Why Top Gear remains annoyingly excellent television

Liking Top Gear brings shame. Jeremy Clarkson embodies everything that’s wrong with straight, white, old men, pampered but inexplicably vengeful, running the country. I’d rather drive a pastel-blue Hyundai Accent 1.5 CRTD GSI than be among the Top Gear studio audience, with their furious Ukip faces and suspiciously uniform laughter. And, of course, the show ought to have been taken off air at least once, and probably twice, for well-documented reasons.

But sometimes you have to separate the artist from their work. Top Gear is still on, still there, still hoovering up viewers in 50 countries. That requires us to admit that as a piece of television, it’s rather good. If a viewer can enjoy it despite hating all the participants and everything it stands for, it might be some kind of genius.

The brashness is invigorating. Not the brashness of jokes about Greeks being incompetent accountants, but the brashness of, in the sinfully entertaining episode on 1 February, dropping Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May in the Australian outback and watching them drive thousands of miles to see which luxury supercar could go the fastest without dust clogging the innards.

Now and then you need a show that puts the money on the screen and says: get a load of this. Top Gear has had moments of making do, in that apologetically low-budget, self-deprecating British way. But since it’s become dizzyingly lucrative – every episode makes the BBC enough money to pay for numerous excellent BBC4 comedies about tree surgeons – Clarkson and producer Andy Wilman have had the gumption to see how far they can push their toy.

The show has gradually ditched the magazine format and moved towards exotic, expansive specials. Even the latest episode, which seemed like a regular instalment, turned out to be almost entirely taken up with the Australian stunt. Almost no TV show ever gets to the point where it’s up in a helicopter, filming a two-tonne yellow Bentley being raced up the russet dust heap outside an Australian iron mine because it looks cool. Top Gear does. It’s irresistible. In my brain, pleasure and guilt have called a rare truce.

And while the stunts have become bigger and more international, Top Gear’s blokey lineup have kept hold of the little things they do annoyingly well. Clarkson narrowing his eyes at May after he had obviously cheated in the slag-heap time-trial was a typical flash of deft comic timing: the sitcom bully bested by one of his sidekicks, a small pay off that survived a colossally expensive set-up.

For all their cash-spunking, planet-burning brio, Clarkson and co still love a silly gag, not to mention the childish thrill of a stopwatch and a pointless challenge. It’s as if they can’t believe how far they’ve been allowed to go. And maybe that’s why they’ve never completely alienated me. Or perhaps the devil really does have the best TV shows.