O wad some Pow’r the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It was frae mony a blunder free us
An’ foolish notion – Robert Burns
There were only two revealing moments in the otherwise entirely vapid Supercars Vs Used Cars: The Trade Off (BBC2). The first came not, as you suspected the producers had hoped, when Darren – a salesman of piled-high, sold-low cars to the cash-strapped people of Bridgend, Wales – saw the shining, Jaguar- and Aston Martin-strewn Mayfair lot in which London’s Russians and other monied classes buy their toys, and in which he was to test his skills for a week. It came when he asked his counterpart, Louis – who would be fulfilling the other half of the life-swap show formula by roughing it in the valley and parting non-fools from their money for a week – how close he lived to his workplace. Seventy miles, said Louis. An hour-and-a-half commute each way, best case, and hundreds of pounds spent on petrol every month.
Darren, who had greeted the sight of the gleaming cars with a cheerful “Dreamland!”, boggled. “He’s putting a mortgage into the car each month!” When did Louis get to see his family, he wondered. When did he have a life? Louis, whose patter was normally as smooth as his peachy-skinned face, had no answer. He had a nice house though, out in Hampshire, when Darren finally got there. “Just watching your life ticking away here!” he said, as he sat disbelieving in traffic. “This is kiddies’ bedtime, this!”
Other than that, things proceeded along expected lines. After a brief orientation period from his new boss, David (“This is the toilet. Please don’t piss in the sink”), Louis set his hand to selling run-arounds to … well, poor people, basically. He wasn’t very good at first. “By the end of the week half of Bridgend’s going to be on bloody foot,” said David in frustration.
Darren wasn’t faring much better. For the viewer, watching him trying to sell a £250,000 classic Ferrari to an investment customer by pointing out that “You can sit four in it” was almost touching. For his boss Joe Macari – body like a seal, eyes like a shark – it was less so. Unable to bear the sight of lead after lead walking out of his place without a single new toy to play with or asset to shut away, he put Darren to work at the other end of things – buying the cars Macari’s people would then restore. At this Darren had slightly better luck, managing to knock £25,000 off an Aston Martin seller’s £425,000 asking price. His wife visited him soon afterwards and encouraged him to have one last stab at selling a car and earning a commission that could provide them with a nest egg for years to come.
Alas, he didn’t manage it. Louis, however, found his feet and sold the mandated five cars to earn his £150 bonus on top of his £250 basic weekly wage, as Darren would have done. Darren, meanwhile, found himself at the centre of the programme’s second revelatory moment when we saw him given not a week’s worth of Louis’s salary but simply his own. And no bonus, because he hadn’t sold any cars. You might think Macari could have stretched a point and given him a percentage of the Aston Martin £25,000. Think away. That’s the reason you’re neither buying nor selling classic cars, my friend. You don’t get rich by being decent. That’s not the way this works. I wish Burns had written a poem about Yon People Who Are Bagges of Shite. I could bookend this review quite nicely then.
Let us take instead a restorative draught of actorly spirit, courtesy of last night’s edition of Mark Lawson Talks To … (BBC4) in which he Talked To the entirely magnificent Frances De La Tour about her career, taking in theatre (from Peter Brook’s revolutionary A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which she couldn’t get Ben Kingsley as Demetrius to stay still while her Helena spoke to him, so she rugby-tackled him to the ground and sat on him, to Alan Bennett’s all-conquering The History Boys), film (most recently the screen version of Bennett’s play and Harry Potter), television (from the highs of Rising Damp and Dennis Potter’s Cold Lazarus to … umm … Vicious and Big School, recent productions whose place in television history you can decide for yourselves) and uncountable awards (including one, I presume, for having a voice like cracked oranges) over the last five decades.
She remembered once saying to Bennett that he didn’t write how people talked. “No,” he replied, “I don’t write how people talk. It’s what you call ‘style’.”
I would like a special Talks To … next Christmas, of just the actors’ anecdotes spliced together. A cracked orange in the toe of the festive listing stockings. Delicious.
