Top Gear: how the BBC behemoth became car crash TV

You could reasonably argue – and many certainly would – that Top Gear’s big bitey fish never actually went unjumped. Once it had settled on its core presenting tripod of Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May in 2003, it simply was what it was: three old-enough-to-know-better men wanging on about cars.

From the off, Clarkson was a kind of bloviating Typhoid Mary of over-entitled Middle England, 50% highest-grade gammon, 50% the contents of Leo Sayer’s plughole. Hammond played the role of Clarkson’s cooing lackey, sides dutifully bursting asunder at his idol’s every bon mot, like a clammy whelp sucking up to the school bully to recuse himself from being bisected by atomic wedgies every breaktime. And May … well, May always seemed sort of all right, actually. Like a harmless, pottering, grey-muzzled old pooch whose primary contribution to the world is soft, hot farts.

TG’s reboot hit its sweet spot around the third series, the hosts by then comfortable enough in each other’s company to allow their personalities to tessellate into a televised diorama of feckless, middle-aged man(child)hood. Their easy chemistry made Gear a colossal hit – a 350 million viewers worldwide kind of hit – making a fusty magazine show about transport a universal family draw. It was silly, enjoyable nonsense: trips across Botswana and Vietnam; the North Pole expedition; amphibious cars; Jeremy screaming “SOME POO’S COME OUT!”; James shouting “Cock!”; Richard giggling at it all like a schoolboy whose dreams about driving cars for a living had visibly all come true. It was never insightful, in any way unscripted, or even educational by accident. It was Top Gear.

Its glum downswing didn’t begin until 2013. The trio were to turn a Transit into a hovercraft and take it on to the Avon to test it. Larks would ensue. And, with the requisite bickering, they did. At one point, the “Hovervan” drenched diners at a swanky riverside eatery, its winds whipping up tables, causing chaos among baffled, aghast poshos.

Only – and you might want to sit down here – the sequence was staged. “It’s another Top Gear FAKE,” strained the Mail, in that handy caps-locky way it does to tell old people which part of the sentence to be mad at. But it wasn’t as if some magic curtain of illusion had been hoisted. Every Top Gear set-piece was set up. We always knew that. The problem was, after this hugely publicised incident, the cat was so far out of the bag as to be un-put-back-innable. Any pretense of reality could be abandoned, because Top Gear didn’t have to pretend to pretend any more. So began an inexorable, bloated decline.

The level of scripting became unbearable. Casual bigotry snuck in with alarming regularity. Each segment of the show – once charming in its make-and-make-do scrappiness – whooshed and zinged like an Edgar Wright appreciation montage. Even humble car tests became licence fee-spaffing superstunts. With one jaunt on the Avon, the underdog-turned-BBC behemoth had become a clapped-out old banger. When Clarkson punched it from our screens in 2015, it hadn’t so much driven into the sunset as been wrapped around a lamppost by a twocking drunk. Total write-off.