Fleeting Fame

It’s easy to criticise reality TV shows, more so when their subject is our own industry. But what is it like to actually appear on such telly programmes? T&D finds some of the wagon driving stars to find out

- Lucy Radley

Eddie Stobart Trucks & Trailers Probably the most famous programme about truck drivers’ day-to-day lives was, of course, Eddie Stobart Trucks & Trailers, which aired on Channel 5 from 2010 to 2014. Tim Fox was driving for the Stobart Biomass division when he was first asked to appear.

“There were only two trailers with the new Biomass livery, so basically they tossed a coin between me and the other lad pulling one to decide who’d do the show,” Tim tells us.

“Steve did the first series but I don’t think he was all that keen, so the boss asked me to do the next one.

“I’m one of those who once I start talking I won’t shut up, but the producer thought that was brilliant,” Tim recalls. The first day’s filming went so well he was chosen to be one of the regular ‘feature drivers’, alongside people like Mark Dixon and Ashley Maddocks. Together these three represented the tramping side of the job, meeting up with the camera crew somewhere down the road.

“I would get a phone call telling me to wash the wagon because I’d be picking them up,” Tim says. “They just filmed whatever we were doing that day, our normal jobs,” he assures us. “A few customers didn’t want to be on camera, but otherwise it was just whatever I was delivering, there was nothing set up or arranged.”

Filming did slow the job down, but not a great deal. “Sometimes they’d want you to do things twice, like setting the moving floor going so they could film each part of the process,” he explains. “But at most it would only cost about 30 minutes over a day.”