Surf Patrol, now appearing occasionally on the Travel Channel, is one of those odd filler programs that turns out to be oddly compelling. The show wants very badly to be a sun-n’-surf version of Real Stories of the Highway Patrol, but, in reality, it’s more of a showcase of Aussie charm and eccentricity, with plenty of unplanned comedy thrown in for good measure.
Australian lifeguards, you must understand, are nothing like the bored college students sitting atop the guard tower at your local beach, and even less like the bronzed bimbos of Baywatch. Most of these guys are lifers: many appear to be in their 40’s and 50’s and one patrol captain is 71. They’re also a weird mixture of the dorky and the awesome. They sport a goofy array of headgear, from their signature red-and-yellow beanies, to floppy fisherman hats that look like something your grandpa would wear, usually accompanied by blotches of colored sunblock on their faces. The old, beer-bellied guys wear the Speedos and the young ones the baggy shorts. One guard is named Khan. Some patrol the unfortunately-named Manly Beach, where they take patients to Manly Hospital and even the female patrol members are identified onscreen as “Manly Lifeguards.”
Then there’s the Inflatable Rescue Boat, or IRB, a device capable of instantly transforming the most heroic of rescue teams into the lifeguarding version of the Bad News Bears. Little more than a blow-up pool toy with an outboard motor, the IRBs are prone to tipping, flipping, refusing to start, and starting up without warning. IRB mishaps are so common that, on one beach, the guards have a standing agreement that whoever flips one must buy the team a case of beer. In perhaps the most memorable episode of “Surf Patrol,” the lifeguards struggle in vain to get the outboard motor going so they can assist in a rescue, and other guards swim right past their stalled boat towards the victim. The motor finally starts, they cruise over . . . and it stalls out again. Then a giant wave hits the IRB, catapulting all the lifeguards into the drink. Next the motor, apparently inhabited by some evil gremlin, starts up on its own, taking the IRB out to sea. Meanwhile the victim’s been brought into shore by the low-tech swimming guards, leaving the other guys to go after their boat.
The producers try awfully hard to make Surf Patrol a dramatic reality series along the lines of COPS or Untold Stories of the E.R.. The thing is, most of the time, there isn’t that much drama going on. Foreboding musical stings play over footage of pounding surf; the scene switches, cliffhanger-style, from one subplot to another (“Meanwhile, at Surfers Paradise, two children have been missing for over an hour!); and the gravelly-voiced narrator implies that dozen will surely drown if the lifeguards don’t swing into action immediately. And then . . . nothing happens. The missing kids are found at the ice cream stand, the guards help a couple of tired swimmers onto shore, somebody maybe needs a few stitches and some oxygen, but, eighty percent of the time, it’s not that exciting. And so the overly dramatic production values become a cause for unintentional hilarity. The lifeguards themselves sometimes unwittingly participate in this comedy of overstatement, as when they “save” visibly bemused swimmers from waist-deep water, or bring out a helicopter, an inflatable boat, and six guys with rescue tubes to ferry one struggling surfer back to the beach.
Beach Nazi is watching you.
This boredom sometimes appears to take its toll on the lifeguards: one guy my husband nicknamed “Beach Nazi” goes back and forth with his whistle, ordering swimmers out of the water for such egregious infractions as swimming outside the area he flagged off or (gasp!) swimming with a T-shirt on.
But, the other 20 percent of the time, “Surf Patrol” is gripping. A young woman has a seizure in a beachside shopping plaza. A boy is stung by bluebottle jellyfish and has to be rushed to the hospital. A driver strikes a pedestrian and breaks down crying, sobbing to his wife over cell phone, “Honey, I hit an old man!.” At times like these, the dorky-looking guys and women in carnival beanies show that there’s more to them than beer-swillling IRB antics. They’re calm, compassionate, and knowledgeable, and, watching them save lives, I swear to myself I’ll never laugh at those mustard-and-ketchup-colored chapeaux ever again.
And then they go and do something like lose their Speedos in heavy surf, or break up a fight by yelling at the combatants, “YOU! Out of the water! You go that way, you go that way!,” or flip their boats and need rescuing during a lifeguarding competition, and I’m cracking up once more. Surf Patrol: there when you need them, dorkily hilarious when you don’t. More things in life should be like that.
