Bring back 'Motorway Patrol'

If an Anglophile is someone who loves England, and a Francophile admires the French then you can sign me up as card carrying Kiwophile. I love New Zealand and everything it represents. My admiration has always been cast from afar, I am yet to visit our neighbours personally (haven’t ever had the excuse really. I never run out of sugar and their branches don’t overhang the fence), but I get my fill of NZ culture whenever I can in the form of music, movies and TV shows. 

New Zealand has always produced brilliant cultural exports. There are those we now call our own- John Clarke, Tony Martin, Reg Mombassa, and Sam Neil. And there are those who have made it to the world stage like Russell Crowe, the Finn brothers, The Flight of the Conchords, Taika Waititi, and Peter Jackson. 

There’s also this, which is, like, eight different kinds of wonderful. 



But my favourite Kiwi export by far would have to be Motorway Patrol.

Motorway Patrol is a documentary show that follows police as they manage the roads around Auckland. The show ran in New Zealand for 11 seasons over the period of a decade. It ran in Australia periodically on Channel 9 and was the predecessor to our own version, which took the slightly sexier sounding name Highway Patrol. Sadly, Motorway Patrol is not gracing our screens at present and production of new episodes looks to be unlikely. In NZ and Down Under alike, we are ever poorer for the lack of it. Motorway Patrol is the quainter side of real crime.

Motorway Patrol showcases the gentler, more mundane, slightly parochial, and often humorous side of policing and being policed. The cops on the show are awkward and self-effacing and the citizens being policed are usually polite and complicit. There is the occasional moment of high drama, a hostile driver or even a chase, but usually those being targeted are only evasive enough to make for funny television. 

The show isn’t expressly intended as comedy but it is definitely light entertainment. There are plenty of other police reality programs that attempt to capture high drama and action, showcasing a suburban RBT like it was an episode of The Wire, but Motorway Patrol is honest. The show knows that there are exciting moments of police work but much of it is routine, work-a-day kind of stuff. In this clip of the show, for example, there is a drunk driver from Thailand, to whom the awkward officer shouts the universal exclamation “Arriba!”, there’s a revelatory “university” statistic that indicates that  “excessive alcohol consumption can result in aggressive or irrational behaviour”, there’s a group of young men who are excited to be pulled over because it means they’ll be on the telly, there’s a drunk passer-by who sings the national anthem, and there’s a cop who erupts into a sneezing fit. It’s all there on tape- Motorway Patrol omits none of the sordid details.



 I enjoyed watching the moderate law enforcement on Motorway Patrol immensely but I often wondered, why make a show like this? People have been telling stories about crime since the campfire days. Crime and law enforcement stories are the ultimate vessel for danger and heroism. So why show the ordinary side? Why did Motorway Patrol exist?

Well, firstly people can relate to it. Most of the crimes on the show are easily commitable. The drivers are over the limit, their licenses expired, their cars modified in slightly dodgy ways. These aren’t hardened criminals. They are our neighbours and friends. We empathise with them. The producer of the program Tash Christie suggests “There is something quintessentially Kiwi about Motor Patrol. People identify with the stories, the characters… and the excuses”. Australians too can easily identify. It’s a “there but for the grace of God go I- two beers and ten kms/h over the limit” kind of situation.

Secondly the show humanizes the police men and women it follows. Here in Australia our own reality police programs venerate our cops. They are everyday heroes with authoritative voices who deal with those in breach of the law with a heavy and solemn hand. This extends to our media portrayal of Customs officers and even surf lifesavers, who take a zero tolerance approach to those bringing bags of peanuts from Iran or those who can’t swim well. Authority, in Australia, is nothing to be taken lightly. Motorway Patrol refreshingly made no such pretense. 

It may seem like a slightly dangerous route to take, stripping the police of their clout, but when most of the problems on the show arose from citizens being needlessly uncooperative due to uncertainty or fear, perhaps this humanization of cops is a strategic move. The motto of the New Zealand Police is “safer communities together” and Motorway Patrol may have played a part in actually seeing this aim come to fruition.

In terms of television appreciation too it’s a welcome approach. There is something fairly insulting about seeing an RBT dressed up in dramatic music, graphics, and voice over. We can see through it. Motorway Patrol is honest and very entertaining and I hope we can look forward to its reintroduction to Australian screens soon. 

Also worth a mention is Police Ten 7, a cousin program to Motorway Patrol, which spawned this internet hit a while back. Oh New Zealand. I want to be in you.