This family road trip was a joy from start to finish
‘Have any of your friend’s had sex?” asked pushy London mum Debbie at the outset of Taxi of Mum and Dad (Channel 4). A withering look and a shriek of “Mum, we’re only 14,” from her daughter Kasey was as reassuring a response as any parent could hope for; but who knew such an exchange could make laugh-out-loud television?
The idea was simple: fix multiple cameras in eight family runabouts for a month and record the ordinary drive-time exchanges that all parents and their teenage offspring enjoy – or endure. The result was highly entertaining, especially in chalk-andcheese relationships such as the one between ex-cop Gail and her 19-yearold son Ben in Southport, who seemed perfectly comfortable, even to actively enjoy, a relationship based mostly on her haranguing him, and him telling her to shut up.
Fun was always to the fore. Bradford mum June’s sensible advice to 18-year-old Sarah regarding a holiday in Kavos was amusingly spurned by a daughter who always had something more extreme to suggest than her mother had imagined. The vicarious thrill Kent mother Sarah took in her 14-year-old daughter Cameron’s first romance was a gift that kept on giving.
If there was a lesson, it was that parents are well meaning but fundamentally annoying creatures. A rare example of one getting the upper hand was Guildford dad Glynn’s increasingly outrageous suggested restrictions on his daughter Maddie’s upcoming house party – winding her up nicely.
Best of all were the cringe-making moments, such as Charlotte from Market Harborough’s suggestion to her 16-year-old-son Ben that they go to a gay bar together; or worse, her offer, in front of friends, to act as surrogate mother if he ever wanted a child. “Euuurgh!” was the jointly appalled response.
Clever editing and use of music played on the car stereos added an extra entertainment layer: passengerseat bopping, impromptu singalongs, moments of sharing, and unselfconscious laughter.
All in all, a joy from start to finish. Not least because it was a one-off. Good as Taxi of Mum and Dad was, you could see the gloss wearing thin quite quickly.
We can’t all have illustrious forebears; a point that Lulu was quick to remind us of at the start of Who Do You Think You Are? (BBC One). “I’m not waiting to find out if I’m really a princess. I know,” she said, with typically effervescent good humour.
Which is just as well, because the story that unfolded was as bleak and dreich as a wintry Scottish morning. The focus was on Lulu’s mother, Elizabeth, who was “given up” shortly after her birth in Glasgow in 1927, and brought up by foster parents. The first she knew of it was being told, aged 13, by a previously unknown sister that she wasn’t who she thought she was. A shock that left her insecure for the rest of her life.
Little by little, Lulu and her genealogical burrowers unpicked the tapestry of Elizabeth’s life, exposing the singer’s feckless grandfather, Hugh, with a razor-slash scar on his face (“a Glasgow grin”, as Lulu put it) and a lengthy criminal record. The only redeeming thing was the unbreakable – though never fully explained – bond of passion that he and Helen’s mother shared, despite him being a Catholic and her a Protestant from a family very active in the Orange Order.
Of course, some of the most memorable editions of the genealogical series have focused on ordinary people’s extraordinary lives: Jeremy Paxman being reduced to tears by his family’s former poverty, Ainsley Harriott’s discovery of slavers in the family line or Alex Kingston’s brothelkeeping great-great-great-greatgrandmother, spring to mind.
But what those and similar editions lacked in estimable ancestry, they made up for by bringing vividly to life long-forgotten times and characters, or revealing more about the celebrities who still bear that blood in their veins.
Here though, other than bad boy Hugh, none of these individuals were allowed to rise more than vaguely in our imaginations. Even Lulu herself remained oddly elusive. Her own life, other than having her first hit at the age of 15, winning Eurovision and being a presence on the pop circuit for 50 years, went entirely ignored. And though some tears were shed along the way, her admirably upbeat attitude seemed entirely at odds with the bleak tale of human misery and sectarian division playing out behind. In the end there remained a sense of something missing, possibilities unexplored, in this surprisingly flat edition.
Taxi of Mum and Dad Who Do You Think You Are?