American Nomads BBC 4

American Nomads written and directed by Richard Grant. The narrator starts with property. He has a house in Tucson Arizona. Before he had a house he had the ground and the stars. He seeks out with a big butterfly net to capture his fellow contemporary nomads in America. First stop was the young homeless. They are always the most photogenic. And if they are travelling with a dog that just makes the most poignant scenes. Boy-girl-dog. The story is always the same: poverty. Fling in a bit of incest. A bit of mental illness and the road away from a home that doesn’t exist is always the one most travelled.

At the other end of the spectrum are the ‘snowbirds’ that migrate from North to South and back again, when it gets to hot or too cold. These are people that have cashed in their chips and bought a house on wheels. One of them shown cost $250 000 and did everything but sit up and beg.

No picture is complete without guys with beards. They hang about places like ‘Slab City’ which is just another name for desert. Where ever guys with beards are there always drugs and women without beards. There is always some kind of warning to the newcomer, in this case Richard Grant from some kind of grizzled old timer: ‘don’t go too close son or else you’ll grow a beard and there’ll be no telling...(spit into spittoon dead rat’s head) what’ll happen next’. If guys with cameras listened to guys eating rat’s heads where would the world be? Richard, being English, ignored this piece of advice and you guessed it, next shot he’s got a daddy-longlegs beard!

It was all downhill from there. It reminded me a bit about the time I hitched out of Paris, met some guys and dogged a train into Berne. It seems impossible to believe now but it was Sunday service. The train went into Berne, reversed back out –and that’s when we thought we were stewed- and then back in again. We walked off, no tickets, no barrier, no money, but that’ s a different story.