On and off over the last couple of years I have been following the trials and tribulations of life on the Ice Roads with Ice Road Truckers and also life in the mountains with the Axemen. These are television shows which follow the working lives of Ice Road drivers in Northern Canada and lumberjacks in Northwestern Oregon.
I wouldn’t say I actually follow these series – but if they happen to be on I’m happy to watch (much to my girlfriends disdain); I think the appeal of these shows for me is getting an insight into the working days of tough guys doing “Real Work” – these guys could get injured, or even killed just going about their daily tasks…Now, don’t get me wrong, software engineering can be pretty frenetic, I almost spilled some warm tea on me (and the keyboard!) the other day – but I’ve never actually felt my life was threatened whilst in the office.
Ice Road Trucker
Ice Road Trucking is essentially about driving very big trucks carrying huge payloads over roads cut into the Canadian icefields over the course of “the season” – at the end of said season the roads start to melt – which is not good for the drivers. Trucking in these conditions is definately a stressful job for the drivers, mainly from an endurance/concentrating for a long time point of view and has some inherent dangers, such as being stranded on the ice road or dropping thorugh the ice. However neither of these risks seems hugley scary to me, if they get stranded they radio for help/wait for the next truck which will be along in a matter of hours; and despite the threat of plunging through the ice – there are support teams out checking the state of the ice so it’s a very calculated risk.
Personally I prefer the Axemen series – this features the workers of various logging companies working in the mountains of Oregon. These guys cut down trees, skip and jump and love to press wild flowers… oh no hang on. Apart from the obvious Monty Python connotations lumberjacking looks like hard work. These guys are charged with felling and retrieving large swathes of seriously big trees from some pretty inhospitable landscapes. There is some sophisticated technology used in the industry but mainly they have to get out there with their chainsaws and get busy.
I enjoy watching both series, but feel that the producers have always been trying to make the programmes into competitions (who can haul the most truckloads, which company shifts the most timber and so on) – I think they’ve missed the point – just seeing what the challenges are and how they do the work is the draw of the show.
The other thing that always irritated me about these shows is that the producers seem to want someone to get injured (or killed) I know it would make good telly but still…
So, based on my interest in the previous shows, I’m intruiged to see Channel 5 advertising the upcoming Oil Riggers series based on the working lives of roughneck oil workers in Texas. I think the producers may have struck lucky (as it were) with picking a very hard messy job with a high chance of injuries…. I’ll be watching with interest.
Read Full Post »
Red Dwarf Crew
It looks like all of the usual suspects are making an appearance in the new episode – titled “Red Dwarf: Back to Earth”- with the addition of, the rather pleasing on the eye, Sophie Winkleman as Rimmer’s nemesis. It looks like there will be a lot more CGI used in these episodes and generally more attention focused on production values – so no more shakey sets and laughable aliens; a shame in a sense, but it may be the crucial factor for hooking a new generation of viewers.
OwZone 