Just be bolshy and you’ll never have to pay a parking fine again
THE WORLD fleeces us in lots of ways. Waiters expect a 10 per cent tip after a rotten meal, car mechanics lift the bonnet and discover repairs we never expected, airlines stick another slab on the bill f or i nsurance we don’t want.
Life, it sometimes seems, is one long mugging. But traffic wardens are the worst — they don’t so much fleece you as flay you down to the bone.
Parking tickets leave deep wounds. I’m still peeved about one I picked up in Moreton-in-Marsh in 1985. I parked legally, but when I returned my car was flanked by ‘No Parking’ cones and there was a yellow notice stuck to my windscreen.
Though I appealed, and the magistrates’ court reduced the penalty to £10, the injustice of it grieves me almost 30 years later. It’s not the principle, it’s the money.
A wound like that is inflicted every three seconds, according to Parking Mad (BBC1). Just as air hostesses have become ‘ cabin crew’ and lollipop ladies are ‘crossing attendants’, it seems there are no traffic wardens now. They are all ‘ civil enforcement officers’ or CEOs.
Call them what you like, they’ll still slap a ticket on your car for overhanging a yellow line by two inches.
And they enjoy it: ‘If you are not issuing tickets you are not doing your j ob properly,’ said Jamie, a university graduate who put his education to dubious use as a CEO in Lincoln. His colleague, Chris, was a former milkman. Before the rise of the supermarkets, every street in Britain had a milkie. Once, people were glad to see him, but not any more. ‘I’ve had people grab hold of me,’ said Chris with perverse satisfaction, ‘I’ve had ladies cry to me.’
Infuriating it might be, but gripping it was not. Parking Mad boiled down to an hour of civic dignitaries defending indirect taxation and monotonal CEOs talking about what they had in their sandwiches. This was jobsworth telly.
But it did offer a few handy tips. If you pick up a ticket, don’t ignore it — otherwise you’re likely to be flagged down in six months or so by husbandand-wife bailiffs Steve and Debbie, who will calmly and persistently demand £500 or your car keys.
On the other hand, don’t cough up the initial fine, often a swingeing 70 quid, without querying it. Seek advice from campaigners such as the blogger Mr Mustard, who knows all the loopholes and reckons he can get almost every ticket quashed. The traffic department will never admit a mistake, but they will own up to ‘procedural impropriety’.
James Constantino, the boss of Prestige Pawnbrokers of Weybridge in Surrey, was in danger of being fleeced himself, on Posh Pawn (C4). He was keen on collecting luxury toys — Ferraris and Porsches, helicopters and even a one-man mini-submarine.
So when a Nigerian air force officer emailed him with the chance to buy a fleet of fighter jets, James was seriously tempted. Most people know not to trust ‘spam’ messages from entrepreneurs in Lagos, but we all have our blind spots and James’s was supersonic fighter planes.
After all, who hasn’t dreamed of strafing the M25 during rush hour with a squadron of Phantom jets? Luckily for him, his assistant Jo disabused him of his delusions with a pithy tongue-lashing, and then marched outside to deal with the workmen who were blocking the shop doorway.
It was easy to see how James had become a multi-millionaire — faced with any obstacle, he could simply unleash Jo.
The documentary was crammed with great characters, and they turned a tawdry Cash-In-The-Attic format into thorough entertainment. Producer Bethan Arwel-Lewis has an instinct for amateurs who are TV naturals, such as Marcella, the single mum and pawn- shop customer who dreamed of superstardom while scraping by as a nightclub singer.
Better still was Ian the gem specialist, with his blond Beatle cut and skin-tight silk shirts, and more nail varnish than Bet Lynch from Coronation Street. When he saw a diamond, Ian growled with pleasure like a lion cub.
What’s best about people like this is you can trust them never to become traffic wardens.