There is always a time lag between extraordinary events and the art they give rise to. Memories and facts mulch down to productive soil, aerated by prevailing moods and watered by thought. Seeds germinate and creations eventually flower.
We appear to be at the start of a season of art rooted in the refugee crisis. Rufus Jones has grown something quite special in the shape of Home, which has the structure of a sitcom but whose unfolding tale of Sami, the Syrian refugee taken in by an ordinary family in Dorking, has been so moving and thought-provoking that I feel an urge to classify it as a kind of new embodied journalism-comedy hybrid.
Now we have Don’t Forget the Driver (BBC2) about beleaguered coach driver Pete (played by Toby Jones, who also co-wrote the series with Tim Crouch). It features the arrival in his life of a woman he finds hidden in his vehicle’s luggage bay when he returns to the depot in Bognor Regis after taking a group of day-trippers on a booze ‘n’ respects run to Calais and Dunkirk.
It is billed as a dark comedy, but the first episode is a virtually laugh-free, slowly-painted portrait of a day in the long littleness of Pete’s life. That’s not a complaint – or if it is, only about the mislabeling, not the product which is a pitch-perfect evocation of the unremarkable existence of an unremarkable man in a seaside town, both of whose best years are behind them.
Pete has a happy-go-lucky twin brother Barry (also played by Jones) living a sunny life in sunny Australia while he stays in Bognor, looking after their mentally deteriorating mother and trying to deal with his bored, frustrated daughter Kayla who is set on returning to her mother in Birmingham, and his annoying colleague Squeaky Dave.
His day of driving unfolds against the background discovery by police of a body on the beach – which Pete saw before anyone else, but backed away from in fear. The coach trip gets caught in traffic jams caused by the police activity, and Squeaky Dave keeps them informed of developments as he hears them on the radio. It is gradually determined that the person must have died at sea days before and been washed up only now – the implication, of course, that he or she was trying to flee to the UK.
The seeds of a romantic subplot are sown with the introduction of Fran, who runs the Phil-Me-Up Snack Shack at which Pete buys his sausage baps for the road and who always asks after his mother and invites him to the local quiz night. But just as you are settling in to enjoy what’s shaping up to be a delicate, well-made mood piece, a scene will pop up that sets everything a-jangle. The distressing obstreperousness of dementia sufferers, perhaps (as his wandering mum is taken in by her kind Pakistani neighbours). The disaffection of the young trapped in a town that seems to hold nothing for them. And – most janglingly of all – a tiny scene in which a young black man taps eagerly at the door of Pete’s coach as he waits to leave Calais, moving brutally swiftly from hope of a lift to bleak despair in the seconds between his appearance and Pete setting off. It knocked me sideways, and made me want to sponsor an award for highest actorly impact per second.
The young woman is discovered by Pete in the closing scenes, and we realise that at least part of the young man’s actions were to distract from her stowing away. As Pete stands there in shock, an older white man comes and helps her out, encourages her to stand then moves off with her into the night, snarling at Pete’s small attempt to stop him.
Pete backs away into the depot and falls to the ground – in horror, really, and although you don’t quite know how the last half-hour got you to such a pitch, it feels absolutely right that he does. If it is comedy, it is one with the bleakest tragedy at its heart. But whatever label you put on it, it is a fine, fine piece of work. You could watch this and Home side by side and come away more deeply informed about our era’s besetting sins and sorrows than any news site could manage. Art still has its uses – and popular art at that. Who knew?
