Women can’t drive, and teaching them to do so will ruin your marriage. This is the premise of a show that aired across Australia last night, inspiring more despair in the hearts of TV enthusiasts than endless reruns of Seinfeld.
Where once they might have played a classic movie, these days free-to-air channels plug the holes in their midweek programming with one-off reality TV features or compilations of cat videos from YouTube.
This week’s offering from Seven was UK import Never Teach Your Wife to Drive, an hour-long filler-feature from 2014. Three heterosexual couples allow cameras to film them during their amateur driving lessons, and the results are precisely as condescending as you would expect.
“Usually they never argue,” the narrator says of 33-year-old Becky and her beefcake boyfriend Greg. Becky calls the roundabout a “merry-go-round”, which is mildly amusing if you like laughing at slightly sad linguistic ineptitude. But then Becky reveals she was in an horrific car accident as a teenager in which her boyfriend at the time was killed.
One immediately suspects a therapist would be better placed to intervene here than a camera crew.
On the other hand, Yasmin and John – a young couple with a newborn baby – seem quite well-adjusted until they get into the car with Yasmin in the driver’s seat. John gets frustrated quickly, puts Yasmin down every time she makes a mistake (which is often; his explanation of how to use a clutch leaves a lot to be desired), and then can’t understand why she gets genuinely upset.
Um why is there a show called Never Teach Your Wife to Drive on ch 7?! Will the follow up be Never Teach Your Husband Emotional Intelligence
— Chloe Papas (@chloepapas) November 29, 2016
Then there is Yaveli, the “hotheaded Latino wife” (no, I’m not making this up), whose husband Matt’s preferred description for her is “fiery”. It was about this point when your correspondent (an excellent driver, incidentally, who once stopped a car from rolling when the gearbox failed at 80km an hour) wrote in her notebook, “I hate everyone.”
It’s one thing for TV networks to import cheap filler while they’re pinching pennies at the tail end of the year, but it’s another to go right for the lowest common denominator. This is the kind of show you expect to find when you’re insomnia-surfing at 3am in the middle of the summer holidays, not in midweek prime time. If the golden age of television has taught us anything, surely it’s that ratings success absolutely does not require treating viewers like idiots?
As if to labour the point, Never Teach Your Wife to Drive treats its audience to endless footage of the couples squabbling as they bunnyhop around car parks, sideswipe bushes or accidentally reverse on to the kerb. At one point, Becky very gently drives into a row of bins, not even knocking over a single one. This is about as exciting as it gets – it’s the kind of stuff that was tedious when most of us did it for ourselves at the age of 16, but reaches a whole new level of banal when broadcast on national TV.
Never Teach Your Wife to Drive is code for my wiiiiiiife. left me
— Rick Morton (@SquigglyRick) November 28, 2016
The producers clearly played the whole setup for LOLs, but nothing draws out the arbitrary nature of sexism like driving lessons with an intimate partner. Aside from the underlying presumption that men are naturally better at all things practical or fuel-driven, these “brave men” (that’s a direct quote) give terrible instructions and then harangue their partners for failing to follow them.
In what is perhaps the only flash of insight throughout the whole grindingly tedious hour, Matt explains that within his relationship with Yaveli, “there’s definitely a power struggle”. Well, quite.
In the final act, the couples’ lessons are observed by supposedly qualified driving instructors. They inevitably conclude that the women would fare better with professional instruction (you think?), while simultaneously praising the men for being #sobrave in taking on the task of teaching their partners themselves.
Never Teach Your Wife to Drive has the dubious distinction of not only being sexist and racist, but mindnumbingly boring at the same time. Cat video compilations never looked so good.
