It must have sounded like a winner at the first production meeting. ITV are in desperate need of a show for petrolheads, so let’s adapt one of the most popular elements of Top Gear and turn it into an hour-long programme. “What could possibly go wrong?” as the luckless Vernon Kay says near the start of Drive (ITV1). A question to which the answer is invariably “almost everything”.
There was a very good reason “Star in a reasonably priced car” was kept down to a five-minute slot, which is that it was actually quite boring watching someone drive round in circles. It might be fun to do, but TV fails to give any real impression of the speed the cars are going or the level of skill required; at home there’s more fun to be had playing with Scalextric.
To be fair, the makers of Drive have pulled out the stops. They have come up with eight celebrities – make that reasonably well-known people – of whom at least six most people will have heard, and a format that is vaguely plausible. Each week, they try their hand at a different form of driving, with the most incompetent being sent home. The last one sitting at the end of the series wins something as yet unspecified.
They started with banger racing, and it was clear the producers knew they were in trouble early doors, as the first five minutes were a breathless series of cut shots of the action that was coming later on. That’s 10% of the programme spent trying to sell you the rest of the show; if I had known then that they were actually the entire packaged highlights, I could have saved myself a lot of bother.
“Everything they’ve learned, they’re going to have to forget,” said racing driver Jason Plato. That promised a great deal more than was delivered, as no effort was made to explain which everyday driving skills were of no value on a race track, and which new ones needed to be learned; rather, the programme chose to restrict the narrative to the well-trodden formula ofthe reasonably well known people’s personal journeys. Was Louis Walsh going to be able to battle with his demons that were so invisible they didn’t appear to exist? As if on cue, Walsh muttered something entirely un-heartfelt about wanting to do well to get one over on Simon Cowell. There’s jeopardy for you.
By far the most endearing reasonably well-known person was Mariella Frostrup, who looked for much of the early part of the show as if she wanted to kill her agent for persuading her to sign up. She spent most of the latter part of it looking as if she wouldn’t mind killing most of the other contestants. A woman after my own heart. Thankfully Frostrup made it through to next week as, sadly, did Colin Jackson, the former world champion hurdler, whose utterances are almost entirely restricted to cliches. “I need to deliver what I can deliver,” he says. “I am going to give it 100%.” Colin clearly has the can-do spirit that I lack; I doubt I will be tuning in to monitor his progress next week.
Back in the day, the government used to make five-minute public information films in which someone with clipped received pronunciation would say: “Now look here all you chaps and chappesses. Doing DIY can be extremely hazardous if you don’t know what you’re doing. If you are going to attempt it please make sure you have all the right equipment and follow the instructions carefully. Thank you and have a very good evening.” Now, we just get an hour-long series of home-shot video clips of bodging masquerading as a proper documentary.
If you like watching people setting fire to their houses, flooding their bathrooms, electrocuting themselves, falling off roofs, being crushed by collapsed walls, firing a nail gun through their groin, putting cupboards in upside down and knocking over paint pots then How Not to Do DIY (ITV1) could well have been the programme for you. After about 10 minutes or so, I found I’d had enough and spent the next 50 minutes wishing that one of the show’s resident “You don’t want to do it like that” experts could show me how to cut matchsticks to the right size to keep my eyelids open. I have a suspicion the filmmakers might have felt the same – for the last 10 minutes they went entirely off-topic and chose to just broadcast people detonating their barbecues. God knows what they will come up with for part two.
