Great Southern Truckers

Kiwi trucking on screen

DISASTER CONSTANTLY SEEMS TO

loom just around the next corner, but everything works out fine in the end.

There’s plenty of added drama to accompany the characters and locations featuring in Great Southern Truckers, New Zealand’s first original TV series dedicated to the lives of truck drivers on Kiwi roads.

“I know some people will look at parts of the show and say; `Ha-ha, that’s not real’,” says series Executive Producer Alex Breingan from Auckland-based Stripe Studios.

But that’s the case with most reality-style TV series which aim to keep an audience hooked with a sense of anticipation and impending danger.

“In fact we never had any moments of danger while filming the show. Just great characters and fantastic scenery with not even one day of bad weather,” says Breingan.

Filming began two years ago across both the North and South Islands and was interrupted by the Covid-19 restrictions. Episode one debuted in early July and the series is screening on eden at 7pm on Tuesdays (Freeview 8 and Sky 13) and is also available on demand at THREEnow.

Great Southern Truckers is also playing in Canada, has been licensed to Discovery in the US and UK as well as going into European markets.

“The series is designed to show the audience what truck drivers do and put up with and get across that without truckers, there’s no food on supermarket shelves, no petrol in the pumps and no building materials to site,” Breingan says.

There are six one-hour episodes featuring most segments of the New Zealand trucking industry and a diverse range of characters ranging from rookie drivers to those with decades of experience. Each episode focuses on three drivers working in three locations with some characters returning later in the series. The settings vary between busy city motorways to logging roads and mountain passes. The cargo ranges from luxury cars to logging, livestock, fuel tankers, a circus big-top tent and heavy haulage jobs. But it’s the drivers who are the stars. “The drivers themselves are incredibly interesting and entertaining as well as highly skilled,” says Breingan.

“When we started filming this series we had no idea how important the trucking industry is to everyone in New Zealand and I now have a new found respect for the drivers,” says Breingan.

“They’re not being annoying driving slowly up a hill, they’re being safe and without them, our mad dash to the shops would be a waste of time as there would be nothing on the shelves.”

Breingan is hopeful a number of aspects of the series will benefit both the industry and the general public.

“One theme I’m sure will resonate with the industry is that we highlight the terrible state of the roads in many parts of New Zealand and the behaviour of other drivers on the road.

“For the non-trucking audience its two-fold. Firstly, we want to highlight there is a great career in the trucking industry.

“We focus on a number of younger drivers who through perseverance are building themselves a career. The message is that for some younger people, who maybe find that school is not really for them, there can be great career for them in the industry.

“We also hope the general public gets a better idea of the challenges faced by truck drivers and hopefully they will give trucks a little more space on the road.”

A second series is in the works which will bring back some the original characters and introduce some new ones. T&D

Liz Crosby-Campbell (below left) and her Freightliner (above right) feature in episode two while Mike Edwards and Summer Ratima-Thompson (below centre & right) make their first appearance in episode one.