Summer in Blackpool, BBC One, review There weren't many illuminations in BBC One's Summer in Blackpool, an average film about an average town during a summer of more than usually average rainfall. It was hard to share the whooping levels of enthusiasm felt by the Stags and Hens who roared their way through the "Las Vegas of the North" as we sloshed through acres of emptiness following local entrepreneur Howard Plant, who had been Blackpool's first car clamper before he bought a fleet of pay-and-display car parks. Standing on a barren square of tarmac with only one vehicle - his own - in evidence, Plant despaired that the combination of weather and the recession meant a decrease in the day trippers. Because his brother now ran the clamping business, any tourist who didn't buy a parking ticket from one member of the Plant family got towed away by another. "They'll remember this car park and want to come back," said Plant's proud business partner, David Gardener, as he picked up some litter. The tone of it all was hard to gauge. Were we expected to sympathise with this gloomy clan of car-clampers? And was this a sociological study of "ordinary" people or could we detect subtle levels of irony? The confusion mounted when we met Claire Smith who ran a hotel and whose son wanted to join his girlfriend down south rather than work for the family firm. The result was a crisis in relations that only Kofi Annan could resolve. No one, not even the convention of American wizards enjoying their full English breakfast, was spared the details of Claire's distress: "If we handle this wrong, we could be cut off forever," she half shrieked as she refilled their coffees. Meanwhile, Joe Langthorne, a crooner of unmitigating mediocrity, sang on Thursday nights to an audience of devotees who looked like they could do with a session in the gym. The programme plodded along like one of Blackpool's horse-drawn landaus, another business under threat as tourists now prefer the view from inside the "Cinderella carriages," gaudy pink plastic bubbles, drawn by horses and once favoured by former glamour model Katie Price. This was "observational" film making with not much of interest to observe.