Australia’s Outback truckers are suckers
Malcolm Hopwood
If you want to be a fiction writer, start with Outback
Truckers (TV One, Tuesdays). There, you can test your skills and include adventure, peril, excitement, rude dialogue and ‘‘man against nature’’ in your purple prose. The next step is the
New York Times bestseller’s list. I love Outback Truckers. It’s a world I don’t know about. But it comes complete with a soundtrack that turns reality TV into a series that competes with Bear Grylls for danger.
Last Tuesday, trucker Steve Grahame had to rebuild his rig to take essential supplies 6500 kilometres into Australia’s northwest. He had it patched up in time – he left with a bare grill – and ‘‘fought the clock and the weather’’ to complete his round trip.
In South Australia, Cameron Smith loaded a 130-tonne dump truck on the back of his rig and drove 2600km from Leigh Creek coalmine to outside Perth. The dump truck was a monster. It weighed more than the All Black and English forward packs minus Joe Moody.
Cameron had to use bypass roads to reach Perth by Sunday night. It’s the only time the streets are deserted. Locals are home slipping a shrimp on the barbie. He’s allowed to rumble through the main thoroughfare without taking half the shopping centre with him. The tension is palpable.
But the greatest story comes from Sludge Andrews. Sludge has answered a call from his mate, Hogget, in New Zealand. Sludge is required to load and drive 45 steers from Ranfurly in Central Otago, across Arthur’s Pass to Greymouth.
Arthur’s Pass is described as more dangerous than facing Wyatt Earp at Tombstone. The narrator doesn’t seem to know it’s been upgraded. With purple claiming to represent sexual frustration, Sludge’s dialogue moves from pink to magenta. He has to stop somewhere and offload the effluent. That’s a polite way of saying the steers have gone to the toilet. And then one falls over. It’s like a collapsed scrum. He offloads some into another truck so the steer can stand up, and then returns them to his own. Sludge is unhappy.
But Outback Truckers forgets we know our geography. According to the episode, Sludge drives out of Ranfurly and turns left into Darfield. But then he’s back lumbering past Waimate and, when he takes the Timaru bypass, he’s only 50km away from Arthur’s.
Sludge’s language is like the effluent. He gets behind a slow motorist.
‘‘He’s a moron,’’ Sludge bawls, describing Kiwi drivers.
Doesn’t he know that Scott Mclaughlin and Shane van Gisbergen are leading the Australian Supercar Championships?
Sludge doesn’t reach Greymouth until next Tuesday, but the scriptwriters make us believe that crossing the Southern Alps is like conquering Everest in PJS and slippers.
I can’t wait for Cameron, Steve and Sludge to reach their destination. It’s escapist TV at its best and rivals the Women’s Weekly and Friday Flash for accuracy. But I’m pleased for Hogget.
The Cry (TV One, Sundays) has to be one of my biggest disappointments. The Cry has so many flashbacks and flash forwards that, by the end of the first episode, I wasn’t feeling flash at all. It tells the story of Joanna, Alistair and young baby Noah, who travel to Australia to visit family and fight Alistair’s ex-wife Alexandra, for custody of Chloe. On the journey from Melbourne to Geelong, Noah goes missing and Joanna’s psychological state disintegrates.
I’m sure the TV producer engaged a pathologist to dismember the episode. Not even Jenna Coleman (Victoria )as Joanna could save it.
Yet it has elements of a gripping series if only they’d let it happen. I’d grab Sludge. He’d drive them to Geelong to sort things out.
It’s taken John Cleese about 40 years to return to a TV series. If you can imagine Basil Fawlty in his dotage and anecdotage, then you’ll enjoy Phil in Hold The
Sunset (UKTV Mondays).
Phil spends most of his days in Edith’s house across the road.
‘‘I need rescuing by you. I want to get married,’’ Phil tells her and she’s about to agree when Roger, her dysfunctional son, arrives. He’s left his wife and job and wants to return home to his Dandy and
Beano comic collection.
That puts wedding plans on hold.
There’s a lot of dialogue and shouting that goes nowhere and Roger has a ‘‘routine, mid-life crisis’’ by getting stuck in the window of Edith’s garden shed.
Not much makes sense but it allows Cleese, now 79, to deliver some vintage put-downers. He’s mellowed, lost some of his comic genius, but is still a triumph for the art of embalming.