The Dyers’ Caravan Park review – this lazy, shambolic show does nothing to help the real people involved

Review The Dyers’ Caravan Park review – this lazy, shambolic show does nothing to help the real people involved Father and daughter, Danny and Dani Dyer, are supposed to be reviving a caravan park that’s seen better days. Instead they’re mucking about and cracking infantile jokes – while the owners look desperately on L ike him or loathe him – I like him – Danny Dyer rarely misfires. The geezer “act” is an act only insofar as every celebrity is an act; he’s a more-than-competent actor and he has presented some decent documentaries (especially his most recent one, about modern masculinity). The Dyers’ Caravan Park, however, is a pile of rubbish. The set-up is pretty simple. Danny loves caravan parks. He spent many happy holidays in them in his youth, surrounded by extended family and quickly made friends, enjoying “a sense of community that is severely lacking in today’s world”. So he has invested in such a park, the family-run Priory Hill in Leysdown-on-sea on the Isle of Sheppey, with the aim of reinvigorating it, the industry and bringing back “the great British holiday.” The six-part series will follow him and his daughter Dani through their first year at whatever it is they’re playing at. Because playing at it is what they surely are. The series begins with Danny missing the opening of the season. Everyone – owner Jimi, who has been running the business with his sister Alex since their father died three years ago, the longstanding, hardworking management team (site directors Paul and Darren, site manager Mark, the park’s residents) – had been expecting their new celebrity investor and figurehead, but it doesn’t seem to even have occurred to him to turn up. He was at the Brit awards instead. “Lot of disappointed people, to be honest,” says Jimi, standing in the February rain amid the chalets and vans he is trying to keep hold of as a viable business long into the age of cheap flights and package deals to warmer, sunnier climes. A half-hearted apology to the team ...