Danny Dyer’s Caravan Park, that’s the new name for post-Brexit Britain, aka John Bull’s Island, aka Them Over There. It’s also the idea of a new programme on Sky in which Danny Dyer is given a caravan park to run.
Sure, why not? This is a new trend in management policy and comes hot on the heels of the success of Clarkson’s Farm, on Prime Video. Clarkson’s Farm is a very popular programme in which Jeremy Clarkson is given control over Britain’s food supply and the British people get to watch as they starve.
Yes, having had enough of both experts and royals, Britain is a celebritocracy nowadays. Celebritocracy is a simple enough concept. Give celebrities stuff to run and film the results – Stephen Fry’s Country Cafe, Mel and Sue’s City Zoo, Cannon and Ball’s Air Traffic Control, Rod Hull and Emu’s NHS.
And now we have Danny Dyer’s caravan park. The news of Danny Dyer’s ascendancy to caravan-park manager is slightly bewildering to the people who work in the caravan park, the family who co-own it and the people who spend some of their time holidaying there. He doesn’t endear himself to them by arriving late. But he means well.
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He wants to “bring back the great British holiday”. I suspect the only people who really want to return to this dubious phenomenon never gave up on other great British traditions like drinking from lead cups and swathing themselves in asbestos. It’s a little like wanting to return to the Irish culinary traditions of 1847. But, look, it’s Danny Dyer: he can say what he likes and exists in a time filled with inexplicable nostalgia. “Bring back rickets!” “You know what you never see any more? Children up chimneys!”
Danny Dyer is a cockney, a mythical being like a hobbit or a centaur that was once thought to roam the city of London. He looks like a Fisher-Price man, except he has a full moustache that looks like Mr Potato Head’s or Willie O’Dea’s and he talks like this: “This is the facking caravan for you.” And: “I’m going to have a pony in the main khazi,” before having a pony in the main khazi.
He says all this into a phone camera being held by his daughter, who is, confusingly, called Dani Dyer. They are making an ad. And, yes, there are two Danny Dyers – or, properly, Dannys Dyer. (It’s pluralised like “attorneys general”.) I’m guessing all of Danny Dyer’s children are called things like Dany Dyer or Dani Dyer or Danee Dyer or Daany Dyer, which is as it should be.
Danny and Dani’s qualifications for the job of caravan-park manager seem to be that they have both been on holiday. Dani, in fairness, has been on a proper sun holiday on a famous televised lust archipelago where audiovisual boffins were trying to breed a new strain of reality-TV hunks. (This study is ongoing.) Danny, however, is harking back to something a little grittier.
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In many ways The Dyers’ Caravan Park, which is also set on an island (the Isle of Sheppey), could be called Mike Leigh’s Love Island. In the olden days, before the widespread celebrification of television, someone would have made a fascinating two-part documentary about the forgotten older communities who frequent the caravan park under the control of the Dannys Dyer.
There are glimpses of this alternative programme from time to time when we meet the very likable long-term residents of The Dyers’ Caravan Park, but quickly the spotlight is removed from them and shone upon the Double Dannys as they undertake tasks like procuring a billboard (in which, unaccountably, Danny Dyer looks like he’s pleasuring a caravan in his shouting gob) or running a sports day (it ends up costing £10,000 for unaccountable reasons) or selling new caravans (they get the price wrong by several thousand pounds).
The Dannys Dyer regularly end up in Dyer straits. (This show should be called Dyer Straits, and then we could stick with Danny Dyer’s Caravan Park as the new name for Britain.) At which point their wise servants – a trope of 19th-century fiction that has returned to reality television – shake their heads and roll their eyes and groan and lament their lot on this planet as flunkeys to a vaudevillian cockney and his cursed clone child.
And then, as is tradition, their more competent underlings bail them out. This has the scripted inevitability of sitcom rather than the insightful surprise of true documentary. When Danny grinds a lawnmower into the mud, he’s helped out of his situation by a sighing employee called Mark. “Could Mark do Pinter?” Danny says to Dani defensively. “Could Mark do a six-month run at the National Theatre? Probably not.”
This is a fair observation, Danny, but you are somehow, against logic, running a caravan park.
It’s hard for me not to lament the loss of the old-fashioned fly-on-the-wall documentary about niche communities that this could have been. But I guess those days, like the days of the great British holiday, are long gone. Perhaps Danny Dyer could work on bringing back the great British fly-on-the-wall documentary for his next show.
On the other hand, I like Danny Dyer (and I am not in principle averse to his Scrappy-Doo, Dani Dyer). He brings real warmth to his interactions with his fellow humans, and on some level I feel like maybe it’s okay if he runs everything. Looking at the world right now, there are definitely worse political systems.
This is why I am now okay with people endlessly remaking shows from my youth so I can return to the television womb and just forget about everything.
ABC and Disney+ have remade Scrubs and brought back all the characters from the original. JD (Zach Braff), now a local doctor for wealthy suburbanites, returns to Sacred Heart Hospital, where Turk (Donald Faison), Dr Cox (John C McGinley), Carla (Judy Reyes) and Elliot (Sarah Chalke), JD’s ex-wife, are all still in place, albeit a little older, sadder and more world weary.
In retrospect, Scrubs was from a golden age when sitcoms were still aiming to have laugh lines every 15 seconds and not twice an episode. It’s still funny and warm and sentimental and inventive (the episode My Screw Up, from the original series, is still one of the best instalments of any programme), and it now comes with additional self-referential nostalgia for ageing fans.
I’m glad it’s back. That said, I would feel more comfortable with the efficacy of this fictional hospital if it were run by some sort of moonlighting celebrity – Timothée Chalamet, perhaps, or the Krankies.
