Fred first came to prominence in 1979 with the BBC documentary "
Fred Dibnah: Steeplejack", an extraordinary programme which deservedly won a BAFTA.
He subsequently went on to make a number of excellent series on his passions of steam engines and industrial heritage, in one of which he sank a mine in his garden! You can see the list on
imdb and many of the programmes have books associated with them.
Strangely, although many of these programmes get regular TV repeats and are available on DVD, the original documentary has only been shown twice and is not available commercially.
Like JTL, I also met him once at a steam fair. He kindly signed a copy of his book for me and, as you can probably guess from the picture, it took a little longer than the average book signing - the queue to meet him was very long but he was generous with his time.
A lovely man, still missed.
~iw