This post is going to be about Top Gear, just to warn you in advance. If you’re one of the many people offended by anything the lads have said recently then don’t expect more ammo from my direction; you’ll have to scour the headlines for something else to upset you… preferably something you had no prior knowledge of, and therefore emotional investment in. That’ll let you get good and angry with no consequences, you’ll like that.
I’m an avid Top Gear fan, and by avid I mean I can provide a voiceover to more or less any episode from the last 15 series since the 2002 relaunch. I never miss an oportunity to watch a repeated favourite, and have often thought that this programme alone justifies my license fee. The more observant among you will be bouncing in your chairs and pointing out that we’re now on series 16 so I’ve missed one – HA!, so much for avid! Not so, and that’s where we begin.
There are plenty of pro/anti TG arguments floating around, many of them not worth the pixels they’re displayed on, but there’s a growing undercurrent among hardcore fans along the lines of ‘it’s not like it used to be’. This is usually a hipster-esque tactic to tell everyone you were there first and thereby attempt to gain some sort of geeky high ground, but it’s rare that cogent and persuasive examples are provided. Tonight’s episode of TG finally brought forth a perfect illustration of where I believe things are going wrong.
Lets look at a classic car challenge from the TG archives – a bona-fide classic and on my ‘must watch’ list when perusing Dave: Italian supercars for less than £10k
Now, this was a gem. We’d all wondered if buying a supercar for Mondeo money was actually possible or just the preserve of pub bores. The lads ended up with a Lamborghini Urraco, a Ferrari 308 GT4 and a not entirely kosher Maserati Merak, and set about a series of everyday challenges:
- Change the oil and plugs
- Drive a set distance on a fixed amount of fuel, avoiding motorways
- A lap of a racing track against a boring modern hatchback
- A dyno test to see how much power had escaped from each car over time
- An attempt to parallel park in a town centre
- Try to get the lowest insurance quote
- Experience the least number of breakdowns
This was a fantastic opportunity for petrolheads to live out their idle ownership fantasies whilst avoiding the associated chaos. We really wanted the cars to work, and were entertained when they refused to do so despite the best efforts of the presenters. It boiled down to three mates larking about in ill-advised Italian nightmares, and having exactly the sort of fun any of us would experience in trying to make a good job out of an obviously bad one. Most of the classic TG cheap car challenges fell into this mould, with the focus resting on how cars and petrolheads gel, and the experiences that arise naturally from doing so.
Now lets look at the cheap car challenge in this episode – buying BWM E30 convertibles, specifically the 325. The challenges this time were
- Drive a lap of the track, setting a time relative to the car’s modern equivalent
- Ask car thieves to break into them
- Swab them for bodily substances
- Fill them with helium to see if your voice goes funny
- Get them examined by the BMW owners club to ascertain the cost of a full restoration
- Attempt to use them in a stunt display that ends in a slapstick crash after ten seconds
It’s pretty clear where things are going astray. The cars aren’t important, and play second fiddle to gags that simply aren’t funny. There’s none of the wonderful triumph (or not) in the face of adversity that we know and love, and it feels like the interplay between the presenters is a device to lead to the next set-piece. The E30 is considered to be a great drivers car and one that I’m sure many viewers would love to see driven properly, but instead we got slapstick and cheap laughs.
It’s not the first time this series that we’ve seen this. The murdered Albanian, the plummeting VW Beetle, the fatuous ‘serious’ road test of the Yeti that’s now stretching the joke way too far. Even the news features feel less like a bunch of mates talking shop, and more like out of season filler for Comedy Central. We don’t care about any of that nonsense, but we DO care about feeling like those three guys on screen are just like us where we get together and swap stories about our latest nightmarish acquisition.
Top Gear has protected its position for years by explaining that it’s an entertainment show that happens to be about cars, and that was a shrewd move in the burgeoning anti-car climate we’ve suffered recently. The thing is, we all knew it was really a programme about cars that was only entertaining because it’s hard not to be entertained by watching people indulging in their passion, for better or worse. I have the horrible feeling that the boys are now buying into this line a bit too much, and fancy themselves as comedy writers… which they’re not. Top Gear may attract a serious number of people who simply watch it to be entertained, but if the petrolheads are turned off, and consequently DO turn off, then the remainder might not be as large as they’d hope.
The message is simple. Be yourselves, enjoy the cars and let the humour flow from that. It’s one thing to hold up a card saying BRAKE at the end of a straight, but another entirely to need one saying LAUGH at the end of a segment.
