Aside from the Leaving Cert or a first job interview, no Irish rite of passage is more gruelling than the driving test. Pass or fail, few of us come away psychologically unscathed – and that’s the experience PJ Gallagher hopes to tap for comedy gold in his new series, The Random Driving Test (RTÉ One, Thursday).
The somewhat unlikely premise Gallagher is running with is that, in random shopping malls around Ireland, members of the public will be open to being invited to retake their test with the cameras rolling.
There’s a sweetener. Pass with flying colours and you bag €1,000. Yet Gallagher, the cheekiest chap on the Irish airwaves, initially struggles to find volunteers. It’s as if, having suffered through the trauma of the test once already, few of us are willing to sign up for seconds, even with a big bag of loot on offer.
He walks the length of Bridgewater Shopping Centre, in Arklow, before Prajakta, a Pilates instructor, puts her hand up. She has passed her test in both Ireland and India, and she draws a sharp distinction between the exacting standards here and those in the country of her birth. “I just had to go straight and do a U-turn and come back and that’s it – 10, 15 minutes,” she says of India. “The rules are not as stringent.”
Signing up to Gallagher’s wheeze, she is introduced to Brian, a stern retired driving tester who puts her through her paces in Wicklow town, which has a pass rate of just 46 per cent. The omens are ominous, but Prajakta holds her nerve, even coping with a fake bad driver the show has planted along the main street.
Then it’s off to Naas, with its apocalyptic traffic. But because the town has no shopping centre to call its own, Gallagher has to go down the road to Newbridge, to find a volunteer at the Whitewater – the Harrods of south Co Kildare. This time it’s Jason, a hairdresser, who opts to do the test in an automatic despite passing in a manual.
His decision doesn’t make a lot of sense until he explains that changing gears has always been a stress point for him, so he’d rather take his chances in an automatic. But Brian, a merciless adjudicator, marks Jason down for ending up “on the wrong side of the road” while reversing.
Gallagher works hard at keeping the chuckles flowing, and if The Random Driving Test is never actually funny, nor is it as emotionally devastating as it could have been given the horrors of the driving test. You also have to credit RTÉ for trying something different with a show that, for all its aimlessness, at least deserves credit for thinking outside the (yellow) box.