‘The Man’ often gets a battering in this world, mainly from capitalist countries in the Western Hemisphere, due to it’s all encompassing ability to care about nothing but profit margins.

Proof can be seen in most areas of any populated region of the developed world, with coffee houses and take-away stores situated with depressing regularity on nearly every corner, of every street in the big cities.

Dig deeper into this world of finance and targets, and you can find the fight for oil also becoming a major player in the realm of the big cheese – and one country that knows all about that is the United States of America.

Gas guzzling SUV’s slob out alongside faceless organisations and flat-packed hotels, whilst the ‘Mom and Pop’ stores that served the States so tremendously during two-thirds of the 20th century get swallowed whole like a bulimic Pacman.  

In a land where ‘Mom’s Apple Pie’ and 1950’s diner tradition are always stereotypes that are conjured up alongside icons such as McDonalds (31,000+ worldwide) and Starbucks (13,000 worldwide) - is it still possible to live the dream in heartland America?

It’s this exact vision that has taken Dave Gorman, the documentary comedian, former stand-up comic and writer from London to the heartland of consumerism and ‘The Man’ to see if it is possible to drive from one side of the U.S. to the other, without giving a penny to mass corporations.

In typical Gorman style, he changes some of the targets of what he is trying to accomplish as he goes, which regular readers/watchers of his Googlewhack Adventure and Are You Dave Gorman? series’ (amongst others) will be quick to relate to. It’s also statistics laden, thanks to Gorman’s love of number crunching, but is still replicated in an interesting, near quirky demeanour.

Filmed with just one video camera by his producer, Dave’s trip manages to balance the levels of sociological documentary that sees it nestle in comfortably on More 4 (where it was first aired), as well as keeping the youthful “why not?” attitude that saw him go on the quest for 54 Dave Gormans back in 2000. Don’t be thinking that it’s plain sailing though, for it’s quite the opposite.

There’s illness, walk-outs, mental blowouts, empty gas tanks and a temperamental Ford Torino station wagon to deal with along the arduous journey, that takes in people that Gorman rightly points out wouldn’t ever get a job in a motel chain, “because they have personality”.

From the hotel that was built to look like a Beagle, to themed Japanese rooms that outdoes the African Safari room opposite, it nearly resembles scenes from The Mighty Boosh or The League of Gentlemen rather than the oft-sterilised and derided world that America has become synonymous for.

Initially, it could be easy to write this off as crazy American behaviour, similar to Christian Televangelism, but one look in these characters’ eyes and it instantly melts away to mere human behaviour; untouched and unshackled from what is deemed to be ‘normal’ by The Man’s ruthless marketing campaigns. In short, it’s the real American Dream, isolated and hounded out to the sticks.

In a part of the world where freedoms of speech and expression are becoming increasingly scrutinised and squeezed by higher powers, the places where we frequent to eat, to sleep and to stay, are becoming increasingly identical. The chirpy ‘Have a nice day!’ attitude of America isn’t a cliché here; in fact, it shows that they’re alive.

It’s all summed up by the owner of the Beagle hotel, in Cottonwood, Idaho – a silver-haired, well weathered gentleman, who calmly says: “I don’t know how it’s become part of American culture, maybe World culture, this homogenisation of us...I don’t know how the society has moulded us to be comfortable [living] like that”.

With this documentary, Dave Gorman, who co-wrote three series of The Mrs. Merton Show, wrote for The Fast Show as well as The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, manages to enthral and inspire from one seemingly impossible dream, which, given the circumstances, seems quite apt.