All the fun of the fares

11 April 2012

With Tony B Liar offering fraternal greetings to the chief architect of the Lockerbie bombing, while security at Heathrow is at an alltime high, let's all celebrate the madness by enjoying some airline fun and games.

Personally, I like nothing better than loitering around Terminal 4 until I spot an irritating TV presenter who has outstayed his welcome on our screens, then slipping a gun-shaped piece of Bacofoil and a plastic pouch of talcum powder into his hand luggage as he's about to pass through security.

I also enjoy dressing up as an airline pilot and getting blind drunk in the lounge, then staggering around and savouring the terrified expressions on the faces of those about to travel as they frantically try to identify my airline from my uniform.

And best of all, I delight in walking up to those limo drivers in Arrivals who hold up their client's name on a board, saying "I am Dr Zimblestein" in a voice that brooks no argument, then sitting in the back of their car, opening the complimentary champagne, and waiting to see where they take me.

Getting smashed in the back of a hired car may be fun to do ( especially if you're not paying), but it's utterly dismal to watch, as ITV1's

Taxi Nights is currently proving. Indeed, it comes as no surprise to me that the patron saint of taxi drivers (St Fiacre) is also the saint who looks after venereal diseases, because the back of a cab in Manchester is where you're most likely to catch a dose of clap, judging from the drunken sluttish clientele we saw enjoying a chauffeur-driven night on the town.

An inelegant and ineloquent copy of HBO's Taxicab Confessions, last night's episode featured the sort of women who wear knickers only to keep their ankles warm, being driven by wretched and obliging cabbies from one quart of Malibu to the next, and frequently regurgitating it en route, to make room for more.

And whereas London taxi drivers display "thank you for not smoking" signs in their cabs, it's a mystery to me why Mancunian cabbies don't display "thank you for not having a liquid laugh" signs in theirs. Probably because few passengers would be sober enough to read them.

"It's every cabbie's worst nightmare - girls behaving badly," said the narrator as a gaggle of cackling salad- dodgers from Rochdale climbed into their hired stretch limo at 5pm, already far more inebriated than most people are when the evening is over.

While they were going into uncompromising stomach overf low error, another drunken group was being driven to a party at schooldisco.com, and faded-pop-star-turned-DJ Marc Almond had to be picked up for a gig from the luxury Malmaison Hotel.

That's where all the medium-sized stars stay when they're in Manchester, including Angus Deayton, who enjoyed his cocaine-fuelled comic relief session with a whore some years ago (just him, her, some nose candy, and a News of the World reporter), while his partner and baby were waiting for him at home. "Tainted Love", as Mr Almond might have called it, but at least Mr Deayton won an award, as Snorting Personality of the Year.

I've often thought that Roman Catholic priests should all become cabbies, because taxis would make ideal mobile confessionals, within which busy citizens could divulge their sins and receive absolution while also being driven across town.

The HBO series cleverly explores that potential for intimate personal disclosure (albeit with a modest degree of fakery), but few of the participants here were sober enough for comprehensible speech, let alone joined-up thinking or meaningful revelation.

"I may be throwing up but I could be a model, so check me out," slurred one girl to the camera as she opened the taxi door and fertilised the pavement with a faecal burp, while the dramatic high point of another scene was the announcement that "we've all fell over", and I thought of a doctor I know, who once worked in a Manchester A&E on Friday nights.

"Fight victims would be brought in," she told me, "and they'd carry on head-butting each other while I was still trying to sew them up." After watching this, I no longer think she was exaggerating.

Okay, the behaviour was no more depraved than you'd see on Ibiza Uncovered, but if I'm going to sit through a half-hour of "tits out for the lads" and synchronised vomiting, I'd rather see suntanned breasts against a Mediterranean backdrop than pasty Mancunian gooseflesh on a chilly Oxford Road.

When a programme's intellectual zenith is the revelation of how Marc Almond unwinds after a gig ("I watch TV and drink camomile tea"), then you know it's time to send up the distress flares, and the only people who emerged with much credit were the cabbies, who seemed surprisingly tolerant of the drunken scum who throw up all over their upholstery, then announce that they don't have enough cash to pay the fare.

Frankly, taxi drivers don't deserve their long-held reputation for surliness, because it's far too easy to give a dog a bad name, metaphorically and literally. In fact, I once knew a man from Salford who gave his dog a very bad name indeed. He called it "Stay" and would shout out "Go Stay... Stay... go," until he drove the poor mutt stark raving bonkers in the nut.

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All the fun of the fares

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