Mrs Dealer loves Sky+. In fact, I can’t remember a time when it didn’t exist. She spends more time setting up timers (and then deleting programmes she hasn’t watched) than she does watching the programmes she has actually recorded.
If Sky+ was an Olympic sport she’d be the Sir Chris Hoy of Domestic TV Pre-Recording And Deleting.
“Oh, Truckers…” was all she said about a new series on BBC. At least that’s what I think she said.
Truckers starts on 10 October 2013, a Thursday night. It also happens to be Line Dancing Night at the local Parish Hall, so Sky+ will come into play.
On the face of it, there is hope that she won’t delete it before viewing it. It is written by William Ivory, who penned Made In Dagenham with the marvellous Sheridan Smith, and it’s about lorry drivers.
Yet the early signs seem so-so; five 60 minute programmes described as being ‘funny, moving and at times painful’ with words like ‘ordinary’ and ‘extremes’ and ‘alone’. A surefire remit for yarns about unstable and meek folk struggling with life. The bumf ends with a sentence that strikes at the heart of every pragmatist: “These are powerful, moving stories, but the tone is always joyous and each story is one of redemption.”
You might as well say: “When Harry Met Sally…but with trucks.”
If five wrongs have to be righted, how long will it be before the local agency supplying these unhinged, docile halfwit lost-at-sea lorry drivers is firebombed for complete incompetence? Long enough for a new series to begin called; Fire-fighters…
Hang on…Mrs Dealer informs me that London’s Burning ran from 1986 to 2002 and is considered the foremost TV series on fire-fighting, making a remake unlikely…
Didn’t stop Planet Of The Apes getting remade, I whisper.
Anyway…I, too, have been a lorry driver and spent time behind the wheel and gone days without talking to anyone. It’s hard work coping with a decomposing road network and piss-poor facilities, while fulfilling the role of ‘social pariah’.
Joey Barton is considered a better role model, but like the bad-boy-turned-Nietzsche (“I punch people because God is dead…”) belligerence becomes the tool of choice for truckers when faced with do-gooders and the self-appointed moral elite stuck in their cars behind every truck ever built. “The road-hogging bastards,” I hear them cry as one.
Of course, I generalise, but my fear is that Truckers will focus on the fragility of human nature as the end in itself and not the working and social environment that shape the stoic human trait most lorry drivers display.
And that will condemn Truckers to TV history with a click of Mrs Dealers Sky+ button without so much as a passing reference to paying for a seven-hour Driver’s CPC training course out of the truckers own pocket.
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