The British public love their improbable televisual heroes. We are a nation, after all, who turned reality TV rejects like Alison Hammond and Rylan Clark into household names, who made two grinning Geordies into the most bankable hosts on our screens. And there’s no genre more susceptible to the unlikely protagonist than food shows. Chances are, if you were watching a cookery programme in the past 30 years (and it wasn’t presented by the Two Fat Ladies) you will have found yourself swept up in the whirlwind of The Hairy Bikers, Si King and the late Dave Myers, whose life is celebrated here in an hour-long BBC Two documentary, The Hairy Bikers: You’ll Never Ride Alone.
“This is not a sad story,” Si reassures viewers. And, in a way, he’s right: this is the joyous tale of how two TV production staff, one assistant director and one makeup artist, embarked on a glittering 20-year career on the small screen. It is a linear trot through the personal history of Dave and the Hairy Bikers, framed around the massive outpouring of love after his death, from cancer, back in February this year. On 8 June, around 45,000 bikers (I can’t even imagine the noise) participated in a procession from London to Dave’s hometown, Barrow-in-Furness, to pay tribute to the hirsute icon. “It’s not a bad thing to show your emotions every once in a while,” a biker, taking part, explains, as the wheeled flotilla embarks on its final voyage.
And emotion is, naturally, at the heart of this tribute. The relationship between Si and Dave is not just the foundation of why the show was made, but why it was a success. That overprized commodity – “authenticity” – is something that the Hairy Bikers had in abundance. Viewers believed in their humble attempts at cooking, believed in their passion for motorcycles, and, most importantly, believed in their friendship. “I don’t have one single photo just with my husband,” Dave’s widow, Lili, explains of their wedding photographs. She is always sandwiched between Si and Dave; Hairy Bikers ’til the end.
There are times in public life when sentimentality seems forced, but the Hairy Bikers never aspired to any level of cynicism. Si, a rugged Geordie, and Dave, a nerdier Cumbrian, felt entirely unaffected. Fame and money never seemed to change them, just make them more enthusiastic for simple pleasures, like watching the sun rise in the Namibian desert, or laughing while sumo wrestling in Tokyo. “He made biking so cool,” a man, wearing a Myers-inspired Hawaiian shirt, declares, standing next to his parked hog. And while the ghosts of Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper might not quite agree, there’s something poignant about this unpretentious display of affection. The heartstring-tugging soundtrack observes a similar commitment to the dad aesthetic – Coldplay, The Killers, Stereophonics, Elbow – that has been a constant presence through the Hairy Bikers’ decades long run.
“It’s not quite true that we broke the rules of presenting”, Si explains, “because we didn’t know the rules in the first place.” And yet, if they were naïfs at the beginning. You’ll Never Ride Alone demonstrates how they became consummate television professionals. The show is tight, never lingering for too long on any chapter of their journey. It also understands that the interest in the duo is not a technical one. They don’t waste time on how the production logistics were decided (a thread that was important to The Grand Tour’s teary send-off), but instead maintain the same focus on camaraderie. It is a rare male friendship on the television that feels entirely spontaneous, neither inhibited by rivalry nor diluted by the passage of time.
If you’ve been on a journey with the Hairy Bikers since their TV debut in 2004, you’ll want to strap in and grip the handlebars one last time. Dave’s death, at the age of just 66, was a gut punch, but this is an unfettered celebration. It is a union of private and public grief that conspires to give fans and family a last chance to say thank you, and allows the Hairy Bikers to ride off, together, into the sunset.
