Last night's TV: Auto cads were head over wheels in love

Published on Wednesday 28 May 2008 21:00

Strange Love: My Car Is My Lover, Five Six Degrees, ITV

THE unimpressed songstress Shania Twain once declaimed: "I can't believe you kiss your car goodnight – you must be joking, right?" Shania didn't know the half of it, as Strange Love: My Car Is My Lover took us far beyond chaste kisses with two men who really, really love their cars.

Edward Smith, a man living in Washington State with his 1974 Beetle Vanilla and, unsurprisingly, no-one else, called himself a "mechanophile". "She's my lover and I don't see anything wrong with that," he insisted. And yet he heartlessly drove her to a car show so he could cheat with several other four-wheeled floozies – the cad! What about Vanilla's feelings? Oh right, she doesn't have any, because it's a car and he's a nutjob.

Clearly I'm no doctor, but Edward was obviously mentally ill – I mean, the man was getting off with a car. He could barely keep his hands, or other parts, off it and a particularly unnecessary bit of footage spied on him having his peculiar way with the film crew's own motor.

He also fancied helicopters and claimed to have "made love" to the star of Airwolf (the 'copter, not Jan-Michael Vincent). And he also had a thing about lions, but presumably he's never tried it on with one of them.

Jordan, meanwhile, was a much younger man who had no sexual interest whatsoever in women, but quickly reassured his flatmate that he wasn't gay either. I wondered if, living in a conservative southern state, he found it easier – strange as this sounds – to come out as a car lover than anything else?

Clearly uncomfortable and directionless in his life, he focused on his two vehicles instead. In defence, he said: "Some people probably like to have sex with toasters, I'm not sure how you would do that, but some people probably do." I think we just found Five's next documentary.

This sleazy film brought the two men together for a road trip, though they were more interested in each other's cars. It was far too long – by at least 59 minutes – and contained far more than anyone needed to know about the actual process of having sex with a car.

Sometimes it seems as if programme makers are taking part in a secret contest to find the most obscure possible subject that they can haul, blinking, into the light of the freakshow. People who have sex with sofas, who can only have sex upside down, who have sex underwater, or with volcanoes – it's actually hard to think of parodies, given that next week's Strange Love is about a woman in love with the Eiffel Tower. I'm all for openness, but surely not everything needs its own hour-long TV documentary? Especially when, as here, it does nothing but exploit the unfortunate souls exposed for entertainment.

Despite coming from JJ Abrams, of Alias and Lost fame, Six Degrees sneaked quietly on to ITV's schedules, probably because it has already been cancelled halfway through its first series. I'm not really surprised, because this drama about beautiful young people running into each other in New York is a little corny.

To show us that the heroine is free-spirited, she is arrested for jumping on a bin lorry and ripping her clothes off, as you do. Another character is played by an actor best known to me from R Kelly's extraordinary video sequence, Trapped In The Closet, where he finds his wife's midget lover hiding in a kitchen cabinet (honestly). I think I'd rather have seen a show based on that than Six Degrees, which was slow and unengaging.