Storage Hunters

My new favorite programme is something called Storage Hunters. How long it will remain in the top spot remains uncertain, probably only until this afternoon when Come Dine With Me might be on, or Man Vs Food, or the endless reruns of The Big Bang Theory, which I never seem to tire of.
Storage Hunters is a documentary which revolves around an American ex-boxer and his wife. They travel around the country to various storage auctions. A burly man armed with a huge set of pliers will bust the padlock on a 'lock-up' - most of the lock-ups tend to look like very narrow garages. A group of people stand around and bid for the items inside. There is an auctioneer who speaks in that fascinatingly incomprehensible way that all auctioneers do, all rolled 'r's and with an incredible amount of syllables in each quickfire sentence. After the auctions are over we usually get to see what kind of profit has been made by the ex-boxer and his wife.
I have just watched one this morning, where they have been down to a storage auction in New Orleans. The lock-ups were situated down some kind of back street, a dead-end area. It looked hot there. There was something very familiar about that kind of heat, though I'm not sure why. Something very familiar -and fascinating- about that kind of locale too, the Stephen King territory of lower working class America. The lock-ups in the episode I've just seen provided such things as an old car, a voodoo altar, a stuffed leopard and a three huge mardi-gras masks. The people who come to these auctions are a fascinating lot. They seem like mardi-gras characters themselves, and seen from across the Atlantic, their Americanisms are at once familiar and strange. There was an unpleasant character who called himself 'the ragin' cajun' and another bearded fellow who called himself 'the pirate'. They both looked like serial killers.