Friday 18 October 2013

Yer get meh?

Truckers is the BBC's new Thursday night drama filling their primetime 9:00 to 10:00 slot. Set in Nottingham it follows the trials and tribulations of a haulage company - Banks of England - and the nomadic drivers on its fleet. In the wrong hands this could easily have fallen flat on its arse but two things, for me, have already elevated it to Appointment TV status: firstly, the finely crafted Billy Ivory script fairly crackles and balances the comedy and pathos perfectly; several scriptwriters fail miserably at this. Secondly, and this alone would have sunk the thing, never to be seen again - they've managed to nail the Nottingham accent. As someone who spent over half his life there, I know that trying to mimic an East Midlands accent, Nottingham, Derby Leicester, can be a bit like nailing jelly to a wall. If you put all the actors end to end who opt for a generic Northern accent when asked to 'do' Nottingham they'd probably stretch the full length of the A52.

Step forward, then, Stephen Tompkinson (who all but stole the scene-setting first episode) and John Dagleish who both know that cold rhymes with road (as in 'it's a bit Derby Road this morning') and that 'yer get meh' is how you ask someone if they understood what you've just told them. Not it serry?

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