Top Gear: the viewers love it as much as those who make it. Photograph: BBC
The question I get asked most often is: "But if you watch telly for work, what do you watch for fun?" Fun. Hmm. It's a tricky word in the context of TV. I'm not sure I've had much TV fun since the demise of SMTV, which finished when I was in my late 30s, so I can't complain - I'd had a pretty good run. I can't stomach too much organised TV fun, even in the name of charidee - Children in Need, this week's Red Nose do, any sort of royal anniversary/birthday/wedding at which the Queen always looks as if she'd rather be shooting something, possibly members of her own family.
Chat shows, panel shows and quizzes always look like they're probably more fun if you're on them than in front of them, while all those Saturday night dance-, sing- and skate-athons are too fiercely competitive to qualify as fun. And the big reality shows (Big Brother, I'm A Celebrity, the all new sunny Castaway) are only fun if your favourite word is schadenfreude.
To my mind, TV is the most fun when viewers clearly enjoy it as much as the people who make it. Which is probably why Top Gear - nominally about cars but mostly about men taking the piss out of each other relentlessly, lovingly, in new and amusing ways - is BBC2's highest-rated programme.
Not so long ago, Top Gear really was about the cars: full of test-drives and torque and testosterone. You tuned in, guiltily, for all the shiny metal and the vicarious thrill of watching someone else drive a supercar round a track. If you were of a certain bent, you might even enjoy Jeremy Clarkson's patented telly-bloke persona, which is now taught in, ooh, tens of universities, on the I Want To Drive Fast Cars and Write Bestsellers Too media studies course.
But since the Hamster became a Heat magazine pin-up, shortly before he ate the tarmac and reminded us that cars are a bit dangerous, and James May emerged from under his own hair to reveal a personality (of sorts) that has made him the thinking woman's Top Gear presenter (not much competition there), and it stopped being all about Jeremy and became merely mostly about Jeremy, it's been, well, fun. And bugger the carbon footprint.
Last week's stretch-limo competition made both me and the other person on the sofa laugh out loud, a lot. Which is just one of the reasons why, if Messrs Hamster, May and Clarkson don't collectively win Presenter of The Year at the Royal Television Society's Programme Awards this Tuesday night (sorry fellow nominees Bruce Parry and Gordon Ramsay, but it's a no-brainer), I will eat my Audi.
