TEST DRIVE The Lives and Loves of a Car Man

When unable to sleep, my dad used to melt saccharin in warm skimmed milk. If the CBC's Test Drive were a liquid, that's what it would taste like. It's a mildly amusing sitcom in which a namby-pamby Toronto car dealer looks back upon the last 50 years of his life and times. His wife's overbearing, his kids typical, his son-in-law an ex-Mennonite who drives as if he's blind. The acting is uniformly fine, the production lean and bright, the characters stock, and the writing unthreatening, considering the volatility of the last half-century. Yet compared to TV comedy of the same nostalgic ilk, Test Drive is a work of art. Y.R. (c) AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine [Published: FEB / MAR 03]