TELEVISION / Another season, the latest supermodels

LAST night we hit the road, like a lot of people do on Fridays. In 'Crash Course' (C4), a film for Short Stories, three normal people ended several days of intensive driving with a test: two passed, one failed. In The Team (BBC 2) two abnormal people also ended several days of intensive driving with a test. One's engine blew up, the other drove into a wall.

There are few longer journeys than from a Malvern driving school to the Portuguese Formula One Grand Prix. While the one place of work is packed with interesting, committed men who relish the variety their work brings, the other is chock full of mirthless dullards who are always looking for new employers. It's just that the dullards are better off to the tune of several squillion a year.

The Team - A Season at McLaren is one of those sports documentaries that seem to exist merely because someone got permission. A film crew gained rare access to the pit sponsored by Marlboro where, with lackeys dressed as cigarette packets and engines screaming away, like the hum of a thousand mosquitoes, searching inquiry was difficult. For those who moan that sport is being remorselessly reduced to a squabble over money by machines, motor racing backs them to the hilt. The closer you look, the truer it seems. For the next six weeks, The Team will look very close.

Drivers are a bit like pampered supermodels: they have a valuable talent for showing off other people's designs. While they think they're important, it's actually what they're inside that really counts, which perhaps contributes to the insecurities that make them dissolve into tantrums when things aren't perfect to a 16th of an inch. Sadly, there were no tantrums here. At the slightest sign of a barney, when Ayrton Senna announced to his blokeish boss Ron Dennis that he was ditching McLaren, the fly on the wall was briskly swatted. Hence there was no chance to assess the real calibre of Dennis, the subject of Part 1.

In the style that worked for Richard Denton, who made informative documentaries on Radley College and the Soviet Union, the running commentary attempted to feed you with intimacies, but somehow it didn't convince. 'Ayrton's positive there's something wrong with his engine,' Tim Pigott-Smith narrated, 'but the engineers are not so sure.' Sometimes these voiceover actors must wonder if they haven't been directed to the Jackanory studio by mistake. There must be a less coy way of letting you into the mind of a driver who apparently values victory more highly than life or limb.

As with mountaineers, it's possible to suppose that Formula One drivers are motivated by a latent death wish. That should make them deeply fascinating, but as anyone who has spent five seconds listening to the droning moustache known as 'Nigel Mansell' will testify, some people with a latent death wish are more interesting than others. It's the same at McLaren, where in mid-season they teamed the Senna with Mika Hakkinen, a Finn - no doubt of the flying variety. They should have been chalk and cheese, the Latin Ayrton and the nordic Aryan, but they were as boring and obsessive as each other. This series could do with a gear change.

'Crash Course' was a lovely ride. The three learners aiming to gain their licence in one week all had their motives: a mother wanted to take her daughter on outings, a young man wanted to get a job, and a chattering bag of nerves wanted to surmount an inferiority complex the size of Worcestershire. On her 11th attempt, tongue lolloping all over her face as she concentrated on her three-point turns, she passed, and her jubilation was more moving than anything the camera brought home from Portugal. The driving instructors, guffawing at the weaknesses of their clients, were hugely human too. And you might always have assumed that marking driving tests was the one career in which a soul was surplus to requirements, but even these pariahs smile more than Senna. On the money they earn, perhaps it's gallows humour.