I was reminded recently of Fiat’s early 1980s ‘Hand-Built by Robots’ advertising campaign for the Strada model, which débuted in 1978. Fiat had very recently dispensed with much of its manual workforce, not entirely without justification since the whole decade had been marred by continual labour strikes and several murders of Fiat executives by Marxist terrorists, and this slogan was a somewhat transparent way of masking the miasma of redundancy as a great leap forward for progress.
ViaRETRO likes to celebrate anniversaries, and that ad campaign reminded me that there are two very important anniversaries to celebrate this year that I haven’t heard a single mention of yet. They’re not car-related, which may explain why they almost passed me by completely, but they deserve recognition and so this seems like a great opportunity to take a quick look at the rôle of the motor-car in television satire.
Hitting television screens in 1979, Not the Nine O’Clock News presented a lively, irreverent take on current affairs according to the minds of Rowan Atkinson, Griff Rhys Jones, Mel Smith and Pamela Stephenson, plus Chris Langham in the first series. They remain, in your author’s opinion, the greatest satirists since Peter Cook and Dudley Moore.
The show saw fit to poke fun at Fiat’s high-tech marketing on a couple of occasions. The first was a simple play on national stereotypes while the second, which coincided with the launch of the Austin Ambassador in 1982, contrasted Fiat’s up-to-the-minute pretensions of technical sophistication with the relatable production standards of British Leyland. Incidentally, for all that the non-discerning car buyer may have been impressed by robotic production lines, build quality of the Strada was still extremely shoddy and rust-proofing continued to be applied in the best Italian tradition. Yes, that is a Vauxhall Viva posing as a Fiat in the first video…
Also launched contemporaneously with NTNOCN was the Austin Mini Metro, which was launched with the intention of replacing the ageing Mini. History, of course, has unsurprisingly favoured the handsome, nippy little Mini over the plain, boxy Metro, but the Mini was rather taken for granted in its 20th year and the Metro was undoubtedly what British Leyland needed to compete with the onslaught of hatchbacks like the Volkswagen Golf, Renault 5 and Ford Fiesta.
Without doubt, the Metro’s most famous television proponent must be Lynn Benfield, with her rather unsuccessful attempt to pitch it (under its facelifted alter ego of the Rover 100) to Alan Partridge. Partridge’s own perception of the car was no doubt tainted by its appearance on NTNOCN some 15/20 years previously, when Jones and Stephenson demonstrated exactly which demographic would find the Metro most appealing. It’s in Applejack, no less!
Most famous, though, is the show’s paean to the truck-driving life, which was rather closer to the British reality than what America was portraying with Smokey and the Bandit, Convoy, White Line Fever and so on. Instead, the British trucker enjoyed and continues to enjoy a life of greasy motorway services and an imaginative interpretation of the Highway Code. Miss Stephenson is undoubtedly the star of this video, but the automotive lead is a 1980 Leyland Constructor. A Mk. V Ford Cortina estate appears as its prey, while we can also see, in order of appearance, a late Rover P6, Triumph Stag, DAF 2800 lorry, Bedford Chevanne, Bedford TK, Bedford HA and, I think, a Ford D-series lorry. If you can identify anything else, stick your answers on a postcard.
Before Not the Nine O’Clock News, of course, there was Monty Python’s Flying Circus, and it’s now 50 years since John Cleese, Eric Idle, Michael Palin, Graham Chapman, Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam first brought us something completely different. It erred more towards absurdism than satire, which perhaps explains its relative international success, and the car was never really an object of humour in itself like it was in NTNOCN.
It would be difficult, for instance, to offer much social commentary on the only sketch in which cars are central to the plot, that being The Killer Cars, a typical Gilliam cartoon starring a succession of AEC Routemasters and a ravenous vigilante group of Morris Minors and MG 1100s. However, Monty Python has often been considered ahead of its time, and with the benefit of hindsight we might point out that The Killer Cars totally preceded the killer-car genre of horror film, which included The Car (1977) and Christine (1983).
Another car lent itself to the title of a sketch, though, that being Mr. & Mrs. Brian Norris’s Ford Popular. A staple of the Python stable was the nasal, tedious suburban white-collar worker, usually portrayed by Michael Palin and engaged in such unexciting offices as chartered accountancy, or quantity surveying. Our hero Mr. Norris was indeed a chartered accountant, but he was also a keen adventurer and ethnographer, the British Heyerdahl, no less. Clearly, the Pythons judged that the sort of car best suited to his character was a 1950s Ford Popular – mundane, frugal and extremely dated – and hence it served as his faithful transport on his swashbuckling expedition into Middlesex.
It’s interesting to observe, too, the choice of cars for The Upper-Class Twit of the Year, in which contestants compete for the coveted title in a series of gruelling tests involving using a car to Wake Up the Neighbour. In the series, a 1967 Triumph Spitfire and 1961 Jaguar E-type were chosen. These were replaced by a 1970 MGB Roadster and a 1971 MG Midget in And Now For Something Completely Different. While we covet these machines today, it is worth noting that they did carry some unfortunate ‘twit’ associations when they were new. Sports cars were no longer the preserve of dashing RAF types flitting from the airfield to a secret rendezvous. With war a distant memory and affordable GT-badged performance saloons starting to hit the market, the traditional sports car was viewed by some as the preserve of young chinless wonders in need of a way to spend Daddy’s money, as the numerous references to flat caps and stringback driving gloves in the newly-launched Custom Car magazine would confirm. Harry Enfield’s Tim Nice-But-Dim owned an MG Midget, too.
Still, it was all in good fun and the fact that certain jokes could be directed at certain cars is testimony to each one’s unique character, and the particular place in society that each car possessed. Such humour could scarcely happen today, now that cars are distinguishable by little more than size, with engineering, performance and styling characteristics being largely similar across the board. Besides which, satire isn’t what it used to be either, with political correctness having been substituted for real irreverence. Don’t mind me, though, I’ll just go on pining for the past…