What’s really going on with Barely Legal Drivers?

So I got round to watching the second series of Barely Legal Drivers, which, for those of you who don’t know is  BBC 3 show, following 12 (2 per episode) newly qualified or out-of-practice young drivers. It follows the formula of such shows as Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents, in that the participants are told they are being filmed for some other show, while the cameras are there mainly to allow their parents access to parts of their childrens’ lives that they would not ordinarily see. To add to that, they also bring in former traffic copper Judith and (for this second series) a top driving instructor, to make the actual assessment of the participants’ driving skills.

On the surface this would appear to be a show about entertaining people with the wacky antics of young drivers and focussing on the typical British family and how the idea of how the parent/child relationship shifts once a child has access to something as important as a car.

However something far more sinister actually lies beneath the surface of this programme. It is propagated on the same notion as that of Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents. The notion that it is perfectly acceptable for parents to lie to and spy on their children.

Now you could say that the whole issue of national broadcast date being set for a programme no matter what the participants think it is means they’re asking for this information to be made public. But that would miss the point I’m trying to make.

Consider how disrespectful it is to their children to lie to them about what’s going on, spy on them and then bring in a couple of external examiners to tut at them. This is linked to an overriding attitude that permeates the older generation in the UK.

It used to be that young people could be framed as disrespectful and unappreciative (“I didn’t fight a war, so you could speak to me like that”). However the generation that relied on that viewpoint has all but died off and been replaced by a generation that literally didn’t fight a war. This generation can’t legitimately frame their youngers as disrespectful so instead settles for going with dangerous.

Case in point, programmes like Barely Legal Drivers completely ignore older drivers who are awful behind the wheel, and are only interested in waggling a finger to young drivers and saying that their very act of getting behind the wheel of the car is a horribly dangerous thing that we should all be afraid of.

For example, one of this years’ participants was denied a car, given his propensity for driving at between 75 and 78 miles per hour on the motorway. Kids and adults alike, I’m going to tell you a secret; EVERYONE drives at 80MPH on the motorway. Unless they’re really bored the Police won’t even stop you for driving at 80 (usually because that’s how fast they’re going themselves). This was even pretty much said in the episode itself, with participants father pointing out that he usually drives about 80 on the motorway, only to be slapped back by his wife, who pointed out that their son was too young to be driving at that speed. Of course she was fine with her husband driving at that speed. Judith even dolled out some advanced driving lessons for this based on his being 8 miles over the speed limit. A speed limit that no one Judith’s age (or any age for that matter) respects.

The hypocrisy of this act is at it’s most evident in the next episode when Judith chastises another young driver for hogging the middle lane of the motorway and holding other cars up, by getting there and only driving at 70MPH. Well that’s all very well Judith, but in order to not be holding up the cars behind her up she’d have to be driving faster than 70MPH, which according to you is guaranteed to kill everyone using the motorway at the time. Incidentally I wonder whether the BBC will be offering advanced driving courses to everyone it recorded using the motorway on the occasion of my first example. While they only had a creepy telemetry box in the participant’s car, the fact that he didn’t collide with any of the cars in front of him suggests they were travelling at the same speed as him.

 

If these lessons really are being given out in the spirit of safety on the UK roads, then I’d say the BBC has an obligation ensure every single driver in their programme that’s been recorded doing something wrong should be educated about their mistakes.

Oh and to close out this point, if he was speeding so much, how did the camera car following him keep up? I mean it’s not like the camera car was speeding too? That would mean there were actually three different types of hypocrisy at work here.

So what’s really going on with Barely Legal Drivers? Am I just reading too much in to what the show’s agenda is?

Or is this a show (like Sun, Sex and Suspicious Parents) that’s designed to promote and dislike and distrust of the young?