yeah.

I thought I knew ALL the Monty Python skits! 🤷🏻‍♂️ 😂

Once a bad project is approved, it’s a slippery slope, downhill all the way. They had snow chance. The locals were piste off.

If all the conversations I’ve had in pubs came to fruition like this, the world would be a weird & wonderful place 😆

“It all started, at lunch time, in a pub down the road…” That explains a lot. Could have just ended the report right there.

Skied down it nearly every day as a child, unfortunately without skies, great memories.

Why didn’t they build a ski jump run, so you could sail over the slip-road and land on a sea of dumped mattresses? 😬

This journalist is a blast from the past. Sounds just like KZfaqr Mark Felton. 😂

At first,i thought this was satire.. Nice video of the old days..

I had a little look into this and it seems the three gentlemen involved were up to quite a bit of corrupt activities, including a housing scheme where some of the materials for the project ended up being used for a couple of extensions on their own houses!

The wonderful and fortunate thing about these 'double-system' stores is that the soundtracks sound superb, being a magnetic track and not optical. Well done BBC Archive !

This is UTTERLY fantastic. Every detail is better than the next.

3:55 the flare on those trousers!

This makes Sheffield Ski Village look like Val d'Isère 😂

if you drive down the coastal road in Southport we have exactly the same problem with a very bumpy road. The council asked locals to dump their rubbish where the road was going to go, my mother took our old pram and dumped it.

this people, is why we have public procurement regulations

One for all the people who think everything used to be better. Constructing a ski slope (?) without a tender or planning permission (??) by building up a mound of uncontrolled rubble (???) really is up there.

I like how there was nearly a car crash at 1:48

I love this channel lol Keep em coming BBC Archives 😊

No-one does journalism like the BBC, at least not back then. ‘The slope is too high, too fast, and too bear the motorway.’ Beautiful.

Super, humourous journalism at it's best. Bravo 1970s BBC!

So this is where the Marble Arch mound people took their inspiration from!

They did a good job levelling it because I never had a clue and have driven by that junction for decades.

I remember both the ski slope and the motorway being built.

There are crosswinds, sun in your eyes, it's steep and it's bumpy...yip sounds like a ski slope to me...hold ma beer !!

Born & raised in Liverpool & never knew about this. Great little story that, like many, started one lunchtime in a pub.

Not only this but the adjoining athletics track in use for years was eventually discovered not to be the correct length around the track as in not 400 metres!

Professional journalism something we rarely get now.

If all ski-slopes had a run-off to a motorway island I would go out of my way to watch Ski Sunday!!! 😁👍🏆

£140,000 and two year construction time for a Government project without having to compromise on the rubbish quality sounds like an absolute bargain these days.

Brilliantly executed bit of reporting.

Nothing like making a mountain out of a molehill

What an excellent report, presented, written and filmed

All done with the aid of a beer and a few gin and tonics 😂

Jacob Rees Mogg saw this as a 7 year old, a few years before starting Eton and thought, "So that's how the UK procures things, huh? In that case I recon I might run a London based management consultancy and become a politician, seems like those two things in combination might work out very nicely, especially should there ever be a pandemic."

What a great bit of film though- nice camera work, great delivery (love the sardonic tone)... just... good. Well made. Love it.

Thank goodness we live in times where nothing like this could HS2ppen again!

This is giving me Tom Scott vibes.

Where there many skiers in Kirby, needing a practice run before flying off the the Alps for their hols? 🤔 No learner slope, and for experienced skiers, it would pretty boring, no 'great snowy mountain view. You'd have to hire/provide all the skis, boots & poles just to have a go - so you need paid staff... apart from that, I think it was a great idea! 😆 Tried it once in Wales as a kid, was ok as a one-off, but that surface grid is hard and covered in nylon brush, when you fall and get your hand caught, it hurts like &*^%! Not like snow!! Couldn't use my hand for the rest of the holidays - though I did have a cool bandage. 😎

Great slope and sportsfield. Pride of 70s . The wrinkles made it exciting to use. Fun memories. The area around smelt bad and there was open mud.

I used to live in Mercer Heights in sight of this, legendary landmark! 😁

Brilliant! & I thought some modern politicians were corrupt & incompetent. Good to see it’s always gone on,& not so good that it always will !

Why did they want to take the bumps out? They’ve got the best Mogul field the north has ever seen

In this fast-moving, immediate gratification via Internet, culture we live in, I find rhis slow drawn out report refreshing.

Five best ski resorts: Aspen, USA. Whistler, Canada. Zermatt, Switzerland. Val d’Isère, France. Kirkby, UK.

Ha ha.. I remember the ski slope scandal. I don’t know when they got rid of it but it was there for years.

The only artificial ski slope with moguls!

This story is legendry in Liverpool for those in the know , looks like a total pxss take but 100% true.....Classic 👍Luv it 😂

Conceived whilst on the piste.

But at least they used sturdy railings! That’s a good cm of wood panelling to get through before you reach certain death on the motorway.

53°28'28.67"N, 2°54'5.73"W

RIP Martin One of Aunty's finest investigative journalists

"He dumped a couple of loads himself" lmao

The Bell-bottomed business suit need to make a comeback

"Oi mate, you're gonna need a loicence built that ski slope!"

Wasn’t the motorway nice and quiet, when our country wasn’t over populated. Great video, shame about the ski slope.

I remember this.

1:00 is soooo (with several o's) Alan Partridge 😂

you can look for this on google maps but the land must have been levelled because there's only grass and trees now

I remember one built in Harlow in the 70s and I think it lasted about ten years. Some sort of town council oneupmanship at the time I guess. Imagine when the biggest worry a town planner had was not having a local ski slope.

In the US state of Michigan they built a ski area on a landfill, known as Mount Trashmore. The biomass keeps the ground too warm for snow to acclimate on it.

Remember it well. Had a Raleigh Chipper, I was 7, and I went barreling down this thing and wrecked the bike. Still have a scar on my left knee. Only in Liverpool, huh?

Back in 1987, i was sent to do some work on the ski slope in Pembrey country park, west Wales. I arrived just as the white matting was being finished, with the last piece attached that day. I was then told the whole lot had to be replacd as it was only usable when it was wet. So unless it was raining, there would be too much grip on ski's for it to be used at all. It was all taken up and replaced with "dry use" matting. The wire rope system for pulling skiers up the hill was also going to be 'in line' with the centre of the pulley system TOWERS, so the skiers would have been pulled through the base of each tower, and not to one side of them around a wheel. The concrette counter weight wooden mold, was also buried 'in line' with where the wire rope was SUPPOSED to be, and not in line with the towers themselves. so the towers would have eventually leaned sideways from any weight on the wire pulley system. All these issues were caught by THE WORKERS on the scheme (manpower) and NOT by the engineers who designed it i.e. Llanelli borough council. But that's what happens when out of work skilled tradesman are put to work as cheap labour back in those days. The level of knowledge between the 'manpower' guys was very large, them being made up mostly of redundant factory workers from the area at the time, several of them tradesmen from a local Steelworks, myself included. Llanelli council couldn't organize a hole in the road, let alone a ski slope.

Did he just say “By Jove, I needed that!”?

The moguls were built in! I love how this little bunny hill is considered a “ski slope.”

I live in the Adirondacks. There’s a couple failed ski slopes here too. All built on the wrong side of the mountain.

It’s nice to see nothing changes.

I remember seeing that as a kid.

All good decisions start in the pub 😂

The council put a large, impressive looking sign on some steep hills between Haydock and Newton, saying "St. Helens Ski Slope Centre". It was there for years. Never did get built. An absolute joke.

Look how quiet the roads are man, why do i have to live here now. I wish i had the freedom these guys had.

The narrator sounds like Mark Felton.

I remember driving past this, down the M57 next to it. It was such an eye-sore.

The dukes of hazzard been waiting for this

Love how he's like the bill was for 64,000 !!! Planing dept spend more then that on stationary now

Dave, Eric & George love to joke about it to this day. You should ask em. Every time you visit the pub down the road, givem a yodel

Good news is that at least two of them ended up in prison later for corruption

I bet there was a few back handers on that job

The Contractor who employed me in the 1970s had the last laugh as if I remember we were paid to remove it. One problem was that as the money began to run out so the Ski Club elected to lay the surface themselves, not a good idea as it folded and rippled. As commented below there was a element of corruption at that time.

“It’s what we call… a crack” 😂 that is classic English humour right there

49 years later and councils/government are STILL doing things like this.

5:12 "I think you better haul me up, lads." * * Note; No lads were involved in the making of this scene

Guaranteed I'm gonna have a cool snowboarding dream tonight 😜😜🤣🤣😜😜

I literally drive past there using the underpass every day never knew the story! (its not still there :)

All three men responsible for this eyesore were jailed on Corruption charges in 1978

Runcorn built a ski slope around the same time and it's still going strong. What was it with the mid 1970s and dry ski slopes?

Pure bureaucratic efficiency!!

Modern-day politicians evidently saw this and were like: "Hold my beer"

I love his orange smock. Amazing. Also an amazing story.

I miss the old days!! 😂😂Having said that, it probably still goes on! 😉

Liverpool.

As a former ski jumper from Canada maybe I can offer a few suggestions to the bold British lads who might be taking up the sport. Before rocketing down a massive ski jump it does one well to buckle one’s bindings. Before building a huge ski jump, even with buckled bindings, it is often a good idea to plan an area to land. Hope these tips help. ps And, yes, during your first ride down the ramp, as your speed approaches the maximum, it is entirely appropriate to emit a blood curdling scream at the top of your lungs.

I swear I've seen this plot line on The Simpsons before. 🤦

Wait. Is this basically the story of the Springfield Monorail, except true?

The unintentional innuendo is amazing 2:51 Free "tip" in Kirby, he proclaimed. And they came in their hundreds, according to local lorry operator Alf Seddon; He dumped a couple of loads himself.

I know a man who sat in a pub 1 dinner time with two mates he now owns 4 tanks that shoot paint balls lol

This is hilarious! Just why would you even think of building this? Where’s the market for a start?😂

Thank god that kind of corruption would never happen today.😂

The BBC - by all accounts - has been on “a bit of a slippery slope itself” the past few years 🤓🤓😝😝😝😎😎 !!!!!!!!

When Kirkby goes bananas