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Spectator
6 days ago
- Automotive
- Spectator
Why truck stop cafés trump motorway service stations
There's something about motorway service stations that seems to encourage the very worst in human behaviour. They're places where no doubt usually responsible members of society have long decided that it's permissible to drop semi-industrial amounts of litter on to the verges, urinate all over the toilet floor and belch with impunity while queuing up for a Whopper at Burger King. For me, it was the full-to-the-brim child's nappy that someone had left on a chair in the revolting 'sit down café' at a services near Preston that made me decide that I would never set foot in a Welcome Break, Moto or Roadchef ever again. I'm lucky; I have a bladder that can tolerate journeys of four or five hours by car. My fiancée, however, is not equipped with such sturdiness. So, over the past few years, we've been seeking out alternative forms of respite from the road. Truck stops are, I always assumed, not the kind of establishment in which a journalist and an intensive care nurse on their holidays would be welcome. Perhaps like many people not involved in the heavy transportation industry, I assumed these were malodorous, members-only places where entry would strictly be restricted to men of a certain age who were covered in axle grease and wearing grimy hi-vis jackets with trousers that comfortably showed at least two-thirds of their backside at any given time. My pompous snobbery was duly kicked into touch when we stumbled across Skelmersdale truck stop café. The first thing to tell you about truck stops is that they are not hard to find, presuming you have a smartphone. Nearly always independently owned and typically situated in an industrial estate around ten minutes' drive from the motorway itself, the locations are frequently aesthetically unedifying. So far, so absolutely predictable, you might say. But what surprised us was the welcome that a couple in a 2014 Ford Focus attracted when pulling into these places. Firstly, there is always parking for cars, as well as articulated lorries. And secondly, there's absolutely no grumpy official telling you that the place is for Eddie Stobart employees only. Inside the café itself; well, the décor is not going to be to the tastes of Philippe Starck. But, then again, neither would the interior of a Welcome Break. Be in no doubt, truck stop cafés are greasy spoons of the type that you seldom see on high streets any more. There will be Formica. There will be a TV showing (silently) football highlights from Bosnia or Colombia. There will be several red-top newspapers discarded across the tables. But there will also be an invariably cheerful woman ready to take your order at the counter for a made-from-scratch cooked breakfast of outstanding quality, and at a price that wouldn't get you a Rustlers microwave burger at a petrol station. Last summer, my Skelmersdale trucker breakfast of two bacon rashers, two sausages, fried egg, black pudding, beans, mushrooms and two slices of toast cost £4. I didn't need to eat again for 12 hours. The typical truck stop café (and there are dozens and dozens of them around the UK) doesn't limit itself to fry-ups, either. Since then I've eaten cottage pies, Cajun wraps, chicken curry, asparagus soup and carrot cake. You'll seldom find a main course that costs more than a fiver and the tea usually comes in mugs that could comfortably hold a tenner's worth of 1p pieces. It's worth remembering the first table-service restaurant in the world was set up to cater for road users. Boulanger's, located near the present day Rue de Louvre in Paris, opened in 1765 to offer 'restoratives' to travellers, including meat broths and sheep's foot in white sauce. The truck stops of Britain today are doing little more than replicating the ethos of Boulanger's. The food isn't intended for, or marketed toward, the majority of the general public. It's simple, homemade, exceptionally keenly priced, and best enjoyed while engaging in low-level conversation with your partner about the road ahead and the likelihood of getting good reception for Radio 4 on the car radio once north of Peebles. The only worry I have about truck stops is that they're seldom very busy. No matter how many trucks there are in the vast parking areas, I've never been to a truck stop café that is anything more than 10 per cent full. It's gratifying after myriad experiences waiting in the festival-length queues for the toilets at a Moto. But I suspect that many of these homespun operations would actually welcome a few more diners who aren't behind the wheel of a ten-ton behemoth. Perhaps the truckers are only here to sleep in their bunk behind the wheel or simply use the shower facilities. But what's become clear to me since I began using truck stops is that it's not necessary to complain about the appalling state of our 'mainstream' service stations when there are so many superior alternatives which we car drivers simply don't use. I no longer gripe about the state of a typical Welcome Break. I just make for the Red Lion truck stop near Northampton (which even sells its own range of sweaters, T-shirts and other merchandise), the Bury St Edmunds lorry park (which is unusually well signposted) or the Lesmahagow truck stop in Lanarkshire, which offers superb views of the rolling hills of the Clyde Valley. Of course, you could just pack your own sandwiches, 'hold it in' and not stop at all on a long drive. But there's something about a cooked breakfast on the road that brings out the Jack Kerouac spirit in me. OK, I'm not jumping off goods trains in Colorado in the dead of night while wired on Benzedrine. But I am hungry. And a litre of tea and some fried bread in a truck stop café beautifully evokes the original itinerant elan of longer haul road trips. Truck stops are the places where the loners, the drifters, the riders of the night congregate for warmth and sustenance. And, as I'm now certain, they're eating better than anyone joining the queue at a motorway Costa.
Spectator
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Spectator
The chat show is dead
I've been having this recurring nightmare recently that involves James Corden. The year is 2045. Society has collapsed and London is under quarantine. There is no transport in the city, so survivors get around on foot – though, for some inexplicable reason, TfL workers are still on strike. I live in a bin and survive on a diet of eggshells and cold Rustlers burgers. In my nightmare, I am abducted by a gang of Mad Max-inspired bandits who take me to the Asda Superstore in Clapham Junction and torture me for information. My constitution is strong. I refuse to tell them where I've hidden my scarce supply of mango-flavoured vapes. One of the bandits produces a laptop and says, grinning, 'This will get him talking.' They pin my eyes open and place the screen before me. After some buffering, the title of the video appears. It's a YouTube compilation of 'best moments' from The Late Late Show with James Corden. 'Please, God, no!' I scream, thrashing around in my chair. I tell the bandits where my vapes are before Corden can finish his opening monologue. The pain is unbearable. But instead of releasing me, the bandits make me watch Corden's Carpool Karaoke with Adele for 20 hours on repeat before putting a bullet in the back of my head – which, in this context, is a sweet release. Watching a modern-day chat show is a bit like getting a back tattoo in Ayia Napa: fun when you're drunk. A major problem are the hosts. To be fair to Corden, which I don't to be, it would also be a nightmare if the bandits forced me to watch The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel Live!, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, The Jonathan Ross Show, and just about anything that falls under the knackered umbrella of 'chat shows'. All of the good hosts are either dead, retired or under the cosh of an executive producer who favours saccharinity over decent television. Gone are the days of Dick Cavett and his intelligent, if meandering conversational style. Lost is the 'preposterously mellifluous' voice of William F. Buckley. Absent are the charismatic captains of late-night television: Johnny Carson and, to a lesser extent, Michael Parkinson. These hosts weren't always kind or warm – William F. Buckley once threatened to 'sock' Gore Vidal in the mouth – but they were real. And they were entertaining. The same can't be said for the pusillanimous hosts of today. The only exceptions are Graham Norton and David Letterman, though neither of these is particularly contemporary. And perhaps Jonathan Ross was OK a few decades ago. Now the new school of late-night chat show hosts reigns supreme. There's Jimmy Fallon with his talent for laughing at anything, even when that thing is about as funny as a wet weekend in Bognor Regis. A guest only needs to cough for Fallon to repeatedly smash his face against the desk in a manic fit of laughter. The insincerity of it makes my toes curl. Though I urge all of you to watch his recent interview with the Costco Guys; it's the only time I've seen Fallon on the verge of a nervous breakdown – perhaps his assistant forgot to give him a dose of nitrous oxide before he went on. And then we have Jimmy Kimmel. The only time there is light behind Kimmel's eyes is when he's hosting Matt Damon. But the studio will never fire him. Why? Because he can't do anything else. Stephen Colbert is more like a school chaplain than a suave media personality. Ellen had her moment in the sun, but there's only so long that you can round up audiences from the bus stop before your shortcomings as a host are laid bare. All of the hosts are much of a muchness, as are their shows. But the hosts aren't entirely to blame. The guests are part of the problem too. They're just not interesting anymore; their overlords – talent agents, managers and publicists – won't allow them to be. In 1971, Salvador Dalí sauntered onto The Dick Cavett Show and launched his pet anteater at Lillian Gish's lap. That would never happen today. The best we can hope for is a little jig from Tom Hiddleston on Graham Norton. The guests are carbon copies of each other. All American chat show line-ups are formulaic: an actor from a new Netflix series, an actor from a new Apple TV series, Robert De Niro being a curmudgeon, Ryan Gosling et al., and a musical guest you've never heard of. UK chat show line-ups are the exact same with the addition of Greg Davies. All of the good hosts are either dead, retired or under the cosh of an executive producer who favours saccharinity over decent television On the rare occasion that they do have an interesting guest, the host doesn't know what to do with them. Fallon recently had author Edward St Aubyn on his show. Just two minutes and 30 seconds into the interview, Fallon turned Aubyn's novel over in his hands, read the endorsements and mumbled, 'These are some great blurbs for you on the back here.' Thanks, Jimmy! I wonder how his team of writers came up with that line of thought-provoking dialogue. My favourite part of the show was when Fallon stood up and read an excerpt of Aubyn's novel in the voice of Mick Jagger – though it was more Stella Street than the Rolling Stone himself. The chat show is dead. It died when The Alec Baldwin Show premiered in March 2018. But perhaps it was always doomed to fail. Chat shows reflect our time. In that sense, the hosts, guests and producers are not to blame; we are. We, the public, created this rubbish because we can't get enough of it. The bloated cadaver of the late-night chat show is also indicative of our changing understanding of celebrity. Forty years ago, you could watch Michael Parkinson interview Cher one week and Margaret Thatcher the next; Orson Welles on Wednesday and Jacob Bronowski on Saturday. All of them were celebrities – i.e. people of great import. Now, we clap and squeal when JoJo Siwa appears to talk about her relationship with Love Island alumnus Chris Hughes. These are the celebrities of the 21st century, and the chat show knows it. I'm not sure if the chat show will ever escape this quagmire of lazy television. It might be too late. Let's hope the demand for engaging late-night TV returns. In the meantime, I'll be content watching reruns of After Dark on YouTube. Oliver Reed making a drunken fool of himself beats Jimmy Fallon playing 'egg Russian roulette' with Ryan Reynolds any day of the week.
