What Car Share needs is a pair of jump leads and a lot more spark
T he slowest-moving love affair on telly is back. A traffic jam on the M62 shifts like Concorde compared to the romance between John and Kayleigh in Peter
Kay’s Car Share (BBC1).
Whether that’s good news depends on how much you enjoy listening to Peter Kay and Sian Gibson talking about the best way to fry chips or how nextdoor’s motorbike woke one of them up at 6.30am, when they ought to be discussing wedding plans by now.
If you like a story to go somewhere, Car Share is a frustration. Like a commuter, it simply shuttles back and forth on the same wellworn route. Months go by and nothing changes.
The running jokes include surreal road signs, bizarre radio ads, Kayleigh’s crush on a workman and John’s encyclopaedic knowledge of cheap Nineties music.
each one pops up at precisely the same point in the morning journey. (If the local FM station’s ‘ Guess The Year’ contest starts before they reach the car park, they’re running late.)
But in its sheer monotony, the show is inventive.
As the second series begins, it’s amusing to see how many ways Kayleigh can find to hint that she finds John attractive, without ever saying as much. her main tactic this time was to give him a pop compilation and tell him to listen to the words of track two.
That cues another of the show’s regular features, a dream sequence where Kayleigh stars in her own pop video. This time she was singing along to S Club 7, with her fellow passengers at the bus stop providing harmonies.
The format did change slightly, as Kayleigh decided to make her own way to work on public transport. But she and John still kept up a steady stream of nonsense natter on their mobiles, until he arrived to pick her up from the railway station.
he had a hands-free kit, but kept glancing at his mobile anyway, to check the signal strength. On the way home, he and Kayleigh were watching YouTube clips on their phones at every traffic light.
Car Share is a comedy about mundane life.
If it’s completely normal for drivers to fiddle constantly with their smartphones and even check out videos, the new six-point automatic penalty and £200 fine has evidently failed to get the safety message across.
The sight of a man at the wheel constantly reaching for his phone aggravated me so much that the jokes became part of the irritation.
Many viewers think Peter Kay is the funniest man on television and will be bouncing on their sofas, whooping at Car Share’s return. I’m just not one of them. Dr Kevin Fong’s evangelistic enthusiasm for manned missions to other planets evades me, too.
he tried to persuade us on Should We Go To Mars? The Big Think ( BBC4) that it was humanity’s noblest goal.
But his arguments were mostly pinched from B-movies and boys’ comics such as eagle. Mankind has to colonise other planets, declared Dr Kevin, because sooner or later we are going to destroy this one.
That’s not idealism, it’s Mad Professor gibberish. As the programme pointed out in one of its infrequent interludes of sanity, humans can’t survive for long in space: stellar radiation fries us. Dr Kevin imagined a new frontier with pioneers living in ice palaces on Mars.
‘I can see that happening,’ he insisted. ‘ The future of our species does depend on exploration.’
If this sort of delusion is our best hope, then Dad’s Army’s Private Frazer was right: ‘We’re all doomed!’