Is This My Best Side...?

Peter Howard’s Vitessehas a track record of TV appearances,but when a car looks this good, then you can forgive it from having something of a love affair with the camera.

My Vitesse obviously likes the limelight, because it has had not one, but two starring roles on film. Well ‘starring role’ might be overstating the case, but it was certainly one of the cast! The first was on a BBC sitcom called The Worst Week of My Life, which first aired in 2005. The first series told the catalogue of errors and disasters leading up to a wedding where the groom was not really approved of by the family. Of course his best man lets him down at the last minute, so he rings one of his other mates, and he turns up in this Vitesse –it is on screen quite a bit during the later episodes.

The chap who sold the Triumph to me passed on those details, and a DVD of the series which I have watched. Supposedly it has also been in a programme called Alibi on ITV, though I’ve not seen that. I’ve been told that it was destroyed in that film –you see the car going into a corner, and the next thing you know it is upside-down and on fire. I do know that a former archivist at the TSSC called the film makers to complain that they had wrecked a nice Vitesse, but was told that it was an old filming trick and that the car on fire was actually the wreck of an old Herald.