DISCLAIMER: I wrote this post a while ago and since then the Top Gear Trio and head producer signed a deal with Amazon to make their own TV Show which I can’t wait to see. In the meantime though…
There is a palpable sense of loss when something you know, love, have come to appreciate, admire and respect is suddenly and ruthlessly taken away from you in a blink of an eye. Gone, zilch, kaputz, sayonara. That sense hit home when with a swing of his fist in a fit of immature and apish aggression a man better known as “the orangutan” sent the most widely watched factual television program in the world, and my guilty pleasure, careening off the road over a cliff and into a massive fireball from which there was no recovery. The show that made every petrolhead’s wildest and zaniest dreams come true was totaled.
To say that I liked Top Gear would be an understatement. I didn’t just watch Top Gear once, have a good laugh and then move onto the next show. I watched all 22 seasons……. THREE times, back to back to back during college. I watched it before going to bed, while cooking, while doing homework, while studying, pretty much whenever I wasn’t sleeping.
There are a variety factors that could have led Mr. Clarkson to punch producer Oisin Tymon in the face, from the less than ideal filming conditions to the sub par plate of cold cuts he was served for dinner. However the fact of the matter is that Jeremey Clarkson broke the playground rule everyone’s mother tells them when they are growing up; use your words not your fists.
While the punch alone was not the knockout blow for the show, Clarkson’s eventual sacking because of the incident and Hammond and May’s refusal to resign with the BBC spells the end of Top Gear as we know it, for without the trio of Clarkson, Hammond, and May there is no Top Gear. The show had worked for 22 seasons because of the natural and unbridled chemistry between the three presenters. If someone could bottle that chemistry and reproduce it, they would strike television gold. Each season their antics would grow, thanks largely in part to the show’s budget which grew exponentially. Before you knew it they were racing a Bugatti Veyron against the Royal Air Force and driving to the North Pole in a Toyota pickup truck.
Those days are now gone and only the top brass at the BBC knows what the future holds for the new Top Gear. As for our beloved trio, yes the jokes were starting to get a little stale, the competition between the three a bit more predictable, and short of driving through North Korea, the world was running out of roads for them to leave their tire marks on. None the less I will always miss settling down on a Sunday evening to watch the latest episode of that pokey little motoring show on BBC2. As James May would say:
justanotherbrownguy 