Show about taxis that’s as cheap as a minicab with a budget satnav
What’s the point of memorising all the street names and back alleys inLondon, when every smartphone has a built-in satnav?
an examiner testing would-be cabbies on The Knowledge: World’s Toughest Taxi Test (C4) tried to make a case for the superiority of the human brain. he argued that computers might be able to pinpoint the theatre Royal, Drury Lane, but they couldn’t understand subtleties such as: ‘Drop me at the stage door.’
he’s right. But is that small advantage worth the colossal difference in intellectual effort? to earn his licence, the black cab driver has to study, on average, for almost five years, working at least 35 hours a week to memorise the capital’s labyrinthine roads. all an unqualified pirate has to do is switch on his mobile phone.
that might sound cynical. so here’s another question: what’s the use in spending months on a bigbudget documentary, when the producers can just as easily fill an hour’s screen-time by sending in the cameras for a single day?
this was a show on a minicab budget. We saw half a dozen trainee taxi drivers sitting different stages, or ‘appearances’, on their four-part test. they recited routes picked by the examiner, calculating the shortest distance and naming every road along the way.
superimposed in a corner of the screen, a map helped viewers to track the imaginary journey. a yellow line on a grid showed the correct path. It looked awkwardly like a satnav picture.
Bus driver and father- of-four Everton passed his first test. so did saimir, who fled Kosovo as a teenager 20 years ago to come to London. But 60-year-old Mike had a memory lapse, and car-mad Nikki suffered an attack of nerves.
they all hung around long enough to give us a soundbite or two about how the knowledge was the hardest thing they’d ever done, and it was the thought of their wives / their kids / their mortgages that kept them going.
then we were back in the exam room with another candidate, and another route. It’s difficult to conceive of a more basic documentary. Put it this way, the budget was so tight that, when the show ended with a taxi ride to harrods, you can bet the producers didn’t tip their cabbie.
at the other end of the documentary scale, Reported Missing (BBC1) showed what can be achieved when filmmakers have the patience to collect gut-wrenching material and the skill to edit it tightly.
Not a second was wasted in the telling of two police hunts, the first launched after a 12-year-old boy with learning difficulties stormed out of his house. Joshua was a passionate Doctor Who fan and, by the time officers picked him up six hours later, he was 40 miles away and heading for another galaxy on the bus.
In the second case, the film crew matched the sensitivity of the Durham police liaison officer, who had to sit with a frantic mother all night after her 13- year- old daughter Katie vanished, leaving a note that hinted at suicide.
Mercifully, the girl was found and brought home.
‘ Kids,’ muttered a relieved copper — ‘you just wanna cuddle them and strangle them at the same time.’
Perhaps the emotional tension would have been heightened even more, if the cases had been more different. By the time we’d watched Joshua’s story, we were already wrung out.
But this was compelling human drama. Mass-produced telly-onthe- cheap cannot compare … just as the satnav is no substitute for a black cab driver.
PSYCHIC OF THE NIGHT: Spoonbender Uri Geller was a guest at the Solana in Benidorm (ITV), urging holidaymakers to Think Positive. Since he’s 70 and looks half his age, maybe there’s something in that malarkey. Pass me a spoon.