I once pitched a TV show to Channel 4. It was called
Moon Salon, and involved a crew of intergalactic beauty therapists visiting ugly aliens in space. The crew themselves were various, impossible aliens and had an array of equally impossible techniques for beautifying their (also impossible) clients. For instance, one of the aliens was a meant to be a famous pop-star, so the crew were really excited to have them coming on board for a treatment. But when we finally meet the star, we see he's nothing but a vast (ie. fucking enormous) brown cube with a tiny little face at one end. The whole thing was so impossible to do, we actually visualised it as a puppet show.
In fact, the whole point of
Moon Salon was that - like all successful TV shows - it was A) completely unrealistic, and B) ever so slightly fascist. It was intended as a culmination of everything that was overblown and ridiculous about American TV...
And now, I've just come up with a show that does exactly the same for British TV!
Yep,
Farm Cops, brings together the Sunday night, morphine-drip nostalgia of
Heartbeat/Last Of The Summer Wine, with the crap, ITV shit-grit of
Taggart/Cracker. Oh, and with all the cute farm animals, rolling countryside and Land Rovers, there's a whiff of the
Howards Way lifestyle porn about it as well.
The action centres around DCI Paul "Digger" Moss. He had it all: family, career, the lot. But one day it all went wrong. We dont' know how or why, but he's haunted by it - whatever "it" is. We know his wife died giving birth to his only son, Dan (who's gay, just so we tick the equal opps. box). Digger gave up his career to become a potato farmer in East Sussex. He lives a modest life; keeps himself to hiself. He is friends with Mellissa, who runs an organic farm-shop and supplies her with potatoes. They fancy eachother really badly and every week we expect them to fuck, but they never do. Digger is true to his dead wife (except during a Xmas special which will get massive ratings). Each episode sees Digger faced with 2 kinds of adversity: 1) a local crime to solve (this could be everything from a murder, pony rustling, land disputes with gypsies, fly-tipping) and 2) trouble at the farm (this could be the rising cost of organic pesticides/pink diesel, finding a supplier for a machine part, a union dispute over Polish labour).
Not only will
Farm Cops be must-see TV with sexy farm-hands and Range Rover Sports, it'll also be a poignant commentary on contemporary rural affairs.
And it'll be just as fucking shite as everything else on telly.
Do you like unsavoury things? (Mmmm yes please!)
