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Dog the Bounty Hunter

Duane Chapman aka Dog
  • Posted at 12:17pm
  • 12 October 2007
  • by RhodriMarsden-RT
  • 3 comments

To the British, bounty hunting is as foreign a concept as baseball, punctual trains or cannibalism. If a criminal skips bail in the UK, it's up to the police to track them down. But in the USA, for some reason, this important work seems to be subcontracted to swaggering men in leather trousers and sunglasses who are liable to shout "We have you surrounded" at a moment's notice.

Bounty hunter Duane Chapman, rather like a stray in your back garden, is better known as "Dog". His show kicks off with a specially commissioned TV theme tune, all squealing guitars and thundering drums, which informs us that "criminals are on the run" – and then we get our first glimpse of Dog, his wife and his children, who have turned the pursuit of dangerous criminals into a cute family business.

There's a lot of amusement to be derived from this show and most of it is down to the appearance of Dog and his wife, Beth. They look like a couple of extras from an old Whitesnake video who have spent the last 20 years being force-fed a diet of pork pies, dumbbells and sun beds. Beth can only be described as “pneumatic”, a collection of impossible curves that have mathematicians desperately attempting to rewrite the rules of algebra.

Dog has opted to grow old even less gracefully, by – well, just hanging lots of stuff off himself. It's as if he coats himself in superglue and charges through a branch of Claire's Accessories – there's stuff hanging off his distended ear lobes, his clothing, and what looks like horse brasses in his hair.

A new episode broadcast on Wednesday night saw Dog and his family pursuing a chap called Robert Webb, who had skipped bail while on a charge of accessory to first-degree murder – not that the victim, God rest his soul, would see it in terms of degrees. For him it was probably very much a black-and-white issue.

But for all the testosterone-fuelled air punching, bounty hunting isn't that exciting. What you see is a family of four driving from place to place, only to discover that the person they were after had departed some ten minutes earlier. They could easily have been looking for a great-uncle with amnesia who had gone for a walk after Christmas dinner and failed to come back. If they weren't carrying machine guns, that is.

Fruitless patrolling of a faceless American city does not entertainment make, but fortunately they ran into a furious chap who was also looking for Robert Webb, and who turned the air blue with some choice expletives. This gave Dog the chance to confront somebody – even if it was theoretically someone on the same side. "You need to simmer down," he screamed, while Pneumatic Beth launched into some sustained finger wagging.

The show ended when a call came through that Robert Webb had been picked up by the police after a routine stop-check on the car he was driving. Dog was furious, mainly because he had been denied his moment of being able to shout "We got a warrant for your arrest, boy!". So he marched down to the cells of the police station and confronted him through a pane of glass. "Be safe," he said, without a hint of irony, to a man very firmly under lock and key.

New episodes of Dog the Bounty Hunter are broadcast on Wednesday nights on Bravo (Sky 121, Virgin 137/138).

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  • Posted on 12 October 2007
  • at 2:32pm
  • by robsoft

@Linzk425 - it's definitely on more often than that, although I think that most of the airings are repeats (hence Rhodri's "new episodes" remark).

I'm sure I've noticed it twice this week that I can recall, and neither time was the episode Rhodri describes.

  • Posted on 12 October 2007
  • at 2:12pm
  • by Linzk425

Is it really only one once a week? I feel like it's always there when I'm trying to find something like "Police 24/7". Mind you, for quite some time, because of the length of the title, all I saw was "Dog the Bo" and thought it was something about canines.

  • Posted on 12 October 2007
  • at 2:03pm
  • by robsoft

Ah, you've picked a favourite in our household - DtBH is often on in the background when Nic is flicking through the channels. We always stop for a moment to reflect on whatever the hell might be going on at that instant (like you say, usually Dog is in his Chelsea Tractor, driving around somewhere looking for some mixed-up kid who he urgently needs to yell at).

Beth is one of the most disturbing characters on the box, she looks like she tried to swallow a sofa (sideways) and it got stuck around her lungs.

Sometimes we see an 'all-new' episode, sometimes we see a repeat. Life's like that, I guess. I never understand the 'all-new' bit though - it implies that some episodes might only be 'partly-new'; in these worrying times of deceitful TV programmes and detailed product labelling, I think it's important that we're told the exact ratio of new-to-rehash in each show. We never watch more than about 10 minutes at a time, so knowing quite which bits to watch is important to us.

I suspect that sooner or later, despite the 'all-new'ing, we'll become so used to seeing Dog that we'll recognise the episode within seconds of crashing into it, and we'll turn to each other with a cheery 'oh, it's the one where....' (as we do so enjoy doing with the CSI shows).

At that point, we'll know that Dog has become part of our modern cultural soup, and very old episodes will suddenly turn up on BBC2 in that early-evening 'no-one is watching this' slot. Then, annoyingly, the students will start watching it, and Dog will appear on 'ironic' t-shirts. He'll be invited over to the UK to appear on Graham Norton, or possibly In It To Win It With Dale Winton, and that'll be the end of him. (Just look at what happened to Hulk Hogan).

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