The film has ended, and now the programme is about to end. That wasn’t very good, was it? Still, thanks for reading along. Will there be a Top Gear liveblog this time next week? God no. GOD NO. Bye.
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Is this running long? Do I have to punch myself in the face now? I’d better do it hard, because I’d give anything to be unconscious right about now.
This whole show feels like someone used the internet to translate Top Gear from English to Swahili and then back into English again. The intention is right but the execution is buggered beyond all belief.
Which is all well and good, except this is literally just a film of two people driving a car up a hill. Still no jokes, still no stakes, still no point.
I think I can see how this is working out now.
CHRIS EVANS: Good in the studio, rubbish in films.
MATT LEBLANC: Good in films, rubbish in the studio.
And now they’re driving their Jeeps up a hill.
More Twitter feedback, this time from a man who knows a thing or two about television programmes that experience dodgy recastings:
Not watching @BBC_TopGear. Never did tbh. All I know is @stuheritage is riding it rotten on @guardian live blog. Cant be THAT bad can it?
— Dominik Diamond (@DominikDiamond) May 29, 2016
This is a little better actually. The challenge is simple – Evans and LeBlanc just have to drive a Jeep as fast as they can – and this have given them room to lark around and needle each other and be competitive. It’s a seed – a tiny seed, an atom of a seed, a memory of an atom of a seed – of what this show might become when it loosens up and stops being so afraid of its own shadow. I know it isn’t much, but I’m clinging to this thought like nothing else.
Back to the Blackpool film. It’s about Jeeps now. Jeeps aren’t as funny as Robin Reliants, so this might not be entirely wonderful.
Remember on the TFI Friday comeback, when Chris Evans called the controller of Channel 4, asked for an extra half an hour of airtime and got it? If he tries this tonight, I’m going to punch myself in the teeth.
I wanted to like this.
Back to the show. After a film about Chris Evans driving around wildly and trying to avoid a laser gun, we’re now being treated to a film about Matt LeBlanc driving around wildly and trying to avoid a photographer. It’s the same idea, which seems like a huge mistake for a first episode.
Tomorrow: a film about Chris Evans and Matt LeBlanc driving around wildly and trying to avoid reviews.
Did you ever see the first episode of the last incarnation of Top Gear? It was rubbish. It was just as rubbish as this. Nobody knew what they were doing. James May wasn’t even in it. It took a full year for the last Top Gear to become Top Gear. So judging this new version on 43 minutes of footage seems colossally unfair. It’ll find its footing in time.
Still, this episode is still rubbish.
Right, all that’s happening now is that Matt LeBlanc is giving a fairly generic buyer’s guide about a car that nobody will ever buy. So permit me to play Devil’s Annoying Advocate for a moment.
Matt LeBlanc’s primary piece of criticism with the dune buggy is that it makes your legs wet if you drive it through a lake. I hate to be the one to point out that Matt LeBlanc could have saved himself a lot of trouble BY LOOKING AT IT FIRST, but I am the one pointing that out, so screw it.
Another film now: this time one where Matt LeBlanc tries to get inside a dune buggy with hilarious consequences.
I had a theory about New Top Gear going into it. I thought that it was missing a James May figure; someone to roll their eyes and slow things down and stop things from getting too silly. However, I was wrong. New Top Gear is ALL James May. I’d give anything for some silliness right now. Or, you know, a power cut.
I hate that this is making me miss Jeremy Clarkson.
Chris Evans cheers a car going around a corner.
Chris Evans cheers a car going through some water.
The Star in a Car track now has needless off-road sections and a tiny jump. Which, I think, makes it a little bit longer. Which, I think, is probably a bad thing.
If you like watching people you vaguely recognise from TV talking endlessly about cars you’ll never be able to afford, then this is amazing television. If you don’t, then New Top Gear is already singling itself out as a ‘Record and watch tomorrow morning, fast-forwarding through all the dull bits, in about 15 minutes’ programme.
Oh, hang on, no. It’s EXACTLY THE SAME. It’s still a ropey interview format that you’ll almost definitely skip if you watch this tomorrow on iPlayer. To be fair, there are two celebrities being interviewed this time; the classic, all-time legendary double-act of Gordon Ramsay and Jesse Eisenberg. So, again, that’s something.
It seems as if they’ve replaced Star In A Reasonably-Priced Car with a new feature called Star In A Rallycar. Which is good, because Star In A Reasonably-Priced Car was the worst part of the old incarnation of Top Gear, and the thing I disliked most about it was the relatively meagre price of the car they used.
This is so weird. It’s like a third-generation photocopy of a Top Gear Challenge film. The music is the same, the editing is the same, the entire look and feel of the whole thing is exactly the same. But it doesn’t have any jokes or stakes or knotty camaraderie or point. It’s empty calories, and now it’s finished.
“Delirium was beginning to take hold” says Chris Evans in the voiceover, after approximately two minutes of entirely event-free footage of two people driving cars on a road.
Oh, it’s OK. Here come the LOLs. Matt LeBlanc is wearing funny gloves now. That’s something, isn’t it?
Quick Twitter focus group:
@stuheritage It's just too painful. I don't think I can watch any more.
— Rhys Fowler (@rhysfowler) May 29, 2016
Maybe not hilarious consequences. They’re just driving the cars along a road, and sporadically going “Whee! OK buddy!” to each other in that slightly awkward way that strangers on stag nights after two pints.
Now for another film: Chris Evans and Matt LeBlanc drive two Robin Reliants to Blackpool, with hilarious consequences.
The Stig’s still part of Top Gear, apparently. And so are all the boring ‘Some say...’ introductions. He’s driving the blue car around the track, and it’s all meaningless really because no normal person is ever going to buy one, and what’s the point of it and what’s the point of anything?
Matt LeBlanc just had to say his first meaningful piece of dialogue, and it seemed as if he was reading it from a slightly too far away cuecard. He doesn’t seem like a natural at this.
I can’t remember which car won the challenge, by the way. The blue one, I think. MORAL: buy blue cars.
The film ends with Sabine’s passenger throwing up in a ditch. This is foreshadowing, since Chris Evans will do the same before long.
This has also got Sabine Whatsherface, the German racing driver who I most wanted to present Top Gear after Clarkson was fired, in it. And this means it’s automatically quite good, if samey and repetitive and already three minutes longer than it should have been.
Aha, a deviation! Now two cars have been mounted with laser guns, and they have to shoot each other on an airfield. It’s a deviation, but not an original one, because this is basically the premise of the late-1980s ITV gameshow The Interceptor, except with cars instead of terrified members of the public.
There’s still the sort of dreadful ‘This car is the best car ever made... except THIS ONE’ double bluff.
There’s still the sort of overly-dramatic music that sounds like it originally came from a part in a foreign film where a man watches his daughter get shot to death in the rain in slow motion.
It’s well shot. It’s got the same unearned swagger. It’s presented by a man in a car comparing stuff to stuff, then leaving a pause, then accelerating, then shouting. It is IDENTICAL.
Into the first film. It’s about a Dodge Viper. And it is identical to the old Top Gear films. I mean identical. It’s IDENTICAL.
Interesting. No big whooshy ‘look at us’ start. Just Evans running around and LeBlanc saying as little as possible. And... oh, no, wait, there’s already been a joke about Jeremy Clarkson punching people.
The theme-tune is intact! And Chris Evans is already doing a Jeremy Clarkson impression. He sounds like a child trying to buy cigarettes in a newsagent.
OK then, let’s get this over with.
Oh God, I just had a thought. What if they’ve screwed about with the theme-tune? What it’s be re-recorded by Kasabian? What if it’s just the 1997 version of Candle in the Wind played in its entirety? That would be awful.
Incidentally, let’s pass the time before the show starts with a random sampling of The Guardian’s Top Gear coverage from the last month:
Can Top Gear survive without Jeremy Clarkson?
Tara Conlan’s report from the recording of tonight’s episode
Something I haven’t read about Matt LeBlanc being an actual juggernaut, or something
Hello friends, and welcome to the Top Gear liveblog. ‘Why is The Guardian liveblogging Top Gear?’ you’re asking. ‘Isn’t this just going to be like that time they liveblogged an episode of Countdown?’
Well, yes. Yes it probably is. However, we’re liveblogging the first episode of the new Clarkson-free Top Gear because this is a proper Event. Anticipation and speculation about the new series has been at fever pitch for months now, and so it feels like this first episode will either be seen as a staggering success or a miserable career-ending failure for everyone involved. It will either be the best thing anyone has seen, or the very worst. Nothing in between So why is this liveblog here? Because we’re a bunch of grotesque rubberneckers, that’s why.
Still, I for one am excited. Secretly I didn’t always hate in its previous incarnation, I think Chris Evans can be capable of making exciting television and I’m interested to see what Matt LeBlanc is like as a host. This might be quite good. At the very least, it has to be better than that godawful TFI Friday comeback. I’ve cleaned up piles of animal vomit that were better than the TFI Friday comeback.
So join me in 30 minutes for what will either be a roar of triumph, a gleeful shoeing or – in the absolute worst case – a blunt description of a competent television programme. Can’t wait, can you?
