Parking Mad, BBC One, review There is something about finding a parking ticket tucked under your windscreen wiper that taps into a primitive rage. Maybe it's because driving a car is a dream of absolute freedom or maybe it's that parking attendants, who are financially rewarded depending on the number of tickets they issue, have become so unforgiving. Either way someone gets a ticket in Britain every 4.6 seconds, and there is plenty of anger bubbling up. Parking Mad (BBC One) followed the most extreme anti-parking-surveillance activists in Britain. One man who owned a building firm in North London collected £80,000 worth of fines from what he called the "dirty bastards" at Camden Council. He appealed each one and, remarkably, nearly always won. There was also the Southend-on-Sea vigilante group called the "No to Mob" who chased council CCTV cars on motorcycles, while wearing V for Vendetta masks. As pedants in fluorescent yellow jackets they looked an awful lot like the council officers they vehemently oppose; but plenty of drivers were grateful to be saved a £60 fine. It's easy to belittle a world in which people take themselves so very seriously, and the programme did not hold back. At one ticket issuing company they redesigned the wartime "Keep Calm and Carry On" poster to read "Shut Up and Deal with It." But things took an unexpectedly tragic turn when Barry from Bolton - who spent all his time deliberately collecting parking tickets in order to prove the authorities" incompetence in issuing them - ended up needing to sell his house to meet his legal fees. When Barry was asked whether he would do the same again his reply was firm: "Yes, I would." Full of British eccentrics, Parking Mad was highly entertaining and at points it had me laughing out loud. It also lightly broached a serious issue: the problems between motorists and parking regulators reflect our dysfunctional relationship with the state, which seems most efficient when catching out the generally law abiding. My only criticism is that the programme failed to point out the obvious contradiction in the anti-parking campaign: if we all left our cars wherever we wanted we would soon be at each other's throats. You could even say the council - roundly mocked here - performs a valuable service by uniting drivers against a common enemy.