The indignity of it all.

For fifteen years as the media columnist for a not-quite major daily newspaper, I was flooded/barraged/bombarded (take your pick) with press kits, tapes (then DVDs), and phone calls from publicists for every network and every obscure cable channel and their even more obscure cable shows. Each was more desperate (or more bored) than the last. Each wanted to squeeze five inches of space out of a deep hinterland paper that was at best known to them as one of a hundred names on their calling list.

Smug with a god-like control over their job productivity, I let most of these publicists, usually with sing-songy voices, twist slowly in voice mail hell and then laid on person-to-person indignation when I couldn’t find the screener of Celebrity Sex Kittens in Borneo, which was suddenly generating so much buzz.

Apparently, it is now payback time. As a low, miserable, one-in-a-billion blogger, I can’t even get a ten-minute phone interview with a cameraman–any cameraman–for my favorite summer series, Ice Road Truckers. My request to The History Channel (i.e."History" as it prefers to be known these days) for a quickie with anyone involved in last winter’s production up in Canuckistan was met with a terse e-mail from a publicist saying their policy was not to “place fans in direct contact with our staff.”

“Fans”? Me? WTF!

Like I was going to do one of those Chris Farley-interviews-Paul McCartney numbers on whoever rode shotgun with Hugh “The Polar Bear” in his Peterbilt to Tuktoyaktuk.

Unusual for me, I decided to play back on the "Do you know who I am?" bit. I did briefly consider throwing some statistics at them, verifiable page views here at Mpls.St.Paul Magazine versus murky “readership” numbers at the newspaper. But my pride had been battered enough. Letting The History Channel see me sweat would blow a pretty good hole in my portrait of indifference.

But I am a fan of Ice Road Truckers. The pissy publicist got that right. If my reasons are perverse, I’m not alone. Last season's debut was a bona fide hit for The History Channel. It ain't American Idol, but it drew unexpectedly good numbers.

What I love about it includes the fact that none of the cast of characters is beautiful or sexy. Far, far from it. Most, in fact, are carrying a minimum of sixty extra pounds, and that blubber is buried under six or seven layers of oil-and-diesel stained fleece, wool, and flannel. This is Carhartt chic. What’s more, the setting, mid-winter on the Arctic Circle, assures viewers that nothing will be decided by some mincing “tribal challenge” in bikinis.

Ice Road Truckers, a show about fat, hard-cussing, blue-collar guys hauling sometimes 90,000 pounds of weird mining gear over frozen rivers, lakes, and the Arctic Ocean is the antidote to every silly, contrived, airhead, hard-body/soft-mind “reality” show, including the granddaddy of them all, Survivor.

I mean, these guys are workin’ here.

Moreover (sexist pig alert), Ice Road Truckers is a completely unsparing male world. While the show occasionally ducks behind the scenes to check up on the drivers cooling their jets while their truck gets repaired or phoning home from some cheap motel, it almost never hangs out with them at the local watering holes probing for their deepest fears or how Hugh “The Polar Bear” hurt their feelings when he told them they were “a [bleeping] loser” for shearing off their oil pan.

Appropriate for a male community in an environment that can turn lethal in an instant, there is little to no sympathy for laziness, stupidity, mewling self-involvement, or preening. You do the job, or you don’t. Excuses are for the “I broke a nail!” bikini crowd out on some Fiji atoll playing with lawn darts.

On the Ice Road, if your truck breaks down, it’s your fault. Somehow that seems more like real life.

I wanted to ask a cameraman about the logistics of shooting the show. This second season, which looks great in HD, seems to have more helicopter footage than last year, which helps convey the vastness and stark beauty of the sub-polar north . . . when the sun is up. But as a fan, I’m curious how they assigned the shooting work and how they picked the runs the truckers were making.

If anyone from The History Channel had deigned to speak . . . to a fan . . . I’d have asked them about how the mostly-male viewing demo is working for them, if they've got any income-level demos, and what women viewers, if any, are saying? I would have also told them that Geo Beach, the self-consciously macho “host” of Tougher in Alaska (a show which follows Ice Road Truckers this summer), is self-defeating. (If you have to tell people you’re tough, you’re probably worried they think you’re not, which means you care too much what they think, which means you’re really not that tough.)

Several years ago, while employed by that not-quite major daily paper that The History Channel and others were once so eager to flatter and cajole, I cornered Survivor producer, Mark Burnett, in a Pasadena bar and, playing devil’s advocate, asked him when he was going do Survivor: Duluth with hard bodies in parkas and mukluks eating raccoon livers and swimming under two feet of lake ice?

“Not too bloody soon,” was Burnett’s reply. “This is show biz, Mate.” (Translation: For every layer of fleece and flannel you lay on the hard bodies, your ratings drop 20 percent.)

I told Burnett, an Aussie, that I much preferred his original show, Eco-Challenge, a lavishly produced chronicle of actual teams of super athletes in a non-stop, days-long 300-mile race through jungles, snake-infested swamps, and ocean channels in places such as Fiji and Borneo. Very much unlike Survivor, survival was in peril, and the rigors and endurance were astonishing.

“I liked it, too. But it was hell to shoot. With Survivor, we can contain it and build the story.” (Translation: A camera is always there every time a bikini picks up a piece of driftwood, and the action stops long enough to work on the soap opera.)

On the Ice Road, soap is a pretty much forgotten commodity, and the soap opera pretty much ends when Hugh “The Polar Bear” tells mopey Drew Sherwood, “You’re an ***hole.”

(Programming note: I see that Burnett and History are teaming up for a series retracing Henry Morton Stanley's trek across Africa in search of Dr. David Livingstone, using only a compass and a map. The series, titled, Expedition: Stanley and Livingstone, will be shot this fall for air next year. Cool.)