I won’t begin this by saying “I was never a fan of Top Gear”
as that would be an outright lie. There was a time in my teenage years when the
three erstwhile poster boys of the best automotive show the BBC had produced
since Brum took it upon themselves to go caravanning.
I am not ashamed to say that some of the happiest days of my
youth were spent on caravan holidays, so while there was a certain innocence
lost in having three middle-aged men lambaste the past-time, there was a
twisted pleasure gained from it also.
Seeing the more mundane facets of caravan holidays brought
to light by the rapier-wit of Clarkson et al. combined a sense of wild,
anarchic abandon with the air of legitimacy that the BBC logo provided (in the
early 2000’s, at least) spoke to my young, sponge-like mind.
It also made me feel like ‘a man’.
Much like beer and football, the testosterone laced scent of
petrol was a love that was, and still is, inaccessible to me. To a boy still
making his first-tentative steps into la vie puberté, anything that I could
genuinely enjoy while conforming to gender stereotypes, reassuring myself that
‘I was normal after all, thank Christ’ was a must-have, and I think that was
part of the core appeal of Top Gear; it was about cars, but it wasn’t really.
Yeah, the boys talked about the latest Porsche and fired The
Stig around their race track in it, and any celebrity they had on talked about
cars, between plugging their newest rom-com/reality show/fragrance, and drove
another one around a race track; but they also dicked around a lot. They took
the aforementioned caravan on holiday and burnt it down, and raced to Edinburgh
on one tank of fuel, while getting into all sorts of hilarious scrapes along
the way, before returning to the studio for some affectionately harsh banter,
the likes of which previous generations could only digest in rugby team
clubhouses or from reading tabloid headlines.
The whole thing was very easy to watch, while making people
feel they knew about cars as they enjoyed a cheeky laugh at some topical barb
delivered in the patented Clarkson intonation.
At least that’s what drew me to the show. Whether or not
that was the case for the countless other men, women and children who tuned in
is anyone’s guess.
But somewhere along the road, I found myself slipping away
from this comforting reassurance of my masculinity. I got a part time job
meaning I was out of the house on Sunday nights and missed new episodes, and
realised that I couldn’t be bothered catching up on the iPlayer or BBC3 (God
rest it’s bloated carcass). On the frequent occasions in my undergraduate days
when I caught a repeat on Dave, I found that each episode was just as ‘same-y’
as the last, and the friendly three-way banter seemed more blatantly scripted
than I remembered. The show had grown stale over the years and, to me, was
worth little more than a pleasant distraction during lunch.
Top Gear and I parted ways, not with a bang, but with a
whimper.
The same, however, cannot be said for the parting of the
show and Jeremy ‘Feed Me Or I’ll Bloody Well Thump You’ Clarkson.
Enough’s been said about ‘Fracas-gate’ already, so I’ll not
discuss it anymore than asserting that Auntie Beeb was right to get rid of JC,
for physically assaulting a member of the crew, even if he hadn’t been on his
‘final warning’ for various un-PC comments he’d made on the show.
Following the scandal, and the announcement that the show
would continue sans The Three Amigos, I don’t mind telling you that I raised a
cautiously intrigued eyebrow. Could the show retain the same spirit that made
Top Gear so popular but do what, quite frankly, needed to be done a long time
ago, by changing the format and making it relevant again?
No. No it couldn’t.
I tuned in last night while attempting to affect the curious
and nimble mind of my younger self, in the hope that the show would be, well,
interesting. And they failed spectacularly.
Now if you were one of the countless devotees of Top Gear
right up until the end times, you may be pleased to know that the format is
largely unchanged, and you’ll still get the same, scripted light entertainment
for an hour, structured around celebrities and tame racing drivers zooming
round a track and the weekly event-spectacle pitting host against host, but
this time with a series of minor (read: insignificant) aesthetic changes.
For me however, we’ve merely kept the same old dirty
bathwater while throwing out the somewhat-attention-grabbing baby that was the
perpetual risk of Clarkson dropping the word ‘coloured’ in somewhere.
That baby’s been replaced with Chris Evans.
Stewart Lee once described Jeremy Clarkson as a violent thug
pummeling BBC viewers’ faces in the weekly Happy Slap that was Top Gear while
Richard Hammond was his weasel-like sidekick who laughed along and held the
camera phone.
Chris Evans is what we’d get if we forcibly let Hammond of
Jeremy’s leash, gave him a Clockwork Orange-esque rehabilitation with old VHS
tapes of Live And Kicking, and slapped a ginger wig on him.
Not only is he so squeaky-clean as to be maddening, but he
seems to be eternally torn between manically jumping around screaming ‘Woohoo!’
in a vain attempt at hyping the audience, and imitating Godfather Jeremy’s
winning speech patterns.
Matt LeBlanc did a decent job, however. Anyone who’s seen
even one or two installments of the sitcom Episodes will have some confidence
in his post-Joey appeal, and he genuinely seems to bring something different to
the show. Unfortunately, I doubt that will be enough to help old fans get past
the insufferable juggernaut that is Chris Evans.
To add a final cherry to the bland, hollowed out cake that
was this week’s episode, there were a few ‘Classically Top Gear’ cheeky nudges
and winks to the topical scandal surrounding the show (including one ill-judged
moment of, once again, blatantly scripted audience participation) that I
suspect will only serve to turn the kids against their new step-dad right from
the starting line.
So that’s it. Top Gear’s back, but not as you know it, but
kind-of-exactly how you know it.
Long may it continue (at least until the inevitable
shuffle/restructuring of the format/hosts that will inevitably come in the next
couple of years when the producers aren’t completely satisfied with the
performance of this bold new approach).
See you all in the Autumn when I tear apart Amazon Prime’s
The Grand Tour for being nothing more than a soapbox for Clarkson while he
dicks around in cars in a slightly different way than he used to. While Hammond
laughs along and holds the camera phone.
-Kyle
