I blame Billy Bob Thornton. In Landman, the highly-acclaimed Paramount series which paints a naturalistic picture of the oil industry in the heart of Texas, Thornton plays the lead character, a roughneck operator turned millionaire business chief.

He is rugged and shrewd and charismatic and funny, he has a beautiful wife and home, the use of a private jet and money to burn. Leave aside the ethics of the oil industry: there isn’t a man I know who wouldn’t, on some level, want to be Tommy Norris, the character played by Thornton.

And he drives everywhere, across a barren Texas landscape whose only points of interest are the oil-extracting pumpjacks, in a beaten-up, beige pick-up truck. It’s the perfect vehicle for him: durable, practical and, yes, evocative of the working life of Middle America.

Is it too much to suggest that the huge success of Landman – almost 15 million viewers watched the series 2 finale within 48 hours of its release – is, in part at least, responsible for the huge rise in the popularity of pick-up trucks in the UK? Maybe it is,........

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