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Driver of a Black Cab
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Although in the US, taxi drivers often have a Funny Foreigner stereotype, it's quite different (in a sense, the antithesis) in England. Often ex-police, the drivers of black cabs (or to be technical, Hackney Carriages) are known for being very open with their views on what's wrong with society today (immigrants, the youth, etc.) and their proposed solutions (public hangings and floggings). Not to be confused with black people who drive cabs, toward whom this character might not be congenial,note This is heading for Discredited Trope status in modern times, as London has one of the highest ratios of ethnic minorities to white people in the whole country and it's much easier to be prejudiced against an abstract concept than against people you've actually met. or with Uber drivers who offer the company's luxury service in black-on-black sedans. Another stereotype is that cab drivers like to drop the names of celebrity passengers, as in "I 'ad that Liam Gallagher in the back of my cab last Friday". The test taken to qualify as a Black Cab driver in London is called "The Knowledge,"note as in, the Knowledge of London Examination takes at least three years to study for, and requires a ridiculously intuitive knowledge of London geography - which is all the more remarkable since London is what happens when one city spends two thousand years growing, absorbing smaller surrounding villages, towns, and cities, while being intermittently flooded, burned to the ground, and bombed into oblivion, resulting in a form of urban kudzu that sometimes defies physics - in places, it is entirely possible to get back where you started while going in what seems like an entirely straight line. It gets to the point where the memory centres of a cabby's brain are recognisably larger than those of a normal person. As Bill Bryson put it, "[London cabbies] would sooner entrust their teenage daughters to Alan Clark for a weekend than admit they've never heard of your destination," but chances are they have. Once they receive their "req" and pass, they earn the right to wear the coveted green badge. A made-for-TV comedy The Knowledge about those aspiring to be London cabbies and their attempts to pass "The Knowledge" exam was made in 1979. Examples |
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| Driver of a Black Cab / int_19ac548b | type |
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A Viz strip had Cockney Wanker taking the Knowledge, which included directions from two arbitrary points for Londoners (a straightforward journey) and out-of-towners (Up the M1 to Dundee, and back down again), and being able to do a stream-of-consciousness speech from any topic to "Enoch Powell, send them all back" (known as "The Ignorance"). | |
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From Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency: | |
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A round on I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue, where the object is to fail a job interview, had Graeme, applying for a job as a cabbie, say he doesn't really hold any strong opinions. And in the Mockumentary In Search of Mornington Crescent, when Barry gets a taxi to physically travel the moves of a typical game: |
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The taxi driver in The Football Factory, who moans about controversial topics, such as immigration in London. | |
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In his Red Dwarf memoir, The Man in the Rubber Mask, Robert Llewellyn confirms the second stereotype (with a dash of the first) by saying he has only once been in a black cab where the driver didn't refer to having had "that coloured geezer, the Scouse one, Craig Charles" as a passenger. And that driver was a novice. | |
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Alluded to in the novel Neverwhere, when after Richard returns to "London Above," the first thing he does when hailing a cab is to express interest in hearing all of the driver's geopolitical opinions. He is so eager about it that the guy thinks Richard is mocking him. | |
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It is a cabbie's rather melodramatic account of the previous night's events which makes David realise the reality of his situation in An American Werewolf in London. | |
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And in the Mockumentary In Search of Mornington Crescent, when Barry gets a taxi to physically travel the moves of a typical game: | |
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Although involving a New York cabbie, there's a scene in The Equalizer that has a stereotypical cabbie griping to Robert McCall about crime and Police Are Useless. It's not until the cab is stopped by some thugs running a shakedown racket on unlicensed cab drivers that the audience realises it's actually exposition on why he's called the Equalizer for help. | |
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The Armstrong and Miller Show: There's a sketch in which it is revealed black cab drivers have to do two tests - the standard "The Knowledge" one everyone knows about, and another, secret, one where they must segue between a harmless topic and a rabidly right-wing one without the passenger getting annoyed. And another one in which a sat-nav starts making right-wing comments (this joke has been done in other media). |
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One of the characters from the vox pops on A Bit of Fry and Laurie is Stephen Fry (who drives a cab in real life, but not as a job) as a stereotypical long-winded cab driver: "If you've got a jar of marmalade in a cupboard, right? And you take the marmalade out of the cupboard, right? You've still got the marmalade. It's not in the cupboard, but you've got the marmalade. You've got to put the marmalade somewhere else haven't you? Course you have, stands to reason. There's the cupboard; no marmalade. But you've still got the marmalade. It's the same with sex and violence on television. You can take sex and violence off television, but where are you going to put them?" | |
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Anthropomorphic British taxis can be seen during the last third of Cars 2, which takes place in London, England. | |
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Have I Got News for You discussed Guy Goma, the guy who showed up at a BBC news studio looking for an IT job, but was mistaken for the tech writer Guy Kewney and Pushed in Front of the Audience. Andy Hamilton said that it had been initially reported that Goma was a taxi driver by trade, but he knew that was false because "a taxi driver would have talked much more authoritatively about something he knew nothing about." Another time it came up was when the caption competition at the end of the episode pictured the queen sitting in the driver's side of some kind of black vehicle, which Paul interpreted as the city having to take on more part-time drivers during the Christmas season: [posh accent] "I'm not going south of the river this time of night. You must be jokin'." Another example was when it was revealed that Prince Philip owned a black cab, which was a particularly good fit as he is known for making gaffes about other countries' peoples. |
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On The Now Show, Mitch Benn parodied the news that the WOMD dossier was partly based on the testimony of a Baghdad taxi driver by imagining him as a driver of a black cab: | |
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The Knowledge is a comedy about the "Knowledge boys", who aspire to be London cabbies with Nigel Hawthorne as their eccentric examiner. He acts strangely on purpose, in order to see how the candidates will deal with the equally strange General Public. | |
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The 2004 series of The Chaser Decides has an ad for the "Great Cabbie Debate" between two opinionated taxi drivers, as an alternative to the traditional Leaders Debate. | |
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Private Eye often has its "A Taxi Driver Writes" like this, mocking any given public figure who happens to have said or done something crudely right wing. Usually involves the catchphrase "I had that [X] in the back of my cab the other day, very clever man..." Frequently the driver also uses the phrase "They should be strung up, it's the only language they understand". In one piece the driver was talking about preventing prisoners from "cheating justice" by hanging themselves. When the right-wing comments come from radical Islamic preachers, they sometimes change it to "A Camel Driver Writes". |
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The second stereotype occurs in Shakespeare in Love, where the black cab is replaced by a Thames ferry boat. "I had Christopher Marlowe in my boat once." | |
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The Doctor Who fic "Among the Jarveys of the Metropolis" has Amy and Rory hail a flying cab in future London, whose driver tells them "the monologue" is extra. Apparently the tourists expect it. | |
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Ray in When I'm Sixty-Four, although he's not an especially gabby cabbie. | |
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The character of Charlie Slater in EastEnders was a black-cab driver, but in his ten-year stint on the show, he averted the trope; he was generally good-natured and was portrayed as apolitical. | |
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The cabbie in Paddington (2014), full stop. | |
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The Up Series includes Tony, who became a cab driver (who was in the middle of the Knowledge at 21) and also played one in several TV shows. | |
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Carry On Cabby is based around this. A couple of workaholic taxi drivers try to make a rival company go out of business. | |
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School of Comedy has one, who gives us everything. | |
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One Hellblazer story focused on two young cabbies-in-training. Apparently the Knowledge was also a demon-sealing ritual. | |
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