Riches from rustbuckets

One of the strangest of my acquaintances is a well-meaning but linguistically accident-prone headmaster. Not long ago, he was rumoured to have caused havoc during a flight to New York by shouting "Hi Jack!" to a friend he had spotted across the aisle (whereupon many of the passengers put their hands in the air), but his classic faux pas occurred when (in a fit of liberal magnanimity) he gave a job at his school to an extremely camp Australian.

He almost collapsed on the first morning when the new teacher casually referred to the high price of the Durex he'd bought for use in class (my friend didn't know that this is the Australian word for Sellotape); but it was when he got a phone call from the same teacher a few days later, saying "I can't come in today headmaster, I'm in bed with a wog," that he finally snapped. Poor man. He'd resigned and checked himself into a psychiatric clinic before anyone had the chance to tell him that "wog" is Australian for a stomach upset.

I suspect that visiting Aussies might be equally bemused by the cockney rhyming slang used by Mike Brewer, because not even Londoners could understand most of it.

As presenter of yesterday afternoon's Wrecks to Riches (ITV1), he spoke to us in an antiquated tellymockney that even Arthur Daley would have considered quaint (has anyone said they'd like "a nice cuppa rosie" since 1961?), as he ventured into the murky lower echelons of the motor trade, armed only with his curious vocabulary, his brass neck, £300 in cash and an ability to do sums (incidentally, there are three types of people in this world - those who can count and those who can't).

In this vehicular version of the BBC's Million Pound Property Experiment, he plans to spend the next eight weeks making enough money to purchase a new car by buying and selling the kind of rustbuckets that look like dilapidated biscuit tins with number plates on them, with windscreen wipers that wipe only the bonnet. And because he's relying on his motoring expertise, allied to an almost Buddhist-like faith in destiny, he's half-philosopher and half-engineer (a sort of karma mechanic, I suppose).

Watching him negotiating his first purchase on a used-car forecourt in Reading, it soon became obvious that even estate agents could learn a thing or two from the motor trade's imaginatively descriptive patois. "It's got air conditioning," was a reference to the hole in the driver's door; "It's been a popular car," meant it had been round the clock at least five times, while the innocuous-sounding phrase "sold as seen" roughly translated as "Once I've trousered your money and pushed it off my forecourt, I'll deny all knowledge of it and you".

Nevertheless, Mike eventually bought himself a Fiat " sinkysentoe ess" for £300, admitting surprise that, "I've managed to find a good little car for the money," but not admitting that the presence of a TV crew always helps when haggling over a deal.

Whereupon he drove it home, hosed it down and immediately advertised it for £750, "a bargain in any language" - the language presumably being an obscure form of Swahili, where the word "bargain" means "you need your bumps felt".

It's a basic rule of television that the duller the content of a programme is, the more over-the-top the direction and editing will be, and that was certainly the case here. Crash zooms, jump cuts reminiscent of The Fast Show's " Brilliant", Jamie Oliver-style soft-rock clips and a cameraman registering 11 on the Ménière's disease chart, we had it all; but none of it could disguise the truth that Mike was simply waiting for a mug to turn up and pay well over the odds for his kipper and bloater (motor).

LUCKILY for him, along came a punter who was nobody's fool (I suspect he was a freelancer), a teenager so lacking in gorm that if you stood close enough to him, I'm prepared to bet you'd hear the ocean. "It's got a full service history ... well, some service history," said Mike as the teen drove it once around the block, then declared himself fully satisfied (without even checking if the reverse gear worked) and bought it.