5 hours ago
4
Like him or loathe him – I like him – Danny Dyer rarely misfires. The geezer “act” is an act only insofar as every celebrity is an act; he’s a more-than-competent actor and he has presented some decent documentaries (especially his most recent one, about modern masculinity). The Dyers’ Caravan Park, however, is a pile of rubbish.
The set-up is pretty simple. Danny loves caravan parks. He spent many happy holidays in them in his youth, surrounded by extended family and quickly made friends, enjoying “a sense of community that is severely lacking in today’s world”. So he has invested in such a park, the family-run Priory Hill in Leysdown-on-sea on the Isle of Sheppey, with the aim of reinvigorating it, the industry and bringing back “the great British holiday.” The six-part series will follow him and his daughter Dani through their first year at whatever it is they’re playing at.
Because playing at it is what they surely are. The series begins with Danny missing the opening of the season. Everyone – owner Jimi, who has been running the business with his sister Alex since their father died three years ago, the longstanding, hardworking management team (site directors Paul and Darren, site manager Mark, the park’s residents) – had been expecting their new celebrity investor and figurehead, but it doesn’t seem to even have occurred to him to turn up. He was at the Brit awards instead. “Lot of disappointed people, to be honest,” says Jimi, standing in the February rain amid the chalets and vans he is trying to keep hold of as a viable business long into the age of cheap flights and package deals to warmer, sunnier climes.
A half-hearted apology to the team and turning on the charm at a hastily called meeting with the residents in an attempt at damage limitation doesn’t go as well as he clearly assumes it will. Jimi, Paul, Darren and Mark sit stony-faced in the front row and the residents are only a little more willing to forgive. Dyer gets the latter onside by asking for suggestions for improvements to the site which – as inevitably as rain follows rain during the opening of caravan season – turns into little more than vitriolic criticism of the current regime. Who are, lest we forget, sitting in the front row.
Dyer, with all the optimism of the ignorant, promises them more or less everything. Jimi et al later explain that the “broken” night lights on the site were removed after people complained about teenagers gathering beneath them, that the suggested indoor pool (to go with the existing outdoor one) would cost an unfindable minimum of £250,000, and that a football pitch or adventure playground for the kids has long been understood to be desirable – but no one ever wants such things outside their chalet or van.
It continues in much the same bleak vein for most of the two episodes available for review. Jimi and the team simply have too much to lose to find Dyer’s incompetence or naivety as funny or charming as they are supposed to, and upon which the success of this kind of show ultimately depends. Alex still cries when she talks about her father, how much he loved the park he set up, the people in it and the success he made of it (in the heyday of the industry, not in a post-Covid hellscape in which 38 pitches are lying empty and losing £150,000 a year).
Dani, meanwhile, is busy saging a dirty caravan instead of cleaning it, while Danny is chatting to chalet and caravan owners instead of taking charge or working on anything, and his three site-saving ideas are each more stupid than the last. The first is to plaster nearby billboards with indecipherably complicated and conceivably X-rated posters advertising the park next to the nearby flyover. The second is to shoot a video on Dani’s phone advertising the new luxury caravan for sale, complete with so much swearing that the team don’t want it put out – but they’re too late, it’s already online. And the third is having a sports day to unite the disparate halves of the camp (the chalet dwellers on the original site, the caravan owners in the newer bit) – by having them compete against each other, and at a cost of £10,000 for a chaotic assemblage of space hoppers, bunting, plastic eggs that won’t stay on the spoons in the wind, and a selection of dismal prizes.
It all feels as lazy, shambolic and contemptuous of the unfortunate people involved – whose actual livelihoods are at stake – as the programme itself does. Dyer at one point likens his undertaking to Clarkson’s farm, Richard Hammond’s workshop or Jamie Oliver’s campaign for school dinners. It’s actually more like the childhood anecdote he tells about the time he shared a bath with his brother. He shat in it, and pushed it out of the way so his brother got the blame.
