All make sure that you have the TV remote control in your possession for the BBC 3 documentary – ‘Licence to Kill’…
This is what the Daily Mirror TV critic has to say about the programme…
“BBC Three comes in for a fair amount of flak for some of the drivel it shoves at its target audience of 16 to 34-year-olds – but it has the power to be a force for good as well.
Consider these statistics. Traffic collisions are the single biggest killer of young people in Britain, and a fifth of all young drivers will have a serious accident in the first year of getting their licence.
One of those was this show’s presenter Sophie Morgan, who you may have seen in Britain’s Missing Top Model and Beyond Boundaries.
Just six months after passing her test, Sophie was left paralysed from the waist down when she was speeding and her car flipped over. She’s spent the last decade in a wheelchair and if anyone is qualified to send a wake-up call to young drivers, it’s her.
“What is it that turns people like me into maniacs when we first get behind the wheel?” she asks.
Intelligent, honest, insightful and still haunted by the lapse of reason that changed her life forever, Sophie puts many more experienced presenters to shame.
This hour-long film contains horrific CCTV footage of the moment 18-year-old Manchester City player Courtney Meppen-Walter crashed his speeding Mercedes into another car, killing two of its occupants, and Sophie follows him through his police interview and the courts.
The part of the brain that controls risk-taking doesn’t develop until our mid-20s, which means there’s an argument to be made for raising the driving age.
No one would dare suggest that, of course. But programmes like this could be one way of stopping a driving licence from becoming a licence to kill.”
