I remember my dad in the 90s had various company motors. It reached full orgasm when he came home with a Vauxhall Carlton Diplomat with full leather and a 10 disc CD changer. He was playing company car Top Trumps with our neighbour who had a CD X! His orgasm was short lived when the neighbour came home with a Vauxhall Senator 3.0 a few weeks later. They genuinely fell out and my dad refused to return the neighbours borrowed drill bits for months. “He knows where I live, he can come and get them”. They avoided each other and washed their cars when the other was out and I think my mum was going to leave at one point as he was in such a mood. I then discovered ecstasy in the night clubs and cant remember anything else. The 90s were brilliant.
1970s Notting Hill Carnival | Notting Hill | Carnival | Darcus Howe | Thames Television | 1979 17.11.24 have i seen American psycho? dunno... all i know is i can't drive, have never owned a car and probably never will. the life of the status symbol hoggin dysfunctional are on the wane, i'm sure... this is Steve Coogan territory... the wind's in his hair. get out of his way, you squares.... that kindda thing. maybe a tally of the number of folk murdered by car drivers would be a sobering gesture as against the guys waxing lyrical about the virtues of the consumer conscious piggy(?) proof of their position in the company will be catching public transport, these days - as they heap a social conscious upon the shoulders of their peers - who are eager to get on. good luck to them. not my thing, though... far too taxing and tiresome.
Comments on ‘1994: SECRETS of the COMPANY CAR MEN | From A to B: Tales of Modern Motoring | BBC Archive’ 17.11.24 1227pm the style which suggest one switch off from the hub-bub and bullshit of one's environment and the people therein?yeah.. i comprehend.
I remember well, the nineties. When you think. Most of the companies don’t exist anymore. The jobs, grades and positions now count for nothing. Most of the cars featured in this have been scrapped. Puts into perspective, what the people in this thought was important at the time.
I'm a senior rep with a company car. It's no different now. It's all about monthly targets, commission, and what car you're driving. The car matters because that's the bit your clients see. It's all about image and perception. Pathetic, I know... but you'd be surprised how being "perceived" as successful actually attracts the bigger fish.
Well anything that wasn't a clapped out banger was good, new cars were a luxury, and any extras like a cd player or electric windows, or bucket seats were top tear.
I was 13 when this was first broadcast. It is hard to overstate how enthralling it was, not only to me but also my sister and parents. I was obsessed with cars, dad was starting to get company cars. He was chuckling at the men in this episode, mum was rolling her eyes. But I was agog at these man children on the screen talking about trim levels, performance, economy etc. But yeah it's not a programme about cars, it's a social commentary, and a great one. A snapshot in time which feels very alien today. Also aren't the roads empty and smooth! Still feel a pang of empathy for the chap who got a diesel Maestro.
I was also 13 then but I had no idea about all of this! But yeah, it's not even about the cars, it's their relationship with these hulks of metal and their obsession with how complete strangers, who'll forget them in 30 seconds, view them right now! There's hilarious but somehow pathetic about these people! The delusion of the guy on 25 minutes sums this whole thing up! He even sees status WITHIN the Cavalier and doesn't realise it's still a bloody Vauxhall no matter WHAT the spec! 😂😂
True about a social commentary. So glad there was a BBC to make a seemingly innocuous little documentary like this which actually punches well above its weight in what it represents about British culture at the time and no doubt still like that today.
I was working for a big corporation in the UK at the time. There were actually a lot of people like this. All they wanted was a company car ending with an 'i', a company laptop, and a company mobile phone. Beyond pathetic.
A favourite joke at the time … “driving down the M1, whatever speed you’re doing, sooner or later you’re gonna be overtaken by a Vauxhall Cavalier 1.6L with a suit jacket hanging up in the back and the radio on full belt”
These early 'fly on the wall' documentaries are fascinating and priceless. Set in the last years before the internet, the mass adoption of mobile phones, social media, reality TV and blanket bombardment with trivialized data, this series was a direct and rare survey of the lives of ordinary people. I do everything to guard against nostalgia but I sorely miss the era when time was time, distance was distance, publishers were publishers and, God help us, only famous people were famous.
@@nicholassimpson518 A mate of mine was in a Channel 4 documentary which was made in 1983. In which he, and a few others, are seen climbing over a fence to get something to steal in a warehouse, but it was completely staged. Even the police who arrive on the scene are in on it.
You have hit nail on the head. Made in 92, this was a very accurate representation of life on the road. Curiously these guys were like dinosaurs. Masters of the jurassic motorway, blissfully unaware the end was nigh. The great extinction came in the form of the Internet. And bang, they were gone! I should know, I did this job from 89 to 2003. Most of these gents seem 40 plus. Strange to think, 32 years on, they'll be late seventies or no longer with us....goodness me time passes quickly. Enjoy your moment in the light😊
I remember seeing this when it was first broadcast, and I was struck by the horrible reality that these people actually exist and shared the roads with the rest of us.
Its you too!! Its me, its all of us, its no different. We pick different things, but we all have company cars. It’s all the damn same. How disappointing
There’s a whole Aries of Thea uploaded into UA-cam. Not as sharp quality. By there’s women drivers, teenage drivers, family drivers and first time drivers.
I'm here because of Smith and Sniff, OTOSOT 36. What makes this for me, is the edit. Those lingering shots - you just don't see them anymore. It was a different time. My dad (not a rep) had a Peugeot 405 GLD estate in red, and it drove beautifully, in that softly-sprung, well-damped French way of the time. The nat-asp diesel engine was a delight too, and simplicity itself. There's one in the back of shot, when the reps are doing that beautifully-choreographed sequence in the service station car park. Wonderful to see this on BBC Archive.
Wertham Hogg tells new hires it's a user-chooser policy but somehow everyone ends up with a Vauxhall Astra anyway. Dunder Mifflin kept an old Chrysler 200 around the Scranton office until the pandemic but they pay the per-mile allowance for company use of personal cars in cash so everyone takes that and nobody reports it on their taxes.
I remember seeing this as well. It was as if Peter Greenaway had been asked to do a TV documentary. There was a similar show about home interiors that also had long, hypnotic shots of teapots etc, and I'm struggling to remember it on account of impending senility.
The days before PCP. It was a real achievement to have a BMW or Mercedes back in the early 90's. A very different era, one actually greatly missed. I think the UK had a population of 53m when this was filmed. It is estimated at 70m now with all the strains and problems it has placed onto society. Thanks for posting this. I would go back to the early 90's tomorrow if i could.
We have a habit in this country of building something & then running it at 150% capacity to maximize profit. I remember Stansted airport when it opened...it was great for about 10 years, then it was just as crowded & busy as every other London airport. The 1990s seemed the last 'sane' decade, when frauds were in the millions, rather than billions or trillons, a house cost bore some relation to an income, and immigration numbers were of the level you could get your head around. And of course in the early 90s recession, you could drive into central London, park in a mothballed building site for a couple of quid for the day, & drive out. It was a city that was accessible for average, normal people. Not just a millionaires playground. All started going wrong when Thatcher let the banks run wild imo.
@@Nick-io9ukremember it very well even though i was a kid at the time it was clearly a working class city, everyone had enough if they had a job London victim of its own success and fame
@@phosoa8965 Politicians in this country have never cared much for the nation beyond the M25. I actually think the overspill was probably a good thing on balance, which should have been continued & pursued a population for London of no higher than 5 million or perhaps 10% of the nation as a whole. Compare the UK to any EU nation, and it is far more concentrated, wealth & power, in the capital. Berlin is actually poorer than the German average! I think Ireland are trying to encourage people out west & reduce as much as it is practical, the dominance of Dublin. Entire suburbs are unrecognisable. I remember when places like Dagenham were just normal working class places to bring up a family, no different to the rest of the country. Now its transient HMO land, no community, people coming, going, no stability.
@@JG-OK a Merc from mum & dad. A £1500 phone & £2000 a year on takeaway coffee. Clubbing every weekend and then complain it’s so unfair our generation can’t afford a home, do me a favour
I remember as a child, my dad had a successful year so for the FIRST TIME EVER we had a foreign holiday (Costa Blanca) this was then followed up by his company rewarding his hard work with a new company car. A Ford Orion 1.6 Ghia. My god we felt privileged.
Haven't seen an Orion for about 20 years. I used to want a 1.6 in black. Same engine as an Escort XR3i too but at a fraction of the insurance cost due to XR3i's being a target for car thief's. Worth a few quid now. Cars haven't got that personality or character nowadays...
Alan: There’s no point finishing the sentence Lynn because I’m not driving a Mini Metro. Lynn: But if you… Alan: Lynn, I’ll just speak over you. Go on, try and finish the sentence and see what I do. Go on! Alan: [Lynn attempts to finish her sentence and Alan speaks over her] I’m not driving a Mini Metro, I’m not driving a Mini Metro, I’m not driving a Mini Metro! Lynn: No, no it’s different. It’s called a Rover Metro now.
These guys are all partridge, Brent and Chris Finch. The office came out in 2001 it's easy to see where the inspiration for characters came from watching shows like these.
Wow, I remember watching this on BBC2 when I was about 16. The man who took the badge of his entry level Mercedes and the poor soul who got lumbered with the maestro had etched itself in my mind.
Me too. Nearly lost it, every time they showed him puttering by in his little blue Maestro... then picturing his bosses walking by it, and 💩ing on it. Evil.
This prompted me to look it up on the government's MOT lookup. It's J773 AWG, which was registered on 25 March 1992, but sadly there aren't any more details (beyond "blue" and "diesel"). It's probably long-gone by now. All the other cars were registered in 1991, 1992 and are also long-gone.
American here. When I was a kid during the time this was filmed, my dad was an executive who also did sales on the road. His company generally provided Ford Tauruses and I believe he was the one in charge of ordering the company cars. One of the sales guys demanded a slightly fancier Mercury Sable wagon instead of a Taurus and I think one of the executives specified an Explorer SUV. The company had a policy of selling all company cars before 100,000 miles because they were known for head gasket and transmission issues and used values dropped like a rock once the powertrain was out of the 100k mile warranty. My dad had a light blue '89 Taurus GL sedan that was replaced by a light metallic blue '94 Taurus GL. The '94 was a special order car with blue fabric bucket seats, floor shifter (most had a column shift), alloy wheels and the higher-torque 3.8L V6 engine. He bought that car when he retired from the business and it was one of his favorite cars he's owned.
We never got the taurus in the UK. I believe it may have been sold in some European markets, Germany at least. The 2nd generation Taurus they tried selling in Australia, so they did build some RHD ones, but they never tried selling that in England either...perhaps due to fuel economy issue, perhaps because it may have plundered sales from the Granada/Scorpio. The explorer we got, along with the Grand Cherokee & for a few years the Chevrolet Blazer, but only really the Grand Cherokee sold in big numbers. We Brits are quite snobby when it comes to branding, and while Jeep is a brand that sells, people dont associate ford with 4x4s here, and chevrolet is largely unknown. I did (growing up near a US airbase in the 1990s) know of a few americans on my street, but they had miserable cars. A 1986 Dodge Aires and a 1987 Chevrolet Nova (a rebranded Toyota Corolla) it seemed such a waste to have such dull cars as american airmen got petrol at US prices...lower even, as I believe only the federal gas tax applied & no state taxes...same for Tobacco - i think some airmen made more money bootlegging cigarettes to the locals than they made in salary!
@@Nick-io9uk The Taurus flopped in Australia because we had our own Ford Falcon already. It was our version of the Granada/Taurus. And don't forget the Holden Commodore
@@c.d.c9425 I wonder why they cancelled the Taurus and not the Falcon though. Eventually of course they cancelled the Falcon 20 years later, but I rather might say they were trying to rationalize their production lines in the 1990s & have one 'global' model for the entire planet. Was the taurus so hated in Australia no one bought it? I do remember the motoring press in the UK were suggesting Ford would bring over the AU Falcon here in 1998 as ford had no replacment for the Scorpio, which wasnt popular by that time. This excited me as at the time the pound:AU dollar exchange rate for very good for us, 3 aud to the pound in 1998/1999, and an AU Falcon cost about $30,000aud or £10,000 for a 4.0 straight six. Whereas a scorpio started at around £20,000 for a miserable 2.0 8v As It happened when the Scorpio was discontinued, Ford Group (very) briefly bought the Lincoln LS in RHD to the UK but that didnt last long, (cadillac also had a foray into the british market in the late 90s to late 2000s, bringing in the CTS, STS & SRX - though not the bigger DTS & Escalade) i guess it overlapped with its Jaguar offerings. And by that time the second generation mondeo was almost as big as the Granada/Scorpio anyway, particularly in estate form.
Don't American corporate reps fly around the huge country on commercial flights like Edward Norton in Fight Club rather than do road trips in company cars?
This would've been the driest, most boring show on TV when it first aired. 30 years on; it's absolutely fascinating. Also, geddon Chris Morris in his Fiesta.
Right! It would have been so easy and tempting to have some narrator fill in the gaps of silence but thankfully they resisted that and let those snippets of the monotonous long journeys tell the story themselves.
This was just toooooo good thank you. The dire situation of owing the CD and nobody knew, Not even the 'I' for Important, just a small CD on the front wing
1970s Notting Hill Carnival | Notting Hill | Carnival | Darcus Howe | Thames Television | 1979 17.11.24 1203pm it's not a honda, it's a nissan primera... in his dreams it's a Chevrolet.
Thank you, @BBC, for making this available. Fascinating to see people's reflections on life in the 1990s, covering all aspects. Very educational! Funny observation though, you realize that while the canvas has changed, human aspirations remain largely the same.
Lovely job.Sitting in a draughty cabin breathing in diesel fumes for a 8 hour shift on minimum wage...i'm amazed they cant get humans beings to do that anymore. ...
10:06 the milk float was trying to do a delivery into that car without having to stop. I saw something similar once on a Royal Air Force Eurofighter Typhoon.
I remember getting a rental car for two days in 1990s and it being a Maestro, I spent 48 hours praying it didn’t break down. The wipers stopped working, the car could barely move with five in, and heater button fell off in my hand, a brand new car 😬🤣
@@wobblybobengland That made me chuckle, yup, we still get the Jones's and keeping up with the Jones's, but with so many PCP's German and quality and lesser EU and Korean cars alll mulch into one..... only thing flash left is exotics , Lambo and Ferrari/McClaren ....... But Dacia and other challenger brands still badly tarnished !!!!!!!!!!!
@@zzhughesdI love the Sandero, it's a crap car but it's anti-worry, some plonker runs a shopping trolley into it I couldn't care, it's also anti-poser and cheap to run. They are popular in Germany but you rarely see them in the UK.
How I miss the days of the sales rep. A sierra (then a cavalier), fuel card , national conferences , expense accounts and overnight stays. I did it from 1990-2006. One of the best unofficial perks was meeting up at 3pm on a Friday afternoon at Corley services on the M6. Dozens of sales reps from all different companies were there swapping their free samples with other reps . I sold beer so a multipack of lager was always in demand ! Toiletries , clothing , electrical equipment , children’s toys, wallpapers , sporting equipment and even frozen prawns could be swapped! It also served as a sales rep recruiting ground if you fancied a change of job ! Sadly., online ordering , telephone based sales reps with Zoom meetings , vehicle trackers, ‘time and motion studies’ introduced by Sales Managers (so you had to document all of your working day) and compliance teams who you had to account for every ounce of stock you had with you put an end to all that. What a time to be alive though !! 😅
Yes I just got the back of it 95 till 08. Then I became an engineer. The mobile phone and WiFi killed it. Remember spending more time doing my mileage than actual paperwork lol!!!It was a great time, so much freedom, plus I got to see all over the UK. Having a letter I was a big deal, remember getting my 308 HDi, it was like a statement lol😂!!!Great times and memories.
1970s Notting Hill Carnival | Notting Hill | Carnival | Darcus Howe | Thames Television | 1979 1201pm 17.11.24 my father would never drive on the motorway... dunno why. it's not right.. it's not natural...might be the reason why.
@@stephenspence-d9q Comments on ‘1994: SECRETS of the COMPANY CAR MEN | From A to B: Tales of Modern Motoring | BBC Archive’ 1342pm 17.11.24 why - did i say it was?
It is hard to believe how much the company car mattered to these people then I remember after 3 tough years flogging advertising space on the phone in the 1980s, I finally got a job in a medical company and was given a company Cavalier mark 2. I suddenly felt valued and that I had arrived in life.
The ego is a powerful thing. We've all had similar thoughts, but when you hear someone say them out loud, you realize how foolish and fleeting those ideas really are.
The obsession with car model letters - So 90s I had an Audi 90 and a Mazda 626 in the 90s as a company car. No mobiles, no internet. Just turn up at your customers and they would see you. Not anymore, always too busy.
Probably the best motoring documentary ever made. I even remembered bits from when it was originally broadcast - the man given the Maestro Clubman D and cried!
24:41 guy flexing on the other reps by standing next to the junior rep salesmen using a public phone with his mobile brick phone, its the tiny world of Alan Partridge, David Brent & Patrick Bateman.
38:17 To conclude the Maestro moaner's tale of disappointment with a HGV overtaking him and his rueful look is amazing unintentional comic timing! Great piece of social history!
This was very true for the time. Back in 1990, a 23 year old version of me, took a job for a company that paid slightly less than another, purely because they *lured* me with a Metallic Blue Astra GTE Cabriolet. Never regretted it and smiled like a loon every time I drove that car :)
my heart bleeds for the guy with the maestro diesel , A truly awful car , engine was so noisy /clattery ,sooooo slow ,and it looked like a pig .His boss must of wanted him gone 😂
The 90s Reps used to visit me at my office, Id always end the meeting with "So what are you driving now" then 10mins on the different cars they would like, but transport gave them a cavalier. Of particular note were the lady reps all hair spray and shoulder pads high heels saint tropez so thick you could scrape it off with a wall paper scraper, and short skirts on mid forties. great times.
There's an old fella who lives round the corner from me who has one in exactly the same spec and colour as the one in the documentary. It's in immaculate condition.
If you want to be a real stand out company car man you need to roll up in a Robin Reliant to the client to represent the company and the colour should be yellow.
Aah, memories! Back in the 90's, my company gave me an Astra 2L injection car. I bloody loved it. It had previously been owned by a more senior manager than me, and he had added a load of nice toys to it, including an absolute killer stereo. I drove many thousands of miles around the M25 and in central London blasting out my favourite metal tunes!
For some reason I'm suddenly transported back to the slightly earlier age of Renault 25's "It's time to go it alone. I'm starting my own business... The company car's gonna to have go back" advert!
@@Benjamin.Jamin. I am not sure where this was filmed but there was a big road building programme in the late 1980s and early 1990s so quite a lot of dual carriageways and motorway was brand new at the time. This lost momentum after the M3 construction protests
@@scottirvine121 There were no actor credits at the end. According to the great Mr. ChatGPT: The BBC film "Over the Moon with the Cavalier" is part of the series "From A to B: Tales of Modern Motoring". It is a documentary rather than a film with actors. The series explores various aspects of motoring and features real people, locations, and events rather than scripted performances.
@@scottirvine121 You might be right for the dialogue is so funny. But according to BBC this is part of a documentary series and feature "real people". There are no actor or writer credits at the end either.
My guess is they all 'cashed out' to hobby retirements such as yacht rentals, golf businesses, Hotels ownership, holiday businesses or overseas work as ex-pats. Would love to be proved wrong and know what it really is these folks went out of sales into.
Absolute comedy gold! You don’t really find these sort of men anymore, I had a friend whose dad was exactly like this!.. The mid 90’s doesn’t feel long ago to me, but looking at it now it’s a completely different world!
You can hear the disgust & despair in his voice 😂. What a pile of garbage even by the bad standards of the mid late 80’s when they launched and people were surprised when the company folded
This obsession with i, L, CD, etc is exactly how I remember thinking about cars as a child of the 90s. Before the German premium brand craze took over. And now even they have cheapened in quality and image to become as run of the mill as the Escorts and Cavaliers of yesteryear.
Yea the turning point was around 94/95 the bug eye scorpio sealed fords fate and then millenium lease n pcp enabled any cunt and his mother to cheapen the image of prestige brands. Omega was decentish but volvo and saab gobbled up the market slightly sub 5 series.
@@awareofvacuity4238 true. Back then Mercedes were still very over engineered and if you had a BMW or Audi, you were doing well for yourself. The PCP craze has kind of killed that off and commodified status. It does irk me a bit that BMW stick an //M badge on pretty much anything that rolls out of their factory these days.
Yes I remember an article some time ago ( 10 years or more) saying bmw 3 series now outsold mondeos how they managed to still persuade people they were a step up is the amazing thing. I also agree PCP has basically meant people can run cars they would never have had access to, the problem is the amount of wealth it drains from their life affecting other things like house ownership.
Yes it's quite fascinating to see in these clips from the 90s (and also much more recently) how heavily Ford and Vauxhall dominated all sectors of the UK car scene but in the last decades or two, have been almost wiped off the map in most of them. Audis, BMWs and Mercedes are now the only mid-size saloons that sell and even those are increasingly rare as more and more manufacturers flood the market with stupid and ugly SUVs and "crossover" vehicles. Times have certainly changed! But not entirely for the better, it must be said.
Just as I remember it. I worked for a large company, over 900 staff and we were graded from 8~12. A few grade 10 staff elected for the newly released Mazda 626. A 626 was out of my paid grade but the company did allow us to buy ex-demonstrators so I set about getting one of those signed off. Well, when it arrived there was a lot condemnation from the other managers. My 626 was on another level what with a sunroof, cruise control and alloy wheels. It turned out that as a grade 9 I couldn't have a car above their grade so immediately ex-demonstrators were banned from the business. After that I got the Golf GTi Colour Concept, a car I wish I had today. It was an 8 valve Golf but came with lots of colour coded leather. Again, it was raised in one of the many managers meetings and no further Yellow Golf Concepts were allowed in after mine. Such stupid games but at the time they were so important. Thanks for the memory....
I thought I wasn’t that bad, back then. But remembered when my Mondeo 2.0 GLX was replaced by a white Volvo 440. I didn’t wash it for 18 months til I left.
Great to see this series again, I remember watching it the first time it was broadcast. Very unique style then, and now. So I also remember when company cars really were a big thing, loads of them on the roads!
Notice how even back then none of these men stipulated that they’d prefer indicators/blinkers as an optional extra. Opted for sunroofs and top end radios instead.
My dad came home one day with a glorious Rover 620Di - British racing green. It was the most glorious motorcar I had ever laid eyes on, especially the red walnut interior made it a gentlemens club on wheels. My dad referred to it as the common man's Jaguar, I agreed. I was likely the only person in Europe severely emotionally affected by the demise of the Rover Motor Company.
This is such a brilliant ethnography of car drivers and the power dynamics on roads. I don't think drivers nowadays would be so proudly open about the symbolism of their vehicles and the egotistical power they draw from them. Absolutely brilliant. This is the bs we have to navigate as pedestrians and cyclists; no wonder drivers are so livid all the time, their source of self is stuck in traffic.
30 years ago, as an 🇺🇸, I loved reading Russell Bulgin's articles about this obsession in CAR magazine. British culture has Pecking Order as a permanent feature. Stateside, we have billionaire CEOs in hoodies as well as vice-signalling run rampan by the 'working class' (whatever THAT means)😅
Nick Barker's From A to B (and Signs of the Times series) are peerless tv making. This whole series is stunning in terms of what's revealed and how it's been captured so seemingly guilelessly. TV has rarely examined the British so forensically...
Just watched it to the end and BMW man...reminded me of a guy I knew in my 70s, Rover days at Lode Lane, he had an engineering company, guy called Felix Sheridan of Sheridan Engineering. Once told me that he had a Rolls Silver Spirit but went to see his customers in a Rover/Austin Montego....everything was status back when wasnt it..glad I'm 70 and retired from it all !!!
I love this. Particularly reading some of the comments. Those who smugly talk about the world moving on and modern generations now realising what's really important need to ask themselves "what do the modern generations find important?" I don't think that people are somehow more informed, more in touch with life, in fact they have just shifted focus. What phone they have, what brands they wear, how many days they get to work from the comfort of their bed... Nothing has really changed that much.
Very true. The ‘code’ has changed, but the message hasn’t. People just have slightly different preoccupations, but the base values are more or less the same.
My dad was a company car guy. He didn't care about cars though so he took whatever they gave him. The guy in the video ain't wrong. Company cars in the 80's and 90's were how you recognised who was who in the business.
I dont know if it had a touchscreen, but the top end 7-series introduced this year had a big colour screen in the dash. Though i think some japanese market cars had big TV screens in the dash some years earlier.
The last guy really stood out and perhaps it's no surprise he had one of the nicest cars. His velvety voice and diplomatic choice of words are well suited for eroding barriers that customers instinctively erect. I also appreciated his candidness when he spoke of walking the tightrope between being the "thrusting achiever" and being a decent human being. Today, perhaps more than ever, the two are often mutually exclusive.
@@memofromessexRemember, reliable and cheap public transportation has been systemically removed from Britain and denied to us for the past forty years.
A lot of inspiration for John Shuttleworth seems to have been taken from Maestro Man. He's the only likeable guy out of the lot. Thanks for uploading I vaguely remember watching this with my dad when it was originally aired.
Absolute gold, you couldn't write it! The abject misey portrayed by the Maestro driver was palpable. I grew up in SA so missed this era of the UK but whilst 'success' was defined differently there it was equally vacuous...well almost.
I remember my dad in the 90s had various company motors. It reached full orgasm when he came home with a Vauxhall Carlton Diplomat with full leather and a 10 disc CD changer. He was playing company car Top Trumps with our neighbour who had a CD X! His orgasm was short lived when the neighbour came home with a Vauxhall Senator 3.0 a few weeks later. They genuinely fell out and my dad refused to return the neighbours borrowed drill bits for months. “He knows where I live, he can come and get them”. They avoided each other and washed their cars when the other was out and I think my mum was going to leave at one point as he was in such a mood. I then discovered ecstasy in the night clubs and cant remember anything else. The 90s were brilliant.
😂
What a fabulous story
Brilliant 🤣
That is a coming of age story I can relate to!😂
Brilliant story. 😂
Great insight documentary into historical knob ends
🤣😂😅
Did you have your own company car then?
You think anything has changed? It's just not all about the cars now.
@@danlee1811 No one has their own compay car - these are the mark of someone who does not have a car to call their own .
@derekheeps8012 makes no sense at all.
All the interviews have the same energy American Psycho had when discussing business cards
1970s Notting Hill Carnival | Notting Hill | Carnival | Darcus Howe | Thames Television | 1979 17.11.24 have i seen American psycho? dunno... all i know is i can't drive, have never owned a car and probably never will. the life of the status symbol hoggin dysfunctional are on the wane, i'm sure... this is Steve Coogan territory... the wind's in his hair. get out of his way, you squares.... that kindda thing. maybe a tally of the number of folk murdered by car drivers would be a sobering gesture as against the guys waxing lyrical about the virtues of the consumer conscious piggy(?) proof of their position in the company will be catching public transport, these days - as they heap a social conscious upon the shoulders of their peers - who are eager to get on. good luck to them. not my thing, though... far too taxing and tiresome.
I like that style…
Comments on ‘1994: SECRETS of the COMPANY CAR MEN | From A to B: Tales of Modern Motoring | BBC Archive’ 17.11.24 1227pm the style which suggest one switch off from the hub-bub and bullshit of one's environment and the people therein?yeah.. i comprehend.
Cavalier ? You mean
PRECISELY what I was going to write just then. Batemen one and all.
Although the BBC gets most hated on these days as outdated and out of touch, their archives are an absolute gold mine, 10/10 content.
Fiesta boy describing a "success" when he blocks someone from overtaking him. What an absolute trumpet.
😂
Time stamp please?
@@Automobiliana 22:11
Oh dear, guess this was the sort of sad sack that I used to sweep past in my Lancia turbo!
I remember well, the nineties. When you think. Most of the companies don’t exist anymore. The jobs, grades and positions now count for nothing. Most of the cars featured in this have been scrapped. Puts into perspective, what the people in this thought was important at the time.
💯 we’re so shallow if we are judging people on there cars 😮
@@markynorthy1878its probably worse now, Londoners refuse to have a car older than 4-5 years old😂😂😂😂
I'm a senior rep with a company car. It's no different now. It's all about monthly targets, commission, and what car you're driving.
The car matters because that's the bit your clients see. It's all about image and perception. Pathetic, I know... but you'd be surprised how being "perceived" as successful actually attracts the bigger fish.
@ unbelievable
Everything will eventually be pointless, so what's your point? Not to enjoy anything here and now because we'll all die one day? 😅
That milk float at 10:05 absolutely welded to the car ahead 😂
lol!
It was worth watching this **** just for your comment 😂 was that pat mustard in the float do you recon ?
Must have been the milk float i spec. It's all about the i factor, you know.
😂😂
@@williamstrachan it was a transit van.
That first man describes a CD Astra like it’s a Bentley
🤣
@@jonasmcrae2 Well, it is the new shape... 😂
@@kieranwhite6647pollen filter
Well anything that wasn't a clapped out banger was good, new cars were a luxury, and any extras like a cd player or electric windows, or bucket seats were top tear.
Cars were a huge thing back then. Now I don’t think anyone even blinks when a Bentley drives past. It’s a case of whatever there goes another car.
I was 13 when this was first broadcast. It is hard to overstate how enthralling it was, not only to me but also my sister and parents. I was obsessed with cars, dad was starting to get company cars. He was chuckling at the men in this episode, mum was rolling her eyes. But I was agog at these man children on the screen talking about trim levels, performance, economy etc.
But yeah it's not a programme about cars, it's a social commentary, and a great one. A snapshot in time which feels very alien today.
Also aren't the roads empty and smooth!
Still feel a pang of empathy for the chap who got a diesel Maestro.
I was also 13 then but I had no idea about all of this!
But yeah, it's not even about the cars, it's their relationship with these hulks of metal and their obsession with how complete strangers, who'll forget them in 30 seconds, view them right now!
There's hilarious but somehow pathetic about these people!
The delusion of the guy on 25 minutes sums this whole thing up! He even sees status WITHIN the Cavalier and doesn't realise it's still a bloody Vauxhall no matter WHAT the spec! 😂😂
@dommidavros2211 super comment. The cavalier was probably crushed within 5 years
It may feel very alien today, but I'm sure there's a sales rep out on the motorway in this very moment, obsessing about his new Hyundai N spec.
True about a social commentary. So glad there was a BBC to make a seemingly innocuous little documentary like this which actually punches well above its weight in what it represents about British culture at the time and no doubt still like that today.
It’s clear this doc is in fact more about the mid-90s corporate ego than it is cars
From A to B: Tales of Modern Motoring
I was working for a big corporation in the UK at the time. There were actually a lot of people like this. All they wanted was a company car ending with an 'i', a company laptop, and a company mobile phone. Beyond pathetic.
80s I'd say 🤔
@@kkiwi54 The title might suggest otherwise...
@@kkiwi54 the fact the program was made in 1993 and transmitted in 1994 weren't big enough clues for you?🤣
A favourite joke at the time … “driving down the M1, whatever speed you’re doing, sooner or later you’re gonna be overtaken by a Vauxhall Cavalier 1.6L with a suit jacket hanging up in the back and the radio on full belt”
I've heard a variation of that joke nowadays it's a tradesman in a Transit. I've been sat doing 80 and Transit will blast past doing a tonne.
I remember Clarkson joking around that time the fastest vehicle on the road was the Vauxhall Astramax van. Good days sorely missed.
I remember that one! Even if I was a teenager at the time!
That’s right. We all know that nothing has the speed and handling like a photocopier salesman’s cavalier 1.6L
These early 'fly on the wall' documentaries are fascinating and priceless. Set in the last years before the internet, the mass adoption of mobile phones, social media, reality TV and blanket bombardment with trivialized data, this series was a direct and rare survey of the lives of ordinary people. I do everything to guard against nostalgia but I sorely miss the era when time was time, distance was distance, publishers were publishers and, God help us, only famous people were famous.
They are not fly on the wall, they are all staged.
Hmmm. It looks...bogus.
Lol. It's not a documentary. They're all actors.
@@nicholassimpson518 A mate of mine was in a Channel 4 documentary which was made in 1983. In which he, and a few others, are seen climbing over a fence to get something to steal in a warehouse, but it was completely staged. Even the police who arrive on the scene are in on it.
You have hit nail on the head.
Made in 92, this was a very accurate representation of life on the road. Curiously these guys were like dinosaurs. Masters of the jurassic motorway, blissfully unaware the end was nigh.
The great extinction came in the form of the Internet. And bang, they were gone!
I should know, I did this job from 89 to 2003.
Most of these gents seem 40 plus. Strange to think, 32 years on, they'll be late seventies or no longer with us....goodness me time passes quickly. Enjoy your moment in the light😊
I remember seeing this when it was first broadcast, and I was struck by the horrible reality that these people actually exist and shared the roads with the rest of us.
Watching it my over riding feeling is people have always been cunts and are no worse these days than back then 😂
And a lot of them still will.....
@@Jaya365 oh, 100% they will.
Its you too!! Its me, its all of us, its no different. We pick different things, but we all have company cars. It’s all the damn same. How disappointing
@@somebloke757 im convinced it was spoof now
Still trying to convince myself this isn't a spoof documentary 😅
It's very tongue in cheek.
Nope was part of a series, the other one that spring to mind is about the staff at a London Underground Station...
Trust me, it’s all real. Every sales guy I knew in business I worked for during the 90’s behaved like this.
@@mattdodd8479 I too thought at first this was a spoof. My Dog, these people walk among us. Imagine going home and crying about your Maestro.
It was played mostly by actors
10/10 the perfect documentary. This is textbook. More of this please
Liquid television
There’s a whole Aries of Thea uploaded into UA-cam. Not as sharp quality. By there’s women drivers, teenage drivers, family drivers and first time drivers.
21:00 the guys talking about their coat hangers, Alan Partridge eat your heart out
😂😂
@@JustAlex848 don't laugh you've broken your neck
Strange none had driving gloves, lots of gold bracelets though
I'm here because of Smith and Sniff, OTOSOT 36. What makes this for me, is the edit. Those lingering shots - you just don't see them anymore. It was a different time. My dad (not a rep) had a Peugeot 405 GLD estate in red, and it drove beautifully, in that softly-sprung, well-damped French way of the time. The nat-asp diesel engine was a delight too, and simplicity itself. There's one in the back of shot, when the reps are doing that beautifully-choreographed sequence in the service station car park. Wonderful to see this on BBC Archive.
Is this the prequel to The Office? Dozens of David Brents driving around 😂😂
Where do you think the inspiration comes from? This is what is was like in the 90s. Poor guy with the Maestro though. God they were awful cars.
Brents V Partridges!
Going 70mph TOPS...
Wertham Hogg tells new hires it's a user-chooser policy but somehow everyone ends up with a Vauxhall Astra anyway.
Dunder Mifflin kept an old Chrysler 200 around the Scranton office until the pandemic but they pay the per-mile allowance for company use of personal cars in cash so everyone takes that and nobody reports it on their taxes.
Also very UAP, unintentional Alan Partridge. 😂
This is one of the greatest documentaries ever ! I remember when it came out, it’s all we talked about the next day at work !.
Agreed. Most people commenting here are missing the whole point.
I remember seeing this as well. It was as if Peter Greenaway had been asked to do a TV documentary. There was a similar show about home interiors that also had long, hypnotic shots of teapots etc, and I'm struggling to remember it on account of impending senility.
The days before PCP. It was a real achievement to have a BMW or Mercedes back in the early 90's. A very different era, one actually greatly missed. I think the UK had a population of 53m when this was filmed. It is estimated at 70m now with all the strains and problems it has placed onto society. Thanks for posting this. I would go back to the early 90's tomorrow if i could.
We have a habit in this country of building something & then running it at 150% capacity to maximize profit. I remember Stansted airport when it opened...it was great for about 10 years, then it was just as crowded & busy as every other London airport.
The 1990s seemed the last 'sane' decade, when frauds were in the millions, rather than billions or trillons, a house cost bore some relation to an income, and immigration numbers were of the level you could get your head around. And of course in the early 90s recession, you could drive into central London, park in a mothballed building site for a couple of quid for the day, & drive out. It was a city that was accessible for average, normal people. Not just a millionaires playground. All started going wrong when Thatcher let the banks run wild imo.
@@Nick-io9ukremember it very well even though i was a kid at the time
it was clearly a working class city, everyone had enough if they had a job
London victim of its own success and fame
@@phosoa8965 Politicians in this country have never cared much for the nation beyond the M25. I actually think the overspill was probably a good thing on balance, which should have been continued & pursued a population for London of no higher than 5 million or perhaps 10% of the nation as a whole. Compare the UK to any EU nation, and it is far more concentrated, wealth & power, in the capital. Berlin is actually poorer than the German average!
I think Ireland are trying to encourage people out west & reduce as much as it is practical, the dominance of Dublin.
Entire suburbs are unrecognisable. I remember when places like Dagenham were just normal working class places to bring up a family, no different to the rest of the country. Now its transient HMO land, no community, people coming, going, no stability.
Now we have 18 year olds living with mummy and daddy who’s first car is a Merc. They wonder why they have no money to buy a house
@@JG-OK a Merc from mum & dad. A £1500 phone & £2000 a year on takeaway coffee. Clubbing every weekend and then complain it’s so unfair our generation can’t afford a home, do me a favour
I remember as a child, my dad had a successful year so for the FIRST TIME EVER we had a foreign holiday (Costa Blanca) this was then followed up by his company rewarding his hard work with a new company car. A Ford Orion 1.6 Ghia. My god we felt privileged.
Plush interior?
@ArwynKeast Dunno, we stayed on the coast! 🤣
Nice cars back in the day
@rob-fb5xs The old man would just stare out the window looking at it, he was so proud of what he had achieved. Happy days.
Haven't seen an Orion for about 20 years. I used to want a 1.6 in black. Same engine as an Escort XR3i too but at a fraction of the insurance cost due to XR3i's being a target for car thief's. Worth a few quid now. Cars haven't got that personality or character nowadays...
Ricky Gervias must have seen this documentary. Every one a David Brent, absolute comedy gold. Even presented in the no audience Office format. 😂😂
Alan: There’s no point finishing the sentence Lynn because I’m not driving a Mini Metro.
Lynn: But if you…
Alan: Lynn, I’ll just speak over you. Go on, try and finish the sentence and see what I do. Go on!
Alan: [Lynn attempts to finish her sentence and Alan speaks over her] I’m not driving a Mini Metro, I’m not driving a Mini Metro, I’m not driving a Mini Metro!
Lynn: No, no it’s different. It’s called a Rover Metro now.
Im on the ring road
THEY'VE REBADGED IT, YOU FOOL!
@@partario753 Well Alan if you want a Rover 200 you're going to have to sack EVERYONE at Peartree Productions! 😁
These guys are all partridge, Brent and Chris Finch. The office came out in 2001 it's easy to see where the inspiration for characters came from watching shows like these.
@@soundseeker63even Jill?
15:40 "i have a car phone" delivered with the stately confidence of Queen Victoria herself.
for issuing instructions no less!
Wow, I remember watching this on BBC2 when I was about 16. The man who took the badge of his entry level Mercedes and the poor soul who got lumbered with the maestro had etched itself in my mind.
That guy in the maestro 🤣OMG I actually feel sorry for him but couldn't stop laughing.
Me too. Nearly lost it, every time they showed him puttering by in his little blue Maestro... then picturing his bosses walking by it, and 💩ing on it. Evil.
He’s the only decent guy in the video so far too!
He got absolutely seen off by his bosses.
Pms me too , I bought myself a mg maestro in 1990 on a, A plate , I was better off than him 😆😆😆😆
This prompted me to look it up on the government's MOT lookup. It's J773 AWG, which was registered on 25 March 1992, but sadly there aren't any more details (beyond "blue" and "diesel"). It's probably long-gone by now. All the other cars were registered in 1991, 1992 and are also long-gone.
American here. When I was a kid during the time this was filmed, my dad was an executive who also did sales on the road. His company generally provided Ford Tauruses and I believe he was the one in charge of ordering the company cars. One of the sales guys demanded a slightly fancier Mercury Sable wagon instead of a Taurus and I think one of the executives specified an Explorer SUV. The company had a policy of selling all company cars before 100,000 miles because they were known for head gasket and transmission issues and used values dropped like a rock once the powertrain was out of the 100k mile warranty. My dad had a light blue '89 Taurus GL sedan that was replaced by a light metallic blue '94 Taurus GL. The '94 was a special order car with blue fabric bucket seats, floor shifter (most had a column shift), alloy wheels and the higher-torque 3.8L V6 engine. He bought that car when he retired from the business and it was one of his favorite cars he's owned.
We never got the taurus in the UK. I believe it may have been sold in some European markets, Germany at least. The 2nd generation Taurus they tried selling in Australia, so they did build some RHD ones, but they never tried selling that in England either...perhaps due to fuel economy issue, perhaps because it may have plundered sales from the Granada/Scorpio.
The explorer we got, along with the Grand Cherokee & for a few years the Chevrolet Blazer, but only really the Grand Cherokee sold in big numbers. We Brits are quite snobby when it comes to branding, and while Jeep is a brand that sells, people dont associate ford with 4x4s here, and chevrolet is largely unknown.
I did (growing up near a US airbase in the 1990s) know of a few americans on my street, but they had miserable cars. A 1986 Dodge Aires and a 1987 Chevrolet Nova (a rebranded Toyota Corolla) it seemed such a waste to have such dull cars as american airmen got petrol at US prices...lower even, as I believe only the federal gas tax applied & no state taxes...same for Tobacco - i think some airmen made more money bootlegging cigarettes to the locals than they made in salary!
@@Nick-io9uk The Taurus flopped in Australia because we had our own Ford Falcon already. It was our version of the Granada/Taurus. And don't forget the Holden Commodore
@@c.d.c9425 I wonder why they cancelled the Taurus and not the Falcon though. Eventually of course they cancelled the Falcon 20 years later, but I rather might say they were trying to rationalize their production lines in the 1990s & have one 'global' model for the entire planet. Was the taurus so hated in Australia no one bought it?
I do remember the motoring press in the UK were suggesting Ford would bring over the AU Falcon here in 1998 as ford had no replacment for the Scorpio, which wasnt popular by that time. This excited me as at the time the pound:AU dollar exchange rate for very good for us, 3 aud to the pound in 1998/1999, and an AU Falcon cost about $30,000aud or £10,000 for a 4.0 straight six. Whereas a scorpio started at around £20,000 for a miserable 2.0 8v
As It happened when the Scorpio was discontinued, Ford Group (very) briefly bought the Lincoln LS in RHD to the UK but that didnt last long, (cadillac also had a foray into the british market in the late 90s to late 2000s, bringing in the CTS, STS & SRX - though not the bigger DTS & Escalade) i guess it overlapped with its Jaguar offerings. And by that time the second generation mondeo was almost as big as the Granada/Scorpio anyway, particularly in estate form.
Don't American corporate reps fly around the huge country on commercial flights like Edward Norton in Fight Club rather than do road trips in company cars?
This would've been the driest, most boring show on TV when it first aired. 30 years on; it's absolutely fascinating.
Also, geddon Chris Morris in his Fiesta.
Maybe whoever made it had this in mind, like a video time capsule 😂
Director and/or producer deserves an oscar
Right! It would have been so easy and tempting to have some narrator fill in the gaps of silence but thankfully they resisted that and let those snippets of the monotonous long journeys tell the story themselves.
This was just toooooo good thank you. The dire situation of owing the CD and nobody knew, Not even the 'I' for Important, just a small CD on the front wing
What a gem. It's kind of endearing despite the pretentiousness and shallowness of it all.
1970s Notting Hill Carnival | Notting Hill | Carnival | Darcus Howe | Thames Television | 1979 17.11.24 1203pm it's not a honda, it's a nissan primera... in his dreams it's a Chevrolet.
@@JJONNYREPP I don't think we had Chevrolets over here back then, the top of the line Primeras went like rockets by all accounts.
Perfectly reflects sales reps in my experience
Thank you, @BBC, for making this available. Fascinating to see people's reflections on life in the 1990s, covering all aspects. Very educational! Funny observation though, you realize that while the canvas has changed, human aspirations remain largely the same.
I never thought I would feel nostalgic for driving over the Dartford crossing - handing over £1 to a human being, and getting change!
Lovely job.Sitting in a draughty cabin breathing in diesel fumes for a 8 hour shift on minimum wage...i'm amazed they cant get humans beings to do that anymore. ...
10:06 the milk float was trying to do a delivery into that car without having to stop. I saw something similar once on a Royal Air Force Eurofighter Typhoon.
😂😂
They are so obsessed with the "i" badge! I had forgotten all about that.
i badge to i phone
@@ASBO_LUTELY ooooohhhhhhhh that's good, why have I never seen that comparison!
I worked in the trade and people would buy an I badge snd stick it on😂.
"I means important" he's being funny but it's really sad.
What was the i badge? Don’t remember those over here in the US.
Absolute gem this, time capsule.
The bloke in the maestro 😂
I remember getting a rental car for two days in 1990s and it being a Maestro, I spent 48 hours praying it didn’t break down. The wipers stopped working, the car could barely move with five in, and heater button fell off in my hand, a brand new car 😬🤣
Brilliant. Refusing to let a comparable or lesser model overtake you. Lunatics.
I do wonder if Fiesta man is still with us and/or how many people he´s killed since.
It's how it was in rep mobile sales cars. Lol. To think back !!!!!!! Mad as toast.
Oh that still happens, I own both a Jaguar and a Dacia Sandero, I know.
@@wobblybobengland That made me chuckle, yup, we still get the Jones's and keeping up with the Jones's, but with so many PCP's German and quality and lesser EU and Korean cars alll mulch into one..... only thing flash left is exotics , Lambo and Ferrari/McClaren ....... But Dacia and other challenger brands still badly tarnished !!!!!!!!!!!
@@zzhughesdI love the Sandero, it's a crap car but it's anti-worry, some plonker runs a shopping trolley into it I couldn't care, it's also anti-poser and cheap to run. They are popular in Germany but you rarely see them in the UK.
Excellent to see this channel start to put up full episodes. MORE PLEASE!
How I miss the days of the sales rep. A sierra (then a cavalier), fuel card , national conferences , expense accounts and overnight stays. I did it from 1990-2006.
One of the best unofficial perks was meeting up at 3pm on a Friday afternoon at Corley services on the M6. Dozens of sales reps from all different companies were there swapping their free samples with other reps . I sold beer so a multipack of lager was always in demand ! Toiletries , clothing , electrical equipment , children’s toys, wallpapers , sporting equipment and even frozen prawns could be swapped! It also served as a sales rep recruiting ground if you fancied a change of job !
Sadly., online ordering , telephone based sales reps with Zoom meetings , vehicle trackers, ‘time and motion studies’ introduced by Sales Managers (so you had to document all of your working day) and compliance teams who you had to account for every ounce of stock you had with you put an end to all that. What a time to be alive though !! 😅
Yes I just got the back of it 95 till 08. Then I became an engineer. The mobile phone and WiFi killed it. Remember spending more time doing my mileage than actual paperwork lol!!!It was a great time, so much freedom, plus I got to see all over the UK. Having a letter I was a big deal, remember getting my 308 HDi, it was like a statement lol😂!!!Great times and memories.
1970s Notting Hill Carnival | Notting Hill | Carnival | Darcus Howe | Thames Television | 1979 1201pm 17.11.24 my father would never drive on the motorway... dunno why. it's not right.. it's not natural...might be the reason why.
@@JJONNYREPP What has the Notting Hill Carnival got to do with this film?
@@stephenspence-d9q Comments on ‘1994: SECRETS of the COMPANY CAR MEN | From A to B: Tales of Modern Motoring | BBC Archive’ 1342pm 17.11.24 why - did i say it was?
Amazed you didn’t off yourself.
It is hard to believe how much the company car mattered to these people then I remember after 3 tough years flogging advertising space on the phone in the 1980s, I finally got a job in a medical company and was given a company Cavalier mark 2. I suddenly felt valued and that I had arrived in life.
The ego is a powerful thing. We've all had similar thoughts, but when you hear someone say them out loud, you realize how foolish and fleeting those ideas really are.
The obsession with car model letters - So 90s I had an Audi 90 and a Mazda 626 in the 90s as a company car. No mobiles, no internet. Just turn up at your customers and they would see you. Not anymore, always too busy.
David Brent tastic.
This is type of mindset that made rave scene so appealing to so many people
Probably the best motoring documentary ever made. I even remembered bits from when it was originally broadcast - the man given the Maestro Clubman D and cried!
Omg the coat hangers part 😂
Oh and then at 28:53 , he’s doing some weird topping his finger at the window to show off his bracelet.. 😂😂
Until watching this, I had fond memories of the 90s
🤣🤣🤣 same but if think back 30 years in some ways it was worse.
It was a great time, when the UK had a higher standard of living than most of the US, how things have changed
24:41 guy flexing on the other reps by standing next to the junior rep salesmen using a public phone with his mobile brick phone, its the tiny world of Alan Partridge, David Brent & Patrick Bateman.
38:17 To conclude the Maestro moaner's tale of disappointment with a HGV overtaking him and his rueful look is amazing unintentional comic timing! Great piece of social history!
That was a big drop for him to be fair. A 2.0i back to a smaller diesel, when you have to get a shift on is not fun
An unmistakeable inspiration for the Comic Strip Presents episode: 'Four Men in a Car'. Brilliant stuff!
From A to B: Tales of Modern Motoring
Planer and Richardson were pretty tame compared to this lot! Mind you Adrian Edmonson had a crap stereo...
@@justme-hh4vpHe still had leather seats and nice alloys on his Toyota Avensis.
Not being from Britain and having no idea what half these car brands are makes this documentary even better.
Vauxhall is the same as Opel, the others were global brand, Obviously Rover is gone now
24:36. the guy with mobile phone could have a phone conversation anywhere, yet he chose that spot just to show off. these people are messed up
Most likely setup for the shot by the DoP/Director.
I mean, maybe, or perhaps someone from the production told him to stand there while they were setting up the tripod and boom mic.
😂😂😂😂😂
This is one of the best things I've watched in a long time
- "Thanks for your interest in this job Mr Smith, walk us through your career"
- "I started in 1981 with a Maestro Clubman D..."
This was such a great piece of TV. It’s from a world of motoring that doesn’t exist anymore. Every episode is genius.
The spec was very much a measure of the man’s success! What an era!
This was very true for the time. Back in 1990, a 23 year old version of me, took a job for a company that paid slightly less than another, purely because they *lured* me with a Metallic Blue Astra GTE Cabriolet. Never regretted it and smiled like a loon every time I drove that car :)
my heart bleeds for the guy with the maestro diesel , A truly awful car , engine was so noisy /clattery ,sooooo slow ,and it looked like a pig .His boss must of wanted him gone 😂
The maestro was seriously outdated by 1994, it really had the social cache of a pair of brown polyester trousers
The 90s Reps used to visit me at my office, Id always end the meeting with "So what are you driving now" then 10mins on the different cars they would like, but transport gave them a cavalier. Of particular note were the lady reps all hair spray and shoulder pads high heels saint tropez so thick you could scrape it off with a wall paper scraper, and short skirts on mid forties. great times.
How good (and still
Modern) does that e36 look. Stunning.
It’s always been my least favourite shape, but seeing it next to the other cars of the time, it really stands out as premium.
There's an old fella who lives round the corner from me who has one in exactly the same spec and colour as the one in the documentary. It's in immaculate condition.
As an account manager with a company car I feel like I should be putting more thought into my coat hanger choice and jacket placement
If you want to be a real stand out company car man you need to roll up in a Robin Reliant to the client to represent the company and the colour should be yellow.
Aah, memories! Back in the 90's, my company gave me an Astra 2L injection car. I bloody loved it. It had previously been owned by a more senior manager than me, and he had added a load of nice toys to it, including an absolute killer stereo. I drove many thousands of miles around the M25 and in central London blasting out my favourite metal tunes!
For some reason I'm suddenly transported back to the slightly earlier age of Renault 25's "It's time to go it alone. I'm starting my own business... The company car's gonna to have go back" advert!
ua-cam.com/video/H9nRNTQBmpw/v-deo.html
200E boss is the bloke who puts an AMG badge on his mercs today
38:00 the sad story of being upset about his car is perfectly timed with the overtaking by the yellow truck 👌
The motorways looked so quiet. What a time to be on the road for a living
The motorways are always busy in the day now
Yep, it was.
and the lanes so wide!
And clean! Everything looks so clean and tidy. What happened?
@@Benjamin.Jamin. I am not sure where this was filmed but there was a big road building programme in the late 1980s and early 1990s so quite a lot of dual carriageways and motorway was brand new at the time. This lost momentum after the M3 construction protests
Great piece of film. I was smiling all the way through. I wonder what they are all doing now and what they think of how they thought back in the day?
They’re actors I believe
@@scottirvine121 There were no actor credits at the end. According to the great Mr. ChatGPT: The BBC film "Over the Moon with the Cavalier" is part of the series "From A to B: Tales of Modern Motoring". It is a documentary rather than a film with actors. The series explores various aspects of motoring and features real people, locations, and events rather than scripted performances.
@@scottirvine121 You might be right for the dialogue is so funny. But according to BBC this is part of a documentary series and feature "real people". There are no actor or writer credits at the end either.
My guess is they all 'cashed out' to hobby retirements such as yacht rentals, golf businesses, Hotels ownership, holiday businesses or overseas work as ex-pats. Would love to be proved wrong and know what it really is these folks went out of sales into.
@@JoolsUK consultants lol
Absolute comedy gold! You don’t really find these sort of men anymore, I had a friend whose dad was exactly like this!.. The mid 90’s doesn’t feel long ago to me, but looking at it now it’s a completely different world!
They still exist but now it's the laptop spec or home office kit or mobile they compare
@@peterhurst These guys would be computer illiterate.
@@whyohwhyfools That won't stop them
The Rover Maestro guy "it really was a sickening blow for me" 🤣
It drove him to tears! And his wife! Devastating!
You can hear the disgust & despair in his voice 😂. What a pile of garbage even by the bad standards of the mid late 80’s when they launched and people were surprised when the company folded
To be fair, it was an awful car, even more so by 1994, years after it should have been retired
@@alexanderstefanov6474 another example of a car that should’ve been retired before it was built 🤣
This obsession with i, L, CD, etc is exactly how I remember thinking about cars as a child of the 90s. Before the German premium brand craze took over. And now even they have cheapened in quality and image to become as run of the mill as the Escorts and Cavaliers of yesteryear.
As an 8 year old in 1995 I was desperate for my dad to get the Citroen Xantia SX rather than the LX.
Yea the turning point was around 94/95 the bug eye scorpio sealed fords fate and then millenium lease n pcp enabled any cunt and his mother to cheapen the image of prestige brands. Omega was decentish but volvo and saab gobbled up the market slightly sub 5 series.
@@awareofvacuity4238 true. Back then Mercedes were still very over engineered and if you had a BMW or Audi, you were doing well for yourself. The PCP craze has kind of killed that off and commodified status. It does irk me a bit that BMW stick an //M badge on pretty much anything that rolls out of their factory these days.
Yes I remember an article some time ago ( 10 years or more) saying bmw 3 series now outsold mondeos how they managed to still persuade people they were a step up is the amazing thing.
I also agree PCP has basically meant people can run cars they would never have had access to, the problem is the amount of wealth it drains from their life affecting other things like house ownership.
Yes it's quite fascinating to see in these clips from the 90s (and also much more recently) how heavily Ford and Vauxhall dominated all sectors of the UK car scene but in the last decades or two, have been almost wiped off the map in most of them.
Audis, BMWs and Mercedes are now the only mid-size saloons that sell and even those are increasingly rare as more and more manufacturers flood the market with stupid and ugly SUVs and "crossover" vehicles.
Times have certainly changed! But not entirely for the better, it must be said.
Just as I remember it.
I worked for a large company, over 900 staff and we were graded from 8~12. A few grade 10 staff elected for the newly released Mazda 626. A 626 was out of my paid grade but the company did allow us to buy ex-demonstrators so I set about getting one of those signed off. Well, when it arrived there was a lot condemnation from the other managers. My 626 was on another level what with a sunroof, cruise control and alloy wheels. It turned out that as a grade 9 I couldn't have a car above their grade so immediately ex-demonstrators were banned from the business. After that I got the Golf GTi Colour Concept, a car I wish I had today. It was an 8 valve Golf but came with lots of colour coded leather. Again, it was raised in one of the many managers meetings and no further Yellow Golf Concepts were allowed in after mine. Such stupid games but at the time they were so important. Thanks for the memory....
I remember the Fuji rep - he was our rep at the Euro Foto Centre, where I used to work as a lad, around that time.
Tbh he had the best car, apart from the w124
Laughed so hard at the poor guy with the Maestro who felt his company "sh*t on me and didn't treat me well at all" lol!
They probably thought with his northern accent he wasn't worthy of a decent car and gave the better ones to public schoolboys.
I thought I wasn’t that bad, back then. But remembered when my Mondeo 2.0 GLX was replaced by a white Volvo 440. I didn’t wash it for 18 months til I left.
Great to see this series again, I remember watching it the first time it was broadcast. Very unique style then, and now. So I also remember when company cars really were a big thing, loads of them on the roads!
TBH it is carrying quite abit of extra weight so no wonder it`s struggling abit.
Steve Coogan definitely used this documentary as source material for Alan Partridge.
Notice how even back then none of these men stipulated that they’d prefer indicators/blinkers as an optional extra. Opted for sunroofs and top end radios instead.
My dad came home one day with a glorious Rover 620Di - British racing green. It was the most glorious motorcar I had ever laid eyes on, especially the red walnut interior made it a gentlemens club on wheels. My dad referred to it as the common man's Jaguar, I agreed.
I was likely the only person in Europe severely emotionally affected by the demise of the Rover Motor Company.
This is such a brilliant ethnography of car drivers and the power dynamics on roads. I don't think drivers nowadays would be so proudly open about the symbolism of their vehicles and the egotistical power they draw from them. Absolutely brilliant. This is the bs we have to navigate as pedestrians and cyclists; no wonder drivers are so livid all the time, their source of self is stuck in traffic.
We need an update on Maestro Diesel man, seemed like a decent chap.
He's just arrived at the next customer
30 years ago, as an 🇺🇸, I loved reading Russell Bulgin's articles about this obsession in CAR magazine.
British culture has Pecking Order as a permanent feature.
Stateside, we have billionaire CEOs in hoodies as well as vice-signalling run rampan by the 'working class' (whatever THAT means)😅
The car models may have changed, but middle managers seem ever consistent through time.
26:31 "there aint no way somebody is going passed me in a base" 😂
I used to work with him. Never a dull moment.
@WestfieldFreshAir seems a laugh. Is he still alive?
@raykay91 Yes, and still working
What car does he drove noe
I saw this at the time! I thought it was a fever dream till now!
Nick Barker's From A to B (and Signs of the Times series) are peerless tv making. This whole series is stunning in terms of what's revealed and how it's been captured so seemingly guilelessly. TV has rarely examined the British so forensically...
Would love to see more of this - got links?
Just watched it to the end and BMW man...reminded me of a guy I knew in my 70s, Rover days at Lode Lane, he had an engineering company, guy called Felix Sheridan of Sheridan Engineering. Once told me that he had a Rolls Silver Spirit but went to see his customers in a Rover/Austin Montego....everything was status back when wasnt it..glad I'm 70 and retired from it all !!!
Loved a to b - taped them all 😂
Truly a painful experience watching this documentary. Well done, thanks for the upload.
That was hilarious! The Maestro man made me spit my drink out! 😂
I love this. Particularly reading some of the comments. Those who smugly talk about the world moving on and modern generations now realising what's really important need to ask themselves "what do the modern generations find important?" I don't think that people are somehow more informed, more in touch with life, in fact they have just shifted focus. What phone they have, what brands they wear, how many days they get to work from the comfort of their bed... Nothing has really changed that much.
It bloody hasn’t changed at all.
True
Very true. The ‘code’ has changed, but the message hasn’t. People just have slightly different preoccupations, but the base values are more or less the same.
Not many people talk about the camera specs, CPU, RAM,display driver etc etc in their mobile phones like these helmets would be.
Yeah people are now more materialistic than ever imo.
My dad was a company car guy. He didn't care about cars though so he took whatever they gave him. The guy in the video ain't wrong. Company cars in the 80's and 90's were how you recognised who was who in the business.
14:06 that guy 😂 i didnt want them to think my job was a temporary appointment 😂
"Leather gear knob" Not a touchscreen in sight😅
I dont know if it had a touchscreen, but the top end 7-series introduced this year had a big colour screen in the dash.
Though i think some japanese market cars had big TV screens in the dash some years earlier.
wow, takes me back. so true of the era. youngens of today will never get it and how good this content is.
The last guy really stood out and perhaps it's no surprise he had one of the nicest cars. His velvety voice and diplomatic choice of words are well suited for eroding barriers that customers instinctively erect.
I also appreciated his candidness when he spoke of walking the tightrope between being the "thrusting achiever" and being a decent human being. Today, perhaps more than ever, the two are often mutually exclusive.
34:08 i feel sorry for the maestro man could feel him crying inside getting overtaken by an hgv
Look how few cars there were on the road.... 😭😭😭😭
Mass deportations needed . . . .
Most of these drivers drive during the workday. So there is less traffic then say during rush hour
@@memofromessexRemember, reliable and cheap public transportation has been systemically removed from Britain and denied to us for the past forty years.
@@dosman7560 try driving at those times today it makes no difference
21 million registered in 1994. 32 million today, so over 50% more.
A lot of inspiration for John Shuttleworth seems to have been taken from Maestro Man. He's the only likeable guy out of the lot. Thanks for uploading I vaguely remember watching this with my dad when it was originally aired.
The sad thing is that even today a lot of people’s identity is rooted in the car they choose to drive.
Absolute gold, you couldn't write it! The abject misey portrayed by the Maestro driver was palpable. I grew up in SA so missed this era of the UK but whilst 'success' was defined differently there it was equally vacuous...well almost.