Turning Puntos into pimpmobiles

Dear Mister Xzibit. I'm the proud co-owner of a '97 Toyota Corolla which could do with a face-lift. The colour is Glasgow Rangers blue, the seat pattern is pretty wack, the stereo has never known better days, one of the window panels is Perspex, the windscreen wipers suck and there's a whole load of stuff in the boot (sorry, trunk) which needs to be sorted out. Er, could you please pimp my ride?

In the TV makeover world where bean-counters are transformed into Mediterranean guesthouse hosts and livingrooms in suburban semi-ds are va-va-voomed into art-deco monstrosities, there is nothing else like Pimp My Ride. The unlikeliest hit TV show on the box comes from the same MTV development stable which has given us the good (Cribs) and the bad (The Osbournes) of music-related reality TV.

What happens on the show is that run-of-the-mill, clapped-out and ugly bangers are turned into flash automobiles which cause mass rubbernecking on the streets and the gardaí to stop you for a gawk on the Cashel bypass.

Fronted by rapper Xzibit (an unlikely but fantastic TV host), Pimp My Ride follows the car's transformation from ugly duckling via the work of a bunch of Californian car-customisers into a motor most of us would regard as being on the ostentatious side of gaudy.

The bangers which Xzibit and his team select to refresh make some of the shoddy cars on Irish roads look like factory-fresh models by comparison. One kid called Kerry moved from Fargo, North Dakota to California in an '89 Ford Escort. Nothing wrong with that, except that his ride was actually two different '89 Escorts welded and glued together. A yoga teacher called Gaby was tootling around LA in a $200 Land Cruiser with no doors. Ezra's station-wagon was so confused that it sported two different logos, Nissan and Datsun.

All grist to Xzibit's mill. After sizing up the car, shaking his head a lot and cracking a couple of cheesy one-liners, Xzibit drives off in the lame car to West Coast Customs. There, a crack team come up with ridiculous ideas, get to work and transform your motor.

Every part of the car gets a makeover. How about adding DVD players, computers and flash heart-shaped brake lights? No problem! Big-ass wheels, a slick paint job and an interior which hurts your eyes? Take it away! The owner's name is Nile? Hey, how about a stream of water running down the middle of the back-seat of her car? You think I'm kidding? The cars which roll out of the West Coast Customs' yard bear little resemblance to the ones which staggered in. This is what you get when $25,000 worth of modifications are made to a car which you'd do well to sell for scrap. At Pimp My Ride, minimalism is a bad word.

Of course, anyone who's ever seen Cribs will be familiar with the rides which Xzibit and friends see as essential. No half-bit rapper or bass-playing nu-metal eejit is complete without a few tricked-out cars and vans parked in the garage. Pimp My Ride flips the script by customising cars whose owners could never afford to even daydream about such extravagant enhancements. No wonder the owners are so gleeful when they see their rejigged ride for the first time.

Best of all, it puts hot cars in the hands of people who will drive them every day of the week, spill tomato ketchup all over the new suede seats and get involved in a few altercations with clampers. Let's hope there's a follow-up show to find out how the owners fared with their new rides.

Whatever about driving those cars around Los Angeles, it goes without saying that some of those monsters wouldn't survive an hour's parking on quite a few streets around Dublin.

jimcarroll@irish-times.ie