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Learners

Jessica Hynes and David Tennant in Learners
  • Posted at 1:02pm
  • 08 November 2007
  • by AlisonGraham-RT

Some television dramas rear up and slap you hard around the face, just begging you to take them on. "Want to come outside? Are you hard enough?'" they might as well be saying. Others, though, are supine yorkshire terriers, snuffling and looking at you with limpid eyes that demand "love me, love me".

Learners (Sunday 11 November, 9:00pm, BBC1) falls into this latter category. It's "comedy drama" (an expression that usually means the makers can't make up their minds what it is, because it's not much of either) centred on a driving school.

Now, many years ago, you young ones, the fine American comic Bob Newhart did a sensationally funny monologue called The Driving Instructor. Seek it out if you don't know it. In it, Newhart made every possible gag about drivers and instructors. The end. There's nothing more to be said.

Yet Learners tries. What emerges is something that, for the most part, could have been a fairly average episode of Terry and June circa 1976. It's written by and stars Jessica Hynes (who, nee Jessica Stevenson, co-wrote Spaced with Simon Pegg, one of the best TV comedies ever).

Learners, though, is a soppy mess. One minute Hynes's character Bev, a hopeless learner and a repeated test-failer, crashes into a milk float (ho, ho, ho). The next she's in her grim mobile home yelling at her boorish husband and sobbing because they don't have any money as her sweet children make the best of things. What the hell is this? Cathy Come Home with L-Plates?

To make this hideous TV working-class hell even more unbearable, Bev develops an unrequited crush on her geeky driving instructor (David Tennant, who someone has gone to an awful lot of trouble to "de-handsome", giving him a terrible haircut and glasses that make him look like the sort of man who would enjoy burning ants with a magnifying glass).

You know that shuddering noise Sideshow Bob makes in The Simpsons? That's the noise I made after Learners.

My Boy Jack (Sunday 11 November, 9:00pm, ITV1) is considerably more worthwhile, but I suppose if I want to be fair (and I don't, not really) its story is so heartbreaking that a piece of nonsense like Learners doesn't stand a chance up against it in the seriousness stakes. Young Daniel Radcliffe stars as John Kipling, son of Rudyard, who dies in the First World War, leaving his bereft father (David Haig, who also wrote the stage play upon which My Boy Jack is based) to rage against such a terrible loss.

Capturing Mary (Monday 12 November, 9:00pm, BBC2) is the second piece by Stephen Poliakoff in as many weeks. If anything, it's even more baffling and infuriating than its predecessor, Joe's Palace. I emerged from it wanting to hit someone.

*

Alison Graham is TV editor of Radio Times.

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