THE MIDDLE LANE

TGTV script editor Sam Philip is on the trail of why motorway services are so boring

Should you ever require proof that the British are optimistic, sunny people, consider this. In a recent survey, a full 59 per cent of Britons thought motorway service station food represented ‘good value for money’.

Yes, according to six out of 10 people in this country, paying seven quid for the pleasure of consuming a clammy cheese sandwich in the bowels of a decaying slab of Seventies brutalism represents ‘good value’. If that’s not glass-half-full thinking, I don’t know what is.

Which service stations have these people been visiting? In my experience – and I have far more than I would like – motorway services rarely represent good value for money in the catering department. In fact, they rarely represent good anything for anything in the anything department.

True, I can’t say that I’ve visited every service station in Britain. I’m sure they’re not all terrible. I’m sure several boast toilet facilities that don’t require a course of antibiotics after use. But still. On the whole, British services are hardly shining examples of value and imagination, are they?

It’s tempting to blame this on their captive market. If my car is down to its last pipette of petrol, and my toddler is so full

“MY TODDLER IS SO FULL THAT IF I HIT A POTHOLE HE’LL BURST LIKE A GIANT WATER BALLOON”

of urine that if I hit a pothole he’s likely to burst like a giant water balloon, I’m pulling in at the next services and to hell with how much the panini cost. In other words, if you’re the only place to have a wee for the next 50 miles, you don’t need on-site Laser Quest to get punters through the door.

But this lack of competition isn’t the sole reason services are underwhelming. It’s also because The Man says they must be. Or at least he used to.

Because here’s a humdinger of a fact for you. Did you know that, until just a few years ago, motorway service stations were required, by law, to be as boring as possible? Completely true. Until 2013, service stations were prohibited from being, to use the official term, ‘a destination in their own right’.

In other words, they were permitted only to provide facilities that might be required by passing traffic, but forbidden from offering any sort of attraction that might tempt people to head out of their way to visit.

I mean, say what you want about our service stations’ half-hearted approach to cleanliness and customer service, but you have to applaud their dedication to not being destinations in their own right. True, they’ve had seven years since that law was binned, and there’s scant sign of on-site Laser Quests just yet.

But you know what it’s like. When you’ve spent so many decades becoming world leaders in the field of underwhelming your customers, well, that’s not the sort of expertise you can be expected to forget in just a few short years. Our service stations may not be good at very much, but at being unremarkable, they remain truly remarkable.