The Motorway: Life in the Fast Lane; Wilderness Walks with Ray Mears – beware of peeing, pooing and spitting lorry drivers
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Version 0 of 1. The M6, our longest motorway, is the country’s aorta, feeding the old industrial heart. But it’s the aorta and heart of a heavy smoker, clogged up and knackered; the West Midlands is choking up, that aneurism is never far off. The Motorway: Life in the Fast Lane (BBC2) follows some of the teams trying to keep it all ticking. Men in hi-viz vests and hard hats, not scrubs. Actually, “the fast lane” is a bit of a misnomer. Not only does the traffic on the M6 never move very quickly, if at all (except when the men in hard hats have to run across it, which they do when they need to close the motorway). Most of the drama in this oddly fascinating but depressing observational documentary happens over on the left-hand side of the carriageway. On the hard shoulder, for example, which isn’t always a hard shoulder these days. Because of aforementioned cloggage – five times the number of vehicles than there were when it opened – the hard shoulder becomes a lane at busy times. A smart motorway, they call it. Which is of no comfort to the poor lady having a puncture-induced panic attack. Where the hell is she supposed to pull over now? Her daughter responds in the modern way, by tweeting about it. Further left, on the verge, the litter tells its own story. A £20 note, then a fiver, sucked out of a nearside window, probably. But that’s the end of the good news for the poor man whose job it is to pick the rubbish up. “Driver Tizer” is a new one on me – lorry driver piss, bottled on the go, then jettisoned. Eurgh. This one, as the litter man says, dark and full of bits, looks as if whoever produced it could do with some urgent maintenance himself. And it gets worse. “Some people decide it’s OK to shit in a bag, and then just lob it out the window,” he says. A colleague was cutting the grass on the bank “and he strimmed through a bag of human shit”. Mmmm. Lorry drivers don’t come out of this well. If they’re not urinating and defecating on the hoof, they’re catching up on box sets on the dashboard. The Sopranos maybe, round Spaghetti Junction. Or they’re spitting at the workmen, for slowing their progress. Or cutting in terrifyingly around the cones, grabbing the final places on the motorway before it’s closed. Or maybe it’s just that their brakes don’t work, and they can’t stop. Lorry drivers, you can’t all be so bad, can you? (Ducks, in case of flying bags.) Further left still, but not that far, just a few metres from the road, people try to live. People like Alan and Jim, who has self-diagnosed himself with OMD: Obsessive Motorway Disorder. And Mr and Mrs Croak, who were here before the M6 was here. Then it came, an elevated section, filling the sky above their back garden with concrete and noise. Now, because of a drainage problem, their garden is filling with water. They should have emigrated to Australia back in the 1960s, when Mr Croak wanted to. It’s a bleak picture of choked-up Britain – more and more cars, less space, no one happy, out-of-control lorries, the air filled with decibels and anger, airborne phlegm, driver Tizer and bags of poo. The only nice moment – a thin slice of joy among the misery – is when Matt the Tarmac-er brings a caramelised onion quiche along to share out among the nightshift workers. After that, Wilderness Walks with Ray Mears (ITV) is a lovely relief – quiet, traffic-free, the opposite of angry. In this first one, Ray meanders around Dartmoor, possibly his favourite national park, where he learned to navigate as a young man, roaming from tor to tor. He stops to coo over a newborn Dartmoor pony foal, to admire the moss and lichen, to search for a rare beetle, to listen in a wood to the warbling of a wood warbler, and to pick a leaf of wood sorrel, the first wild plant he ever tasted. It feels a long way from the M6. It’s not just about nostalgia and natural history, it’s about history too, both quite recent and very ancient. So he meets Captain, a range engine that towed targets for shooting practice in the second world war. And he rests in a bronze age circle of stones that was once someone’s home, and where he now looks at home, too. Ray Mears works very well on television; but maybe he really should have been around 3,500 years ago. |