Set aside your prejudices for a moment and consider the facts. Can you think of a potentially funnier 15 minutes of TV than an effort to convert three cars into amphibious vehicles and sail them across the Channel? Can you think of a more touchingly Sisyphean task than asking a group of rocket enthusiasts to turn a Reliant Robin into a space shuttle?
It seems to have become received wisdom that the first post-Jeremy Clarkson series of Top Gear failed because of its presenters. Chris Evans continues to maintain he was a square peg in a round hole and that Matt LeBlanc should drive the show on its next outing. Yes, the presenters were part of the problem, but they weren’t the biggest issue, which was the fact that Top Gear stopped being fun. This season’s stunts – that interminable South African trip, LeBlanc being whizzed round London in a high-speed car and so on – were dull. They were about cars rather than the limits of middle-aged human endeavour.
Old Top Gear thrived not because viewers trusted Clarkson’s judgment on a particular sports car more than Evans’s (though they probably did), but because its presenters were happy to have indignity heaped upon them. They knew that the single most important thing about their stunts was not that they have any purpose, but that they be funny. The results, as this four-DVD set shows, were frequently hilarious.
The amphibious car sequence, in which Clarkson managed to pilot a converted truck from Dover to Calais, is justifiably lauded. Funnier still is the challenge in which the trio were told to convert everyday street cars into limos and then ferry VIPs to the Brit Awards: singer Lemar’s fury as James May signally fails to work out a route to Earl’s Court is clearly genuine, as is Jamelia’s embarrassment at the contraption she’s expected to ride in with Richard Hammond. And the episode where the three of them build an electric car – the world’s slowest, unwieldiest, unsafest electric car – and bring central Oxford to a standstill is magnificent.
Top Gear’s genius, like all great programmes, lay not in the chemistry between its presenters, nor the fancy filming techniques, but in the ideas its team had: ideas that had never occurred to anyone else, or had been dismissed as too stupid or impractical. The best were those that combined a Heath Robinsonesque flair for potting shed invention (basically converting an ordinary car into something else, usually daft) with the three stars’ evident joy in doing such ridiculous things.
These segments were where James May came into his own. There was always a passion for engineering in May that was never evident in the other two, who were keen to dismiss his spoddishness. And it was May who took the challenges to their logical extremes, in his series James May’s Toy Stories, where he would do things like try to fly a toy plane 20 miles up the Bristol Channel. Those shows ended up being moving pieces of TV and, though Top Gear always shied away from anything so poncey as emotion, there were times – as on the Reliant Robin space shuttle challenge – where the presenters were evidently overwhelmed with the preposterousness of what they had accomplished.
The longer old Top Gear carried on, the less inspiring the challenges became, which is inevitable when so many ideas have to be generated. In the final series, the only one that really matched the great days was the magnificently surreal build-your-own-ambulance task. But on these four discs – while you will have to sit through some segments that are very clearly just about cars, and therefore not all that interesting – you also get some of the best British comedy of the past 20 years.
