CV Burp!
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Welcome to the latest addition to CM, a sideways look at the road transport industry on telly, radio, papers and even t’interweb CV Burp splurged itself this week with a double-bill of trucks on TV: Ice Road Truckers on Channel Five and spin-off series IRT: Deadliest Roads on the History Channel.
First up, let’s get one thing out of the way. Why the heck is IRT: Deadliest Roads on the History Channel? Surely this is a breach of the Trade Descriptions Act? As I browse through the channel on Sky, I want to know what I’m watching. Sky Sports means over-hyped sport; Good Food means people cooking dishes I never will; and Northern Birds means Mrs CV Burp has gone to bed.
A documentary about the world’s deadliest roads, while thoroughly enjoyable TV, should have no place on the History Channel. If I’m watching the History Channel, I want documentaries about the Third Reich and who shot JFK. Clearly watching someone driving a truck on an admittedly hairy bit of road might have taken place in the past, technically, but it isn’t actually studying past events is it?
IRT: Deadliest Roads isn’t just dramatic close-ups of tyres slipping across rocks next to a 7,000ft drop – it’s about three Americans in the Himalayas. We have Alabama native Dave Redmon; the bright-blue mohawk-adorned Rick Yemm and the doyenne of blue-collar America, Lisa Kelly. Unfortunately, their grasp of Nepalese isn’t too good, but one could argue that being from Alabama, Redmon’s grasp of the English language isn’t that much better.
That said, half the joy of IRT: Deadliest Roads is that it is shown after the watershed. In last Friday’s Ice Road Truckers some of the drivers were forced into such expletives as ‘shoot’ and ‘flip’, as children were watching. Travelling through the Hindu Kush, it is nice to see that an extended middle finger and some choice language directed at a Renault Clio is universal.
Still, you have to be impressed. No, not with the Ice Road Truckers moving Buddha statues across the world’s highest mountain range, but with the poor bugger who decided to drive a Renault Clio from India to Tibet. The last time we saw a Renault Clio in the trucking world was on the front of an Arclid Transport truck on the A1(M) near Wetherby, West Yorkshire (still available on YouTube if you type in ‘Arclid’).
It could make a fine episode in the next series of Ice Road Truckers watching Hugh Rowland (pictured above) push a Clio down the Dalton Highway... CV Burp can but dream.