Driven

Driven (partially found Channel 4 television series; 1998-2002)

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Driven was a British television show broadcast as a televised weekly motoring programme between 1998 and 2002. It was hosted by a variety of hosts, primarily Penny Mallory, Mike Brewer and Jason Plato, to which its previous presenters were James May, Peter Stevens, Jason Barlow and Alex Sibley - alongside guest appearances consisting of Paul Ripley, Jamie Theakston and Amanda Stretton.

The motoring show aired dominantly on Channel 4 with later-time runs on Channel 4's digital sister channel S4C and had their own home being 4car.co.uk, later changed to channel4.com/4car by the last series.

History

To begin with, Driven wasn’t Channel 4’s first rodeo into the car-programme arena competing with BBC’s Top Gear. In fact, there was a car show called Ride On, which was presented by primarily Muriel Gray, Nicky Campbell and Alain de Cadenet.

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  Ride On’s logo captured from a VHS recording; 09.01.1995

Sadly, Ride On didn’t last too long due to low interest within the programme. In total, it aired from 1994 to 1996. The second series was delayed because Ride On producers wanted to let everyone watch Top Gear Motorsport instead.

After the success of Deals On Wheels presented by Mike Brewer & Richard Sutton, it was then decided to make a proper competitor to rival and overtake Top Gear. Enter: driven.

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  Driven's early iteration of the Series 1 logo design.

The rise of Driven

The four dominant faces of Driven were Jason Barlow, Deals On Wheels' Mike Brewer, James May - who previously appeared on Channel 5's "The Car Show" - and McLaren F1’s designer Peter Stevens. The test track used during the first series of Driven was RAF Bentwaters near Ipswich.

Even though Peter hasn't appeared as much on group tests compared with the trio, he presented the off-road crash test safety item, which was teased in the trailer for the first series.

Driven’s main premise was to provide a perfect balance of consumer advice and entertainment, so viewers could easily understand everything presented to them and also be entertained, no matter the age demographic or whether they were already interested in cars. The format over the years has become the “entertainment car show” format, which during the show’s peak in 2000-2001 dominated the car-programme arena compared with other shows at the time, such as the British version of MotorWeek on the digital Granada Men & Motors channel, or Pulling Power on ITV Carlton. Top Gear’s reboot would reuse and modify the format, which resulted in Top Gear being successful under the reign of "The Holy Trinity" - Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May.

Driven being different than any other car show gave them a big advantage over Top Gear, which continuously followed the old and established magazine format for a long time with very little changes. It was largely unnoticed, until Top Gear started going through their downfall in 2000.

Driven v BMW

During the 1-mile drag test of the BMW M3 Evolution E36 on Series 1, Episode 7, Mike was encouraged to drive it hard behind the tracking car, which as a result left the car stone chipped, and BMW wasn't too thrilled about it. Driven got banned from borrowing BMWs for their road tests and group tests until 1999.

James May and Channel 4

As much as the trio fitted really well and liked each other - as well as the production team being absolutely fine with them - Channel 4's executives didn't see it that way.

The "3 blokes having the same age running the show" dynamic wasn't what they wanted from Driven, and as a result they've sacked Captain Sense of Direction, which resulted in them demanding for a female presenter to replace him, in the name of diversity - while Peter Stevens just left Driven to focus on car design.

As for why James was sacked out of three, was because of Channel 4 not really fancying him whatsoever. Mike wasn't sacked as he was doing really well on Deals On Wheels, and Jason wasn't sacked either because Channel 4 found potential in him as a Car magazine writer. Very unfortunate of the executive team meddling with an otherwise decent show, but there was nothing they could do about it other than to comply.

Drastic changes in Driven's second series

Aside from replacing James with former rally driver Penny Mallory, Series 2 of Driven also ditched RAF Bentwaters and the "Driven truck" - small driven branded tent with the driven-branded 1996 Mercedes-Benz [N306 PNR] truck - for the standard magazine car show approach of reviewing cars in various places. The show's idents were made flashier and more colourful, instead of having the show still use the standard red colour. The intro theme was also remixed to reflect the changes.

Driven also was an early adopter of widescreen broadcasting as part of the changes in series 2 - in result, their first episode was aired in widescreen, but they made an error during broadcast where the programme was shown in widescreen for everyone, but letterboxed to 4:3. One of the earlier Driven trailers - notably for episode 2 - had an aspect ratio error, where the Driven intro ident used 16:9, but the footage and C4's graphics were correctly scaled to 4:3 - in result, 4:3 aspect ratio viewers saw the Driven intro ident in anamorphic 16:9 shrunken down to 4:3. Later episodes have fixed those problems and used widescreen correctly.

By the second episode, Driven introduced something called Paul Ripley's Driving School, a small segment featuring the motoring expert Paul Ripley, which had its main premise in helping random Driven viewers on driving their cars properly, starting in episode 4 with a lesson on preventing skidding while cornering using a skid car and advice by Paul himself.

Series 2 was the last series that used the intro sequence taken from Series 1, where one of the presenters say “This is Driven!”, showing a shot of them driving in 3 different cars, with the driven text appearing as the video gets shrunk down to a cube being in the i.

Jason Barlow and Driven

As part of the quality of life changes in the third series debuting in January 2000, Jason introduced viewers to the driven 100 group test format, where cars were scored in four categories; driveability, desirability, practicality and cost of ownership - with each category having up to 25 points maximum and a total of 100 points to obtain.

Driven 100 scores were also shared on their at-the-time brand new website, simply being 4car.co.uk, which not only served as a home for the car programme, but also as a website to find out about Deals On Wheels (and much later, about Channel 4's World Rally Championship coverage).

On the 14th of April 2000, Jason Barlow officially joined BBC's Top Gear on a 3-year BBC TV contract, which simultaneously ended his tenure on Driven. He wouldn't be on the programme until the next series, as a replacement for Top Gear's stalwart Quentin Willson. This posed a problem for Driven, as they were without a presenter again, but they didn't wait that long to find a new one. More on that later.

"Driven 100" was then recycled and dumbed down to the "Top Gear Verdict", which did the similar premise as Driven 100 (splitting the test into categories and scoring from 1 out of 10, making the total score a calculated average using all of the points grabbed) and also revived Top Gear's "minitest" format from the late 1990s, but with better graphics and harsher outlook on reviewing cars, especially by Top Gear's researcher-made-presenter Adrian Simpson, who started the Top Gear Verdict with a harsh review of the diesel Seat Alhambra.

Preservation Status

Currently, Driven has 79 episodes available out of 90 total episodes aired over the course of 4 years. A large majority of the footage is low quality (from 246p to 288p, long play mono VHS recordings encoded with Handbrake) and unsuitable for YouTube uploading.

External Links

• Google Docs link for more information on the series. Link provided by user Revolume.
• Google Docs link for more information about the scrapped "Series 9" of Driven. Link provided by user Revolume.