The Dyers’ Caravan Park review – This lazy and shameful show does nothing to help the real people involved | Danny Dyer

toLove him or hate him – I love him – Danny Dyer rarely puts a foot wrong. The grotesque “act” is an act only insofar as all celebrities are an act; He’s a more than competent actor and has made some decent documentaries (especially his most recent film about modern masculinity). However, the Dyers Caravan Park is a pile of rubbish.

Setup is very simple. Danny loves caravan parks. He spent many happy holidays in his youth, surrounded by his extended family and quickly made friends, enjoying “the sense of community that is sorely lacking in today’s world.” So he invested in such a park, the family-run Priory Hill in Leysdown-on-Sea on the Isle of Sheppey, with the aim of revitalizing it, revitalizing industry and bringing back “the great British holiday”. The six-part series will follow him and his daughter Dani through their first year in whatever they play.

Because playing them is definitely what they are. The series begins with Danny’s absence from the season opener. Everyone – owner Jamie, who has been running the business with his sister Alex since their father’s death three years ago, and the hard-working long-time management team (site managers Paul and Darren, site manager Mark, the park residents) – have been anticipating the new famous investor and figurehead, but it doesn’t seem to occur to him to show up. He was at the Brit Awards instead. “To be honest, there are a lot of people who are frustrated,” says Jimmy, standing in the February rain among the chalets and vans he is trying to keep as a viable business long in the era of cheap flights and package deals to a warmer, sunnier climate.

A half-hearted apology to the team and turning on magic at a hastily called meeting with residents in an attempt to limit the damage doesn’t go as well as he clearly assumes it will. Jimmy, Paul, Darren and Mark sit stone-faced in the front row, and the residents become more willing to forgive. Dyer supports the latter by asking for suggestions to improve the site, which – as inevitably happens with rain during the opening of the caravan season – turns into little more than a scathing criticism of the current system. Who, lest we forget, are sitting in the front row.

Dyer, with all the optimism of the fool, promises them almost everything. Jimmy and others later explained that the “broken” night lights had been removed from the site after people complained about teenagers congregating under them, that the proposed indoor swimming pool (to match the existing outdoor pool) would cost at least £250,000, and that a football field or children’s adventure playground had long been desirable – but no one would ever want such things outside they Chalet or van.

It continues in much the same dismal fashion for most of the two episodes available for review. Jamie and the team have too much to lose to find Dyer’s ineptitude or naivety as funny or charming as they’re supposed to, which is what the success of this type of show ultimately depends on. Alex still cries when she talks about her dad, how much he loved the park he created, the people in it and the success he had in it (at the peak of the industry, not in a post-Covid hell with 38 empty stadiums and losing £150,000 a year).

Meanwhile, Danny is busy cleaning a dirty caravan instead of cleaning it, Danny talks to chalet and caravan owners instead of taking charge or working on anything, and his three ideas for saving the site are even dumber than the last. The first is to plaster nearby billboards with incomprehensibly complex, X-rated posters advertising the park next to the nearby flyover. The second is to shoot a video on Danny’s phone advertising the new luxury caravan for sale, with lots of expletives that the team doesn’t want to publish – but it’s too late, and it’s already available online. The third is to hold a sports day to unite the disparate halves of the camp (chalet dwellers on the original site, caravan owners on the newer part) – by pitting them against each other, at a cost of £10,000 for a chaotic assemblage of space hoppers, bunting, plastic eggs that won’t stay on spoons in the wind, and a selection of dismal prizes.

The whole thing feels as lazy, shameful and contemptuous of the miserable people involved – whose very real livelihoods are at stake – as does the program itself. Dyer at one point likens his project to Clarkson’s farm, Richard Hammond’s workshop, or Jamie Oliver’s campaign for school dinners. It’s actually more like a childhood tale he tells about the time he shared a bathroom with his brother. He intruded on him and pushed him out of the way until he got the blame on his brother.