Ooo, it’s bad. I refer, of course, to the new series of Top Gear (BBC Two, Sundays, 9pm) – rebooted because the former presenter, Jeremy Clarkson, punched a producer.
When the show started way back in the 1970s – co-hosted, surprisingly, by Angela Rippon – Top Gear was a consumer affairs programme. Under Jeremy Clarkson it morphed into the Jeremy Clarkson Show, to the point where it became about watching other people have fun at the licence payer’s expense. The average viewer can’t afford a £200,000 Lotus, will never have a chance to drive at 170mph and can never hope to go off-road in Argentina.
So why tune in to watch Jezza cruise his ample frame around the Golan Heights in a Ford Capri? Because he’d liven things up by being rude about the French. The girls, the guts, the xenophobic prejudice: old Top Gear was a political broadcast by the Middle Aged Men’s Party.
And it’s only when Clarkson and his menopausal mates are gone that we realise how talented they actually were – how brilliantly they convinced the viewer that they were bombing along beside them in the passenger seat. In their place are Chris Evans and Matt LeBlanc. LeBlanc is charming. Evans is grindingly PC. He bounces about the set as if he’s hosting a kid’s show. Humour and wit are gone, replaced with an artificial kind of “Golly, what might happen next?!” banter that’s about as hard-edged as a vicar’s sermon.
With Clarkson et al, you felt as if you’d been invited to join the lads for a cheeky pint after closing time. This felt more like someone had sneaked a bottle of alcopops into a Christian rock concert.
There’s a case for saying that the BBC was damned if it did or if damned it didn’t, that revolutionising the format would lose viewers while going with a tried and tested one was bound to invite unfavourable comparisons. And didn’t Jezza have to go because he hit an employee? Maybe. But the new Top Gear proves that you can still sell a magic lamp even after you’ve squeezed out the genie.
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