Oi, TV presenters, pay attention to the road!

Do you want to know one of my pet hates in transport? I have lots of them - like fellow cyclists running red lights or motorists thinking the ‘no car lane’ sign doesn’t apply to them - but my teeth really grate when I see TV presenters doing point-of-view pieces to camera. When driving.

In the movies, actors who are filmed driving aren’t actually doing so. The car will most likely be on a truck, with a camera crew sat on the car’s bonnet. TV film crews dispense with this basic safety requirement and simply hook up a small camera so the TV presenter can do the POV piece while driving.

Think talking on a cellphone while driving is distracting? How about trying to look good on camera, think about something useful to say AND pay attention to the road?

There’s a lot of it about. And it’s not just TV presenters, it can be interviewees also. The thing is, once broadcast, you’d think that would be pretty good evidence to take to the police as driving without ‘due care and attention.’ Anybody ever heard of such a prosecution?

To see an example of it in action I could embed any number of BBC Top Gear clips but, for a pretty fresh example, here’s a clip from a Viddler employee. I’d hate to be a ‘vulnerable road user’ in Canton, Ohio. That’s where Brandice drives…



And here’s the rub. @brandice isn’t a TV presenter. She may work for Viddler, but she’s a ‘citizen journalist’. With the rise and rise of online video - ten hours of video gets uploaded to YouTube per second - there will be plenty of other idiots out there who think they can drive and vlog at the same time. NOTE: Sorry, the video has been deleted, either by Viddler or by Brandice. It showed a twentysomething woman driving and videoing herself talking into a camera at the same time.