“In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” Given how easily some seem to dodge the latter, Benjamin Franklin’s oft-quoted epigram could do with a little modification. Nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxis? That, at least, is the premise of A Cabbie Abroad.
This series is a spin-off from BBC Two’s show Toughest Place to Be…, in which Brits in everyday professions – midwife, paramedic, binman etc – were sent off to see how their job is done in another part of the world. In series four, they stuck a London cabbie in the middle of Mumbai.
Mason McQueen is that holy grail of television executives: a natural performer in front of the camera with none of the edges knocked off. The pantheon already includes the likes of Sister Wendy Beckett, John Harvey Jones and Fred Dibnah. If Mason didn’t exist he’d need to be invented. Not a single detail is out of place: the mullet, the glottal stops, the homespun empathy. He now has his own series in which he visits other corners of the planet. Later on he goes to the Canadian Arctic and Fiji, but his first stop was Phnom Penh, where cabbies drive a contraption known as a tuk-tuk, a moped hooked up to a four-seat cart with a canopy. Drivers wear a helmet, and passengers probably should too. McQueen was hooked up with a lovely tuk-tuk owner called Polo Doot, and stayed in his tiny two-room home with Polo’s wife and young son.
The taxi-ing half of the film went entirely to script. McQueen couldn’t believe the unruliness of the traffic, was a terrible driver but by the end spent a day picking up fares and ferrying tourists around the city. But the taxi is only a vehicle. The film was really about the dire poverty suffered by millions in a country ruled by the same oppressive regime since the overthrow of Pol Pot. McQueen had a sniff of state brutality when he and Polo drove into a protest by garment workers which the police were busy suppressing.
The psychological remnants of the killing fields were also explored. McQueen visited a Genocide Museum, a former school on whose premises 14,000 people were murdered. Polo shared personal memories - of relatives being killed and, in front of his eyes, a starving friend who stole a cucumber being marched off to the mass grave to be shot. “It must have been a living hell for you, Polo,” said McQueen, no less speechless than anyone else would be.
He was an amiable if clueless guide to this world of horrific memories and continuing injustice. To fill in the facts, a voiceover did a lot of the heavy lifting – rather too intrusively. Whenever the film jagged back to the tuk-tuk, the tonal shift jarred, like taking a sleeping policemen at speed. The result was a sort of stealth edition of Panorama, smuggled onto your screen in the disguise of a Cockney geezer in shorts. It was messy, rambling, never certain where it was heading, but always kept you on your toes, a bit like a tuk-tuk ride in Phnom Penh. It’s certainly worth hailing A Cabbie Abroad next time it passes.
