Peter Kay's Car Share: a new addition to the 'in-car entertainment' genre

Graeme Virtue - Honk if you love Peter Kay. Before screening on BBC1 this week, Kay’s latest sitcom got a bump-start by premiering on iPlayer, and Car Share turned out to be a particularly high-performance comedy vehicle: in five days, it attracted a record-breaking 2.8m views.

The premise is deliberately stripped back: two supermarket employees – harried assistant manager John (Kay) and Anastasia-loving promotions rep Kayleigh (Sian Gibson) – sign up for their company’s new carpool initiative. Each of the six episodes takes place almost entirely inside John’s cosy red Fiat 500L, as he and Kayleigh spend their shared commute getting to know each other, talking shop and bickering over the merits of cheesy radio station Forever FM. It’s a four-wheeled two-hander, with the viewer as an invisible third passenger.

Car Share is the newest and slickest addition to the small but notable micro-genre – the Nissan Micra-genre? – of TV shows shot inside cars. Perhaps subconsciously, we have become used to surveying drivers from a fixed viewpoint on the dashboard, or, in an odd bit of televisual grammar naturalised by dozens of Top Gear reviews, gazing up at them from a position in the passenger footwell.

But prolonged shooting in a cramped space that is also constantly mobile creates unique technical challenges – problems with noise, vibration and remote camera failure – while also risking boring the audience. Car interiors are functional and dull to look at, although Kay is clearly confident that the crackle of small talk between John and Kayleigh will take up any visual slack.

The most obvious precedent for Car Share is Marion and Geoff, where sad-sack minicab driver Keith (Rob Brydon) filmed his own personal video diary to help him keep track of his disintegrating relationship with his estranged wife and kids. Brydon’s heartbreaking, semi-delusional monologues created dramatic tension even while the cab was parked; the DIY video diary conceit helped explain away any technical shortcomings; and the prosaic backdrop echoed Keith’s own emptied life. (The 2014 film Locke, in which Tom Hardy plays a Welsh contractor whose life falls apart as he drives all night, the camera trapped inside with him, feels like a mutated, moodier update of Marion and Geoff.)

More recently, the bittersweet Nurse, a latex-enabled, multi-character showcase for Paul Whitehouse, was often just as affecting when it cut away from Whitehouse to mental health visitor Esther Coles sitting in her car during her rare downtime, wolfing her lunch and leaving mobile messages for her wayward daughter. The picture of Jarvis Cocker in a heart-shaped frame, hanging from her rearview mirror, offered us a personal insight into a character we usually only ever saw putting other people first. Maybe there is some mileage in a solo spin-off consisting of Coles humming away to herself while commuting between appointments.

Other sitcoms have trapped their characters, and audiences, in cars as a one-off gimmick. In a memorable third-series episode of One Foot in the Grave, writer David Renwick marooned Victor Meldrew in a bank holiday traffic jam for the entire running time, his view blocked by the back end of a horse in a horsebox. How I Met Your Mother, a comedy so committed to formal experimentation it sometimes forgot the gags, poured its characters into a limo for a first-season episode set on New Year’s Eve: what should have been a luxury indulgence rapidly transformed into an emotional pressure cooker with tinted windows.

In 2009, Red Dwarf star and gadget fan Robert Llewellyn hit on the idea of filming his own mobile web chatshow in an electric car to reduce ambient noise, getting everyone from Jonathan Ross to Paul Daniels (twice) to amiably ramble away while buckled in to his passenger seat, only occasionally abandoning their train of thought to confirm directions to their destination. (Jerry Seinfeld does something similar in his web series Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee.) There was a rough-and-ready feel to Llewellyn’s Carpool – which also ran for a 10-episode series on Dave in 2010 – and Llewellyn has moved on to another online show, Fully Charged, that allows him to explore his love of electric vehicles.

But thanks to Kay, the micro-genre of in-car entertainment continues to roll on. If there is a second series of Car Share, perhaps he might consider casting Lewellyn, or even Brydon, as an additional passenger.

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