Confessions of a Traffic Warden, C4

None of this will have surprised metropolitan viewers - and we were already braced for the harsh reality check awaiting Lambert’s principal subject, a gentle and erudite Nepalese immigrant called Durga, who speaks four languages and has two Masters degrees. Durga had such an impossibly idealised view of the British that he would have had his preconceptions shattered if the natives hadn’t apologised for their bad form in parking on a single yellow and invited him home for tea and crumpets to make amends. He seemed to take the view that trying to wriggle out of paying £80 was a form of national decadence akin to Roman emperors marrying their sisters.

Lambert spent six months with Durga and the other fledgling “civil enforcement officers” of Westminster Council – or, rather, of NSL, a private company contracted to collect £80 million annually for the council. Ninety per cent of the workforce are immigrants like Durga, and the application process (while the cameras were around, at least) seemed surprisingly rigorous for a job that presumably only really requires a tough hide and the ability to grin fixedly while being called a "fucking coon".

Anyway, try this one at home and see if you too could wear the badge. “Using the 24-hour clock, work out the following. It’s 17.17 and the meter has 18 minutes left. At what time should the vehicle leave the parking bay?” One job-seeker believed he was applying to become a street cleaner, and looked suitably confused.

What seemed more relevant was a lecture setting out the risks of the job, and written on a white board were the following words: “Verbal abuse”, “Stabbing” and “Drive-by shooting”. Apparently wardens prefer eating their lunch back at the office, fearing that buying food in public whilst wearing their unforms might lead to their being poisoned. Just because they're paranoid...

Psychometric testing aimed to weed out those who were likely to turn on lippy vehicle-owners with a machete, but when things do get heavy, they can always call a "Code Red", at which signal they are joined by several other traffic wardens. Safety in numbers, and all that, although this particular bunch looked so out of condition that you felt a surge of relief when the police back-up arrived. Apparently traffic wardens do have police back-up.

Lambert’s subjects each wore a hidden camera to capture the abuse at its most unselfconscious - no doubt a precondition from Channel 4 when commissioning his film. Mind you, even those who did seem to know that they being filmed weren’t in the slightest distracted from their fury. And most of Westminster’s wardens being non-whites, the abuse hurled at them was predictably racist.

Durga was a godsend to Lambert. Not only did he call his controller Dave his “guru” (admittedly he was a man of buddha-like girth), but he was also given to quoting his beloved Shakespeare (“Whether to issue a PCN or not issue a PCN, that is the question”) and generally going about with a naivety that would have make Borat seem like a horrid old cynic. And yet Durga found himself facing a very real moral crisis when he felt himself turning into an unfeeling automaton.

The problem was that he was on a three-month probabtion, and he wasn’t issuing enough tickets. Last year Westminster Council made it illegal to set targets for wardens, but there were allegations here of unofficial incentives, with overtime payments and better-paid Sunday shifts being distributed as a reward to those who ticketed the most cars. The company denied the practice – and the whistleblower, a wry Nigerian, had the relaxed air of a man who had decided to jack it all in anyway.

Durga was less sanguine about the whole business, and the film ended on a downbeat if inconclusive note. It had been a life lesson for a man who had never travelled outside Nepal before, and, although his Candide-like outlook did shine a useful light on our shabby behaviour, I'm not sure we British should be made to feel too guilty for dashing his absurdly lofty preconceptions.