Need some overblown nonsense about heroic truck drivers and impressive-sounding numbers? Send for Eddie Stobart

“Eddie Stobart is shifting up a gear,” we’re told at the start of series five (five!) of Eddie Stobart: Trucks and Trailers (Channel 5). “They’re already one of the kings of road and rail. Now they’re aiming high, flying to an ever-growing number of international destinations.”

What, there’s now an Eddie Stobart airline, is there? With green-and-red planes whose pilots are Yorkie-eating men with big bellies and tats? Oh, no – they now have one plane de-icing truck, operating at Southend Airport, glamorously. This show does a lot of that: turning the mundane into the extraordinary. So putting the plane de-icer to the “ultimate test” turns out to be … de-icing a plane. Guess what “the ultimate test” for trucker Peter Grant’s snow chains is? Yup, driving on a bit of snow. (The chains, incidentally are the “ace up [Peter's] sleeve in his fight against the frost.”)

The show throws a lot of impressive big numbers into the mix. Eddie Stobart’s red and green lorries drive half a million miles every day, the same distance as to the moon and back. The forest in Scotland where Peter, Eddie Stobart’s one and only log-wagon specialist, is picking up his logs is 100,000 acres in size, the same as 50,000 football pitches, and home to 40m trees. His monster 500-horsepower timber truck – Laura Jane – carries 25 tonnes of logs, the same weight as five elephants … etc.

Then there’s the odd truck-sounds-a-bit-like-fuck gag. Welsh driver Ashley Maddox has a day from “trucking hell” (he takes a few rolls of loft insulation from Wales and delivers them around London). And there’s a truckload of alliteration in the narration. “From the forests to the factory to the final destination in Kent is an epic 500-mile journey.” More big numbers, more heroic drivers, and a heroic rock guitar soundtrack, and there you have it, Eddie Stobart: Trucks and Trailers. I’d say it was more like an Eddie Stobart marketing film than a TV documentary. But then I’ve always been more of a Norbert Dentressangle man myself.