The questions that are never raised at the driving Test

IT was right up my alley, this programme about people trying to pass the driving test. I’ve been there — a few times — and I’ve formed some strong opinions on it over the years.

Which is perhaps one of the reasons I didn’t see myself on the first of this six-part series called The Test. I kept looking for myself, obviously, wondering if perhaps they’d interviewed me for it and I’d just forgotten about it. But no, not this time anyway.

I guess the style of the series is not argumentative in tone, it is more instructional — and it was made in conjunction with the Road Safety Authority, which is naturally reluctant to engage in esoteric debate about its ways and means.

But anyway… the first candidate was Dennis Murray, a 64-year-old who has been on a provisional licence for about 40 years, and who was now determined to pass the test, due to the draconian penalties which were introduced for unaccompanied ‘learner’ drivers.

These days poor Dennis could have his car seized if he was caught driving without a ‘qualified’ driver in the passenger seat, and since he doesn’t have ready access to such a person, this gave his latest driving test a sense of urgency.

Dennis indeed was a perfect choice for this programme, because his presence should have raised some very interesting points — not penalty points, of course, because since Dennis was eligible for The Test in the first place, one assumes that he has not accumulated a lot of penalty points.

Moreover, the fact that he has been driving for 40 years might itself have established that Dennis is, on the whole, a pretty safe driver. Certainly there was no mention of any accidents or any other damage caused by him over this extraordinary long period of time, so I’m assuming that Dennis is as competent as many drivers out there with full licences, perhaps more than some of them.

Which would nicely illustrate an argument I have made in these pages, that there is a stigma attached to L-platers, a sense that a ‘learner’ driver of any kind is automatically more of a menace on the road than the ‘good’ drivers.

That the moment they leave the Test Centre with their full licence, they are inherently a better driver than they were on their way to the Test Centre.

These to me are fascinating nuances, which reveal something profoundly interesting about the gap between the actual truth and the bureaucratic truth — and not just in the area of road safety.

But it is particularly interesting in such a field, because the margins are so important, and because truth is so vital — again, Dennis was unable to source a ‘qualified’ driver to accompany him on his travels on a regular basis, but he might well argue that a ‘qualified’ driver is not the same thing as a qualified driving instructor.

And he would of course be right about that.

And since a ‘qualified’ driver might have taken the test a long time ago, when it was much easier, it is possible that the ‘learner’ will be a better and safer driver than the supposedly superior one sitting beside him, poised to intervene.

All this and more I would have brought to this party, though I was still happy to see Dennis passing his test at the second attempt.

The other contestant, as it were, the 17-year-old racing driver Rob Parks, was also well chosen, as I have long maintained that there is no automatic correlation between a brilliantly talented driver and a safe driver — indeed sometimes you’d prefer to be driven by the guy on a provisional for 40 years than by the teenage hotshot. But not in this case: Rob showed that he is not just a very good racing driver, you can let him out on the roads too, with the rest of us.

You’ll get no argument from me on that one, and certainly not on The Test.