Last night's TV: Britain's Busiest Motorway (ITV); Ross Kemp: Libya's Migrant Hell (Sky1)

It’s amazing what you can find on the side of the road

According to ‘Britain’s Busiest Motorway’, the average motorist can spend a year of their life in traffic jams (ITV)

Like many of us I’ve spent my fair share of time on Britain’s motorways, including the always bustling M25. Well, trying to bustle, at any rate, struggling against what the traffic reporters always describe as “sheer weight of traffic”, which I’ve always found a particularly annoying tautology, given the circumstances, even if delivered by the always lively Sally Boazman (BBC radio’s “Sally Traffic”). According to ITV’s Britain’s Busiest Motorway, the average British motorist can easily waste a cumulative year of their life in traffic jams, and the M25 is especially prone to them, coping as it does with 73 million journeys a year, twice the volume it was designed for when it opened in 1986.

This I could easily identify with, and, as I say, I thought I was reasonably au fait with the ways of the modern highway, but I was not prepared for what the cameras, and “incident support team” Jack and Jamie discovered on a lay-by near Junction 30 (for Tilbury, Thurrock, A13E, Lakeside, London (E&C) and A13(W)). “That is fresh – not even a fly on it yet,” declared poor Jamie as a came across the first of an unfeasible volume of human faeces that had been, well, dumped, by the side of the road. It was as if the lorry drivers of Essex had converged on this little corner of England and embarked on some sort of massive scat party. Anyway, such was the mess that the incident support team, once they’d wretched their way back to their van, had to radio HQ for back-up. It gave a whole new meaning to “long tailbacks on the M25” at any rate. I shall be extra careful if I see that phrase pop up on the satnav, and so should you.

That wasn’t all I found out. Stacey, regular commuter and marketing manager, explained how she’d once been asked out during a pile-up (not a euphemism), while I noticed that the staff in the M25’s control rooms, monitoring their hundreds of CCTV cameras, had quite a spiteful line in jokes about lorry drivers brutally murdering hitchhikers.

The ITV show was a lot more entertaining than being stuck in a queue of traffic with a full bladder and an appointment you missed 45 minutes ago, but this and other similar exercises by the BBC (I think the M6 starred in their last one) will never better 1993’s From A to B: Tales of Modern Motoring. That was a classic, and should be placed in some sort of anthropological archive as the definitive statement of rep and motorway culture from a frightening quarter of a century ago. There’s quite a lot of it on YouTube and I particularly recommend the edition where one salesman is given a Rover Maestro Clubman Diesel by his firm and his workmates – Sierra and Cavalier drivers to a man – came out to the car park to laugh at him. His wife cried when he took the Wedgewood Blue hatchback home. “I thought the firm had shat on me” was his reaction, and I suppose that takes me, as if on the M25 itself, full circle.


 Ross Kemp’s exploration of the plight of Libyan migrants is brave and moving 
 (Sky)

I also have to commend Sky and the makers of Ross Kemp: Libya’s Migrant Hell for an exceptionally fine piece of journalism. I realise that it sounds like a failed Alan Partridge programme title, but the serious, sober and brave reality is of one man using his celebrity to highlight the plight of some of the most desperate people on earth.

For them the journey across the Sahara is actually more dangerous than that across the Mediterranean, assuming they ever make it to the coast. The unluckiest of all are caught by Libya’s pitifully under-resourced coastguard and sent to detention centres where they may as well be dead, which is how too many of them end up.

Kemp managed to get astonishing access to women brutalised in brothels, a people-smuggler who was making £25,000 a week out of his activities and people who had simply witnessed more suffering than any of us in the comfy west will see in a lifetime. I’d go so far as to say it deserves an award. No joke.