I have boiled it down to this demo. TAP::Harness looks like the best driver and it has a callback that lets me get at the parser before it would otherwise be used. Silencing the harness means that it never gets to find out that its parsers have been drained. 
use TAP::Harness;

my $harness = TAP::Harness->new( { verbosity => -3, merge => 1 }  );
my @tests = glob "t/*.t";

$harness->callback( made_parser => \&hijack_parser );
$harness->runtests( @tests );

sub hijack_parser
{
  my ($parser, $test_ref) = @_;
  while ( my $result = $parser->next )
  {
    $result->is_test or next;
    $result->is_actual_ok and next;
    (my $description = $result->description) =~ s/- //;
    print "I seem to have failed $description in $test_ref->[1]\n";
  }
}

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Peter Scott
Perl Medic

In reply to Re^3: Intercepting TAP output by peters
in thread Intercepting TAP output by peters

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