People In Cars

A mother is driving her sulky teenaged son to school. She's complaining about his father, being broke, him. He's bored, unresponsive. Suddenly a man jumps into the car. He's got a gun, tells her to drive. And then all kinds of unexpected, but quite logical, things start to happen. This is, after all, a comedy by Simon Brett which means cannily observed characters and sparkling dialogue. It also has the huge benefit of a delicious performance from Samantha Bond as the mother and a most convincing one from Angus Imrie as the son.

The first of three stand-alone comedies concerning persons in vehicles. In Simon Brett's Get Away, Samantha Bond plays a weary divorcee, on the school run with a moaning teenage son (Angus Imrie) who thinks life is boring. When an armed robber (Stephen Critchlow) gets into the car, life gets less boring, but not by much: the bandit's another weary divorcee, and these are the sort of radio characters who, in the heat of a domestic argument or even an armed car-jacking, somehow continue to speak as if they're reading brittle wit from an over-precise script. When the denouement arrives you'll have been parked up waiting for it for several minutes, but all this is perhaps part of the charm of a neat, cosy vignette that moves smoothly from A to B.

The comedy in Simon Brett's People in Cars, directed by Peter Kavanagh, was also gentle, but Brett is a veteran and knows his audience well. The trilogy started with a man who has just performed a raid on a building society hijacking a car driven by a mother and her teenage son. This implausible set-up worked because Samantha Bond played divorcée Gilly with exactly the right blend of withering sarcasm and simmering anger. "God, you make me furious!" she tells the hijacker. "You burst into my car, burst into my life, threaten my son and then you start ordering me around just like my husband did, just like every other man in my life did!" Very soon, Nigel, the hijacker, realises there is something far more menacing than a replica pistol, and that is a middle-aged mum.