Watching others lose their cool is our guilty pleasure
“RIGHT! That’s it!” screams Basil Fawlty in his recognisably furious falsetto. “You’ve tried it on once too often! … I’m going to give you a damned good thrashing!”
Given the context of Fawlty Towers, you might expect those words to be aimed at a hapless waiter, a disrespectful guest, or even Basil’s own wife (muttered under his breath, mind.) But no, in this particular scene, his escalating anger isn’t directed at a person. Basil Fawlty has road rage. His car won’t move, and he’s vowed to teach it a lesson by thwacking its bonnet with a broken tree branch.
Until yesterday, the image of Fawlty laying siege to an Austin 1100 perfectly summed up the truism that hell hath no fury – and heaven no comedy – like the middle-class Englishman in transit. Now, however, Fawlty has a challenger for the title of England’s Angriest Middle-aged Driver, and his name is Fergus Beeley.
In footage that has travelled rapidly around the internet, Beeley can be seen blowing a gasket on the side of the M27. “Put your hands on the car and get ready to die,” he shouts at one man during the outburst, “this is a citizen’s arrest.” In fact, citizens’ arrests seem to be quite important to Mr Beeley. He later slaps one on an 11-year-old boy in the back of a car, which begs the question: can you be a back seat driver if you’re six years too young to take your driving test?
As John Cleese proved almost 42 years previously, there’s something inherently humorous about the sight of a middle-class, middle-aged man losing his rag in perfect RP. It’s the impotent righteousness of it all; self-importance inflated to side-splitting degrees.
Of course, Beeley isn’t the first road rager to go viral. Youtube is full of these incidents – and the view counts show that we can’t take our eyes off them.
Perhaps there’s a serious reason behind this online, off-road rubbernecking. According to a study last year, we are Europe’s second angriest drivers, beaten only by the Italians.
How many of us can honestly say we haven’t felt the red mist cloud our windscreen? So videos like the one of Fergus Beeley are guilty pleasures. We can laugh at them, and we can quietly say to ourselves: “there but for the grace of God…”