Road Testing the Pedestrian
Updated Th 1-Aug-24
Frank Thornton played Captain Peacock in the long-running BBC sitcom Are You Being Served? alongside Larry Martyn, who was Mr Mash in the first three series. Here they are reunited in a film from 1974 where Thornton, with a cap on his head and a microphone in his hand, spends the day reporting on a happless Martyn, as if he were road testing a car.
Frank, always addressing the camera, walks down the street and comes to rest outside a terraced house.
We recently road tested the current model of er... pedestrian.
A man is in bed under the covers, coughing in the darkness of his bedroom as the alarm goes off.
Morning cold start: poor.
Man eats a full breakfast, with plenty of sauce.
Fuel consumption: heavy.
The model needed topping up throughout the day.
Man comes out of his house, and changes direction, off up the street.
Road Holding: fair...
A woman throws a bowl of water onto the pavement, and as our man walks into it, he slips and falls over.
...But in bad conditions, brakes were unreliable.
And although the same model has been in production for some time now, spare parts are hard to obtain.
However, the makers assure us that it is rust proof and all essential parts should last a lifetime.
But where our model really did badly was resistance to damage...
The poor man is now run over by a car!
...All tests show that in collision with other vehicles, it always came off worst, with 27,000 each year seriously damaged or total write-offs...
The man emerges from the Casualty department of the hospital, walking with a stick and with his arm in a sling. As he walks off up the street, Frank says...
...So we strongly recommend that when you take this model on the roads, you proceed at all times with great caution.
The BFI has made this film
available to watch
for free online. It's part of the BFI Player website's Public
Information Films collection.
Other pages in the PIFs section...
- Teenagers Learn To Swim
- Teach Them To Swim with Rolf Harris
- Road Testing the Pedestrian
- Grown-ups and Road Sense
- Lonely Water
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