Can we quite believe what happened to Top Gear? When I was growing up, this was a motoring show, about cars, hidden in plain sight on BBC2.
Angela Rippon and William Woollard presented it. They tested new cars. They talked about brake linings. It was the Volvo of TV magazine programmes: solid, effective, unexciting. Then, in 2001, it took a year off. BBC2 “rested” it.
And when it returned, it was entirely different: a manic, energetic, often very funny show presented by three middle-aged men who had never grown up and didn’t care who knew it.
It was still about cars – just about – but any pretence that this was a “factual” programme had been pretty much abandoned. This was entertainment in the fast lane.
Slowly, Top Gear took over the world.
Richard Porter was script editor for all 22 series of the Clarkson-May-Hammond hegemony. He was young, funny and obsessed with cars, and it’s reasonable to assume he is still most of those things.
It was he who sat in the office every Tuesday with the three presenters, hammering out what passed for a script, and came up with all those daft ideas.
For instance, Star In A Reasonably Priced Car was dreamt up purely because they found the idea of British pop star Bryan Ferry driving a Vauxhall Astra incredibly funny. They imagined him doing it in a dinner jacket, acting suave, but looking ridiculous.
In the event, stars of the magnitude of Tom Cruise and Sir Patrick Stewart signed up to do the feature, but Ferry never did. One wonders whether they even got round to asking him.
The book is subtitled Inside The Madness And Genius Of Top Gear. I’m not sure about “genius”, but madness is well represented here.
Like many TV shows, the fact that it got made at all seems a miracle. The men responsible are talented but mercurial, prone to last-minute changes of mind – but I think we knew that from having watched it.
It would almost be disappointing to discover that something that looks as though it’s going to collapse at any moment is actually very controlled and thought out.
The anarchy, it turns out, is real.
We should not underestimate the sheer effectiveness of the presenting trio. James May only came on to the show in the second year, and the chemistry developed from there. “James bonded with Richard Hammond over their mutual love of many things, including old cars and interesting motorcycles. He bonded with Jeremy over their mutual dislike of many things, including golf and people who say ‘myself’ when they mean ‘me’.”
Porter has some great stories to tell, and he does so in a zingy, puppyish style.
He describes the team’s day-long brainstorming sessions, which were generally dominated by Clarkson’s voice.
“Finally, some time in the late afternoon… Jeremy appeared to have grown tired of speaking.
“He turned to James, lounging on a sofa in the manner of a man daydreaming about old motorcycles. Jeremy asked him whether he had any ideas to discuss. ‘Well, yes,’ said May. ‘I was wondering if we could get a dog…’ Never has a room been in such instant and unanimous agreement… Why shouldn’t Top Gear have a dog?’
Which explains why they had a dog for a while. I had wondered.
Unfortunately, she wasn’t the most suitable kind of dog as she hated being in cars and, as soon as you put her in front of a camera, she fell asleep. “Like a lot of things on Top Gear, it seemed like a good idea right up until the moment when we realised it wasn’t.”
Porter writes about the end of the show with some sadness. He’s clearly angry with Clarkson for lamping one of the producers and getting the boot, because this single act of foolishness effectively ended the party for everybody.
I have to admit I admire Porter’s honesty. It would have been all too easy to make an excuse for the old bully, but it obviously never even occurred to him to do so.
You also come to realise that the sheer pressure of making a show this popular must have become close to intolerable for everyone concerned. I can’t imagine that its triumphant, 13-year run will have a finer chronicler.
Daily Mail