The Jeremy Clarkson debacle is what Top Gear needed

THIS IS a wonderful time for Top Gear.

Over the past few weeks it’s almost been impossible to visit the loo without someone venturing an opinion on what Jeremy Clarkson did or didn’t do in a North Yorkshire hotel, which is why – until now – I've refrained from weighing in with mine.

Watching the whole Jeremy Clarkson thing unfold has been like watching – perhaps aptly – a car crash in slow motion, made all the worse by the fact I’ve grown up alongside his televisual career. So standing on the edge of the huge abyss his sacking has ripped through the motoring landscape has been like seeing a close relative getting nicked.

It's made worse - especially for the BBC - by the fact there is no clear cut answer. As at least one Champion colleague pointed out, to defend Jeremy would be to defend someone who punches a colleague at work. To agree with casting out would be to disagree with Top Gear's army of fans and to rob the Beeb of one of its biggest stars.

The Corporation has made the only call it realistically could, but it's a sorry end for Jeremy's long career there, A career that not only included some brilliant Top Gear moments, but the wonderfully nostalgic Clarkson's Car Years, the tongue-in-cheek Jeremy Clarkson Meets The Neighbours and the passionate case he made for Brunel to be recognised as Britain's greatest person.

  

Jeremy looks back at the Lamborghini Countach in Clarkson's Car Years back in 2000

I spent my childhood watching the fuzzy-haired progenitor of dodgy faded denim carefully crafting his metaphors on Motorworld. I laughed when his description of how the Ford Probe was so good looking it could snap knicker elastic earned him a mention on Points of View, and yes, I remember the ripples of derision his televised destruction of the Vauxhall Vectra sent through the motoring world back in 1995. Clarkson, both back in the Nineties when I got hooked on Top Gear and in his mega successful Noughties incarnation, is still compulsive viewing.

Yet everyone who loves Top Gear – and that includes you – will be just fine, because the show’s now been forced into the rethink nobody was prepared to admit it needed.

Top Gear of right now reminds me of Roger Moore donning a space suit in Moonraker – it was brilliant in parts, but proof positive that bigger budget doesn’t always bring better results. Stung by the criticism of a Bond film that tried – and failed – to mimic Star Wars, the producers went back to basics and came back two years later with the excellent For Your Eyes Only.

The BBC – as Doctor Who, Have I Got News For You and, erm, a 2002 series called Top Gear prove – is brilliant at rescuing hit shows from the brink and making them brilliant again. As much as it hurts to admit it, Jeremy Clarkson and Top Gear are not one and the same. Now is the opportunity to reboot it and get back to the basics of the show. The cars.

Jeremy's infamous 1995 Top Gear road test of the Vauxhall Vectra

For all the punches, BBC inquiries, sackings, death threats, wild speculation and newspaper columnists seriously suggesting Piers Morgan should be at the helm of the word’s biggest motoring show despite having no experience of car reviewing, everyone will be fine.

Jeremy will be fine because he’ll either retire and enjoy the contents of his garage or find an equally lucrative job. Top Gear will be fine because the Beeb’s best brains are already onto the job, and you’ll be fine because in the long run you’re not going to deprived of motoring telly.

In fact, the only people who lose are The Daily Mail because they’ll have lost something to irritate the public about. Result!

Clarkson column splits opinion

PERHAPS not unsurprisingly, last week's article about the Jeremy Clarkson N-word row has prompted some pretty strong reactions.

The piece, defending the Top Gear presenter over a clip which was never actually broadcast in its controversial form in the first place, has neatly divided Life On Cars readers between those who think he's some sort of automotive Ron Atkinson and those who think his apology was heartfelt and that he deserved to keep his job at the helm of the world's most-widely watched motoring show.

John Kade was one of the readers who got in touch after reading my piece in last week's Champion, and wrote: 

"Firstly can I say that I found this very offensive. Does Mr Simister know Jeremy personally, his article also falls short of describing how indecent Mr Clarkson's behaviour was. It appears that Mr Simister is minimising Mr Clarkson's behaviour. How many celebrities have lost their jobs in broadcasting due to this sort of clandestine racism? After all Jeremy Clarkson is in the public eye and arena, his behaviour should reflect that."


However, I also had plenty of readers lining up to agree with the article, including fellow Champion columnist Jim Sharpe, who wrote not a letter, but an entire column of his own on the subject:

I appreciate it's a hugely sensitive subject, but it's good to see that Jeremy appears to be getting on with what he does best - filming a new series of Top Gear, which I'm really looking forward to. Whichever side of the fence you're on, however, it's clear that the whole saga has prompted some strongly-worded feedback.  


Then again, that's nothing compared to the letter I had earlier today, entitled simply David Simister is an idiot and knows nothing, in which one reader questions my right to be a motoring journalist simply because I think Giorgetto Giugiaro made the Daewoo Matiz far more interesting than it could have been.

Each to their own, and all that...

Top Gear - due back on your screens on January 27

WORD from the Beeb is that the world's most watched bit of motoring telly is due back on our screens later this month.

There's been a bit of a Top Gear vacuum on our screens lately, most noticeably when over Christmas the TV schedules had plenty for fans of Eastenders, Downton Abbey and Miranda but not much for anyone looking for the petrolhead's usual Yuletide helping of three middle aged blokes breaking down in the middle of nowhere. To be fair, the excellent World's Most Dangerous Roads has made a bit of low key comeback but Top Gear, perhaps stung by criticism of last year's India special, was nowhere to be seen.

Until this weekend, when Auntie announced the show would be back on Sunday, January 27.

From what the official online preview suggests it looks set to be a belting season packed with the trio's usual blend of speed, seriousness, silliness and, er, Stig-ness, with a not-at-all-delayed Christmas special featuring the Aston Martin Vanquish, the Lexus L-FA and Dodge Viper on a trip to Mexico, somewhere where the show has plenty of fans.

It's not as if the trio haven't been idly doing nothing since the last series finished way back in March of last year, with Richard Hammond treating us to a rundown of James Bond's cars last October, and Jeremy Clarkson and James May bringing out the brilliantly funny Worst Car In The History of the World special on DVD, but the return of a new, full series looks set to be a bit of a treat.

Can't wait...

Happy tenth birthday* Top Gear!

MANY happy returns, Britain’s most watched motoring TV show. Many have tried to better your three-blokes-and-a-Stig format, but nobody’s really managed it.

Even though I was naive, 16-year-old college student at the time I remember that first programme of the reinvented Top Gear like it been shown yesterday rather than October 20, 2002. What I remember most of all was not being particularly bowled over by the studio, sparsely populated by members of the Subaru Owners’ Club, the tedious piece talking the viewers through their new track, and by Jason Dawe, who despite being a likeable bloke with a lot of knowledge on used cars never seemed to suit presenting the revamped show. No wonder he was quietly dropped after a single series.

But the calls by Jeremy Clarkson and Andy Wilman to give Top Gear an overhaul were well justified. Old Top Gear, as it’s now called, had slowly evolved from the dry, technical show of William Woollard’s day into a thoroughly entertaining thirty minutes of Thursday night telly. Even though I’ve always maintained it was the triple whammy of Tiff Needell’s balletic oversteer routines, Quentin Willson’s caustic commentary and Jeremy Clarkson’s genius quips, in terms of mass appeal it was Jezza who made Top Gear in the Nineties so watchable, and the drop in ratings after he pulled out in 1999 proved it. By the time the original was “rested” in 2001 it was regularly being beaten in the ratings by Channel 4’s excellent and much-missed Driven.

Top Gear of course, is a very different beast these days;  three knowledgeable petrol heads with a genuine on-screen chemistry, packed-out studios with waiting lists which run into years, the enigma of the Stig and some genuinely brilliant production values and novel scripting have made it into unmissable television not just for car lovers, but their long-suffering other halves too. Admittedly, even I get annoyed when it strays into the slapstick – like that caravanning piece, for instance – but the point is it’s memorable and put together by people who have a passion for the subject.

The pieces which have made me cringe are more than outweighed by the dozens of great pieces of film-making they’ve put together. Take the Aston Martin racing the TGV across France, for instance. Or Jeremy’s poignant Senna tribute. Or any of the lovely classic car pieces James used to do (more, please!). Or my favourite Top Gear film to date – the wonderfully funny and spectacularly unsucessful efforts to buy a mid-engined supercar for less than £10,000. All pieces which highlight exactly why TG deserves its place in the primetime Sunday night slot.

What Top Gear has left though – and I’ve said it before – is a gap, a void in motoring telly where the old Top Gear, with its enforced diet of sensible reviews of superminis and used car buying guides, used to sit in the schedules. Even though Driven was dropped shortly after Top Gear’s introduction many have tried; many of the old Top Gear crew went onto Fifth Gear, which is still entertaining largely for Tiff’s reviews but has increasingly tried – and failed – to mimic the Beeb’s format. Sky’s The Petrol Age had a scholarly feel to it and a great presenter in Paul McGann, but still felt a little too inaccessible for non-petrolheads just wanted straightforward pieces on cars old and new, while Five’s latest effort, Classic Car Rescue, has been given an absolute pasting for its obviously scripted performances. Top Gear, meanwhile, has pretty much the entire population divided; everybody either loves it or hates it, but all of them, without exception, are familiar with it.

So long live Top Gear, and kudos to the first production company who comes up with the first genuinely enjoyable car show to fill the gap it left.

*Top Gear actually celebrated its tenth birthday yesterday, but what's a day between friends?

A Life On Cars guide to petrolhead Christmas presents

AS THE final bits of tinsel went up in The Champion office it dawned on me that it's December and Christmas is upon us. Mince pies, mulled wine, sleigh bells and Band Aid are back firmly on the festive menu.

The only problem is that I'm a petrolhead and - if you're reading this column, so are you - which means running the risk of getting a petrolhead present from a non-petrolhead partner, mum or mate down the pub. Which this year will almost certainly be , the latest in a long line of Jeremy Clarkson DVDs. It is the default Christmas gift if you know someone who likes their cars.

I haven't seen Powered Up yet but I've seen all of the fifteen or so DVDs and videos which preceded it, which have each ended up on my shelf after someone bought it me as a Christmas present. I can therefore safely bet this month's salary that Powered Up will contain the following; a race between some shiny new supercars, an appearance by The Stig, an unloved old car getting destroyed in a new and novel way and an analogy which winds up at least one celebrity. It is Police Academy 7 following Police Academy 6.

You could, of course, get the petrolhead in your life something for Christmas which isn't Clarkson's DVD; how about, for instance, a Land Rover branded lambswool wrap? Or a set of BMW-branded Bluetooth earphones? Or the oldest festive favourite of all, a Ferrari-branded baseball cap? There is no more surefire way of letting people passing you in the street know that you can't afford the car you're advertising at your own expense. Car-branded gifts are not cool. Don't do it.

If you really are stuck for Christmas ideas for the car nut in your family or group of friends then I'll happily suggest any of the following; a track day package, a day's off-roading tuition, a year's subscription to a decent car mag, a glossily-produced coffee table book on your car bore's marque of choice, an artwork from the Steve McQueen or Michael Caine movie of your choice or - if you're really desperate - one of those car care kits available from any department store worth their salt.

I await my DVD-shaped Christmas present from Santa later this month...

Live On Cars

I’M A young Jeremy Clarkson in the making.

At least that’s according to Martin Hovden, who presents the Live From Studio One show at Southport-based radio station Dune FM, where I was invited to talk not just Life On Cars, but live on cars.

Among the highlights was having to defend my Mini live on air, explain why the worst cars you can buy today are the boring ones, and profess my love of Jags, Astons, and TVRs.

I’ll upload the broadcast properly as soon as I get it, but for the next seven days you can hear it on Dune FM’s website by visiting the Dune On Demand section and clicking “Martin Hovden – Live From Studio One”.

You’ll enjoy it. Honest.

Endings...

DID anyone see the ending of last night’s episode of Top Gear?

Stunning scenery, Aston’s new V12 Vantage and gloriously open roads were always going to make for a great combination but it was sad to see Jeremy Clarkson declare that motoring as we know it is “coming to an ending.”

As a lifelong Top Gear fan I respect his views enormously but I really wish he wouldn’t leave us with a life of gridlock and speed cameras to look forward to.

Brighten up, mate!