Television review

The idea that one might feel sorry for a London cabbie has a bracing novelty to it. Anyone who has endured the vehicular apartheid applied by taxi-drivers (fellow road users = people driving humpy black vehicles with orange lights on top; everyone else = should learn how to bleeding drive, mate) might find it hard to overcome the adversarial spirit they arouse. But Streetwise (BBC2), a film about the process by which taxi- drivers gain their coveted badge, not only convinced you that cabbies are unsung heroes of resolution, but also explained their proprietorial attitude to the London street plan. They act as if they own the streets because, in one sense at least, they do.

Older viewers will have seen this before. Jack Rosenthal's memorable TV play, The Knowledge, was the first to exploit the narrative gold of the system by which taxi-drivers are made - essentially an epic quest, in which the moral fibre of the hero is tested by long and cruel adversity. Ogres lie along the way, in the shape of the dreaded examiners, and success is dependent on a quasi-religious dedication: adherents must study the Blue Book (the Holy Writ of London routes), must memorise devotional mantras of street names and directions, must mortify their flesh by riding mopeds in the rain. Now and then they confront the enemy in combat, either to be rebuffed or moved on to a higher plane, ascending by strict numerological gradations towards the sacred moment when they are ordained to the Diesel Priesthood. Had Kafka founded a Buddhist seminary, it might have looked something like this.

What viewers hadn't seen was the real thing, and it didn't do any harm to find that it was just as eccentric and cult-like as Rosenthal had made out. Mark Phillips's highly enjoyable film also took a less affectionate line with the bureaucratic mysteries of the system, the sense of unaccountable and possibly capricious power. The abiding image from Rosenthal's play is of Nigel Hawthorne with a pencil dangling from each nostril and a look of interrogatory menace on his face: he was playing the most feared of the examiners, and this was one of his more outlandish attempts to derail an applicant's train of thought. Mr Ormes, a real-life equivalent of Hawthorne's character, was less loveable in his manner, though just as fearful. "It's devastating to get Mr Ormes," said one knowledge boy, a verdict immediately followed by the meaningful flush of a lavatory on the soundtrack.

Mr Ormes appears to be a master of psychological torture - from the achingly languorous way in which he precedes his victim to the torture chamber, to the subtle, deniable taunts permitted by London's geography. A graduate cabbie had already described the way in which Irish applicants are often asked to give the directions to army barracks, so you had some idea what you were watching when Jim, a winningly dogged supplicant handicapped by a prison record, was asked to give the route from the Penal Reform Society to Cheval Place. Mr Ormes smoothly denied any knowledge of Jim's circumstances when pressed about his question, but Phillips nailed him by showing another examination which saw an astonishing transformation in Mr Ormes' manner, from silky obstruction to patient nudges of encouragement.

The defence of the cruel opacity of the system (you are never told whether your pilgrimage is hopeless) is that it produces cabbies of imperturbable temper and unrivalled powers of navigation - claims which might surprise habitual cab users. A far better argument was made by the pride of a Rastafarian cabbie, fingering his green and gold talisman with unconcealed devotion. "This thing means a lot to me, man, this badge. The best thing I've ever had." For him it represented independence, respect, financial security, all hard won. In that short sequence you saw a less utilitarian value to the archaic mysteries of the Carriage Office - an almost spiritual vision of a process by which ordinary people can make themselves special.