Fender Benders

Andrew Younghusband hosts Canada's Worst Driver. Courtesy Discovery Channel.

Discovery Channel’s Monday-night reality series, Canada’s Worst Driver, began with a bureaucratic fender bender. As filming got underway last February, the Canadian Safety Council publicized a letter to the specialty channel. Canada, the council said, has the third-lowest rate of traffic fatalities of the 30 nations in the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. Third lowest! Discovery Channel was obviously guilty of “irresponsible messaging,” the council complained.

The CSC had cause for concern. The show’s prototype, Britain’s Worst Driver, was a demolition derby that culminated with the worst of the Worst racing the famously difficult 10-lane Arc de Triomphe roundabout in Paris. The competitor who proved most incapable of negotiating the course — a 53-year-old mum who once confused her accelerator and brake pedal, inadvertently parking inside a neighbourhood pub — was awarded a Jaguar X-Type to accelerate her unwitting campaign of terror.

Well, the Canadian show is now in its final lap. The worst driver will be outed on Nov. 7. And unless one of the final three contestants leaps a curb and takes out a moose, it’s not too early to declare that the True North Strong and Generally Free of Gruesome Traffic Accidents really had nothing to fear from the popular series, which suggests you don’t need to be cruel to attract viewers to a Canadian TV reality show.

In case you’ve missed the series to date, Canada’s Worst Driver has gathered eight atrocious drivers from across the country, bringing them to an abandoned military base in Picton, Ont. There, they submit to a number of challenges that combine driving tests with elements of a five-year-old’s birthday party — for instance, negotiating an obstacle course with a goldfish bowl on a companion’s lap, or sitting in the passenger seat and coaxing a blindfolded driver through a series of corkscrew turns.

The panel of expert judges from Canada's Worst Driver. Courtesy Discovery Channel.

While all this is going on, host Andrew Younghusband — a St. John’s smartass from the same kettle of fish that brought us Codco and This Hour Has 22 Minutes — bobs in and out of camera range, wondering why contestants can’t drive a “care” any better. Back at the studio, a glum panel of experts, including an evidently caring behavioural psychologist, ponders the fate of the competitors. The members of the panel are troubled because they’re all responsible people and at the end of every show they’ll be forced to graduate the driver who shows most improvement, leaving one less contestant for the title of “Canada’s worst driver.”

Despite a few spilled goldfish and tears, Canada’s Worst Driver just isn’t as mean as any of the Apprentice-Survivor reality TV competitions that trade in psychological violence and humiliation. (No Canadian producer would ever want to face the inevitable investigation by a parliamentary subcommittee.) The defining moment for the series may have been a sequence where Heather, a 59-year-old nurse from Medicine Hat, Alta., tried to work a five-speed stick shift while caught between a tailgater and a sluggish transport truck. Heather’s qualifications for appearing on Canada’s Worst Driver? In three decades of driving mainly Prairie roads, she totalled 10 automatic cars. So naturally she fell apart slip-sliding a standard transmission up a crowded, icy hill while her husband Ernie, a retired truck driver, sat in the passenger seat moaning, “Clutch in… clutch in!”

Heather finally let go the wheel and dropped her head, sobbing. In the old Wild Kingdom Saturday afternoon nature shows, this was the kill scene, where the lion devoured the antelope; in The Apprentice, Donald Trump would be ripping entrails from a disgraced intern about now. But in Canada’s Worst Driver, the producer appeared suddenly to console the wounded quarry. “Heather, you don’t have to do this,” he said.

Heather removed her glasses, wiped away a tear and studied her husband’s face. “Want to give it another try?” she croaked. He did. When Heather and Ernie finally made it to the finish line, the show’s 10-man crew surrounded their car, applauding. Seconds later, host Younghusband commented, “Heather came to the driver rehab centre as a favour to her family… Now her family is stronger.”

I don’t think it’s the Canadian Safety Council or the CRTC that prevents domestic producers from making purposefully cruel TV entertainment. Clearly there’s something about appearing on public airwaves that puts Canadians on their best behaviour, like we’re visiting grandma. Even the most antisocial of Canada’s Worst Drivers turn into model citizens under a camera’s steady gaze. While driving to the driver rehab centre in the first episode, one snorting road hog, Bob, decided he had to arrive first. Approaching the military base, he had one contestant left to pass: Faith Anne, a woman who has racked up 37 accidents over her driving career. Infuriated by Bob’s challenge, she pulled into the middle of the highway. “I love it, a broad crazier than I am,” Bob cackled, swinging to the shoulder of the road, spitting loose gravel at 150 kilometres an hour to pass.

And yet there was Bob, one episode later, the first graduate of Canada’s Worst Driver academy, a man “on the road to enlightenment,” in Younghusband’s words. “I learned I’m not as good as I thought I was,” Bob confessed, making a plea on behalf of the vehicularly-challenged.

Specialty channels don’t release audience numbers, but a Discovery Channel spokesperson says Canada’s Worst Driver “is our most successful new Canadian show ever.” (It helps that the show had a smart publicity campaign, which included banner ads across the sides of taxicabs in major Canadian cities.)

Speaking as a viewer who has always been put off by the Lord of the Flies savagery of reality TV shows — complete with a ritual elimination at the end of every show when a competitor is voted off the island — I admit to being hooked on the kinder, more Canadian reality series.

Who will be the next to depart Canada’s Worst Driver academy? Effervescent Manuel, a Calgary computer whiz who speaks six languages, but can’t drive in any of them, graduated last week. My money is on Madelena, a free-spirited 21-year-old who rests her head on an airbag as often as she does a pillow. (Dad pays the $9,000 annual insurance premiums.) But don’t rule out Heather, or Chris, who learned to cuss at the Will Ferrell School of Swearing (“son of a motherless goat.”)

Unlike the British original, the worst driver on the Discovery Channel series will not receive a powerful racecar upon losing the competition. That would be irresponsible. Un-Canadian. None of the drivers have been voted out of existence. Departing competitors have graduated back into society. No one has gotten hurt. After goldfish were sent splashing to the car floor in an early competition, host Younghusband quickly advised us that the finned creatures were fakes. The Canadian Safety Council will be glad to learn that our third-best standing in the OECD traffic fatalities list isn’t in jeopardy. There is no roadkill of any kind on Canada’s Worst Driver.

Stephen Cole writes about television for CBC.ca.