Top Gear (BBC Two)
James May on the Moon (BBC Two)
Famous, Rich and Homeless (BBC One)
Until this week I had never watched Top Gear. Not once. Not even the
one when Richard Hammond nearly died, which, from what I could make out in
the tabloids, was this generation’s assassination of JFK but with a happy
ending.
This was because I feared that if I tried it I might quite like it. A bit like
heroin. After all, both heroin and Top Gear have a lot of fans. With
350 million viewers around the world, it’s one of BBC Worldwide’s most
successful exports. The presenters — James May, Richard Hammond and Jeremy
Clarkson — offer comfort to anyone who believes that this country was great
until it was ruined, at some point in the mid-Eighties, by a combination of
politically correct comedy, feminism, homosexuals, parking restrictions, and
Emerson Lake & Palmer not getting into the charts any more.
Top Gear’s huge success — 7.6 million viewers for its return this week! Doctor
Who, but with cars! — has allowed it to turn into a small area of the
BBC that operates on its own rules. A lone, patriarchial fiefdom where you
can call cars “a bit gay”, roar around the environmentally sensitive
Makgadikgadi salt pan in Botswana, and refer to Malaysians as “living in
jungles wearing leaves for shoes”. Like the Isle of Man, if its daily paper
were Auto Trader, edited by Alf Garnett.
But that’s the unsavoury side of Top Gear. The savoury side of Top
Gear is that it’s fun. Fun. Just simple fun. One of the few hours in the
TV schedules when clever people devote themselves to a Glastonbury-level of
silliness: blowing up caravans, dropping a Toyota Hilux out of a towerblock.
Sir Michael Gambon did the “Star in a Reasonably Priced Car” challenge and
took a corner on two wheels, and all the presenters have an amusing, ongoing
crush on the BBC newsreader Fiona Bruce.
It is a seductive world where there is no need for politeness, tongue-holding,
duty, consideration, speed restrictions or any cultural engagement after
1986.
In short, it’s heroin. I presumed that if I dabbled, even once, I would be
dragged into a life of self-indulgence and abandonment, until I was lying in
the gutter — scabby knuckled, begging for pocket change, muttering “The
Stig! The Stig! Give it some bloody welly, May!”
For my first viewing I had a plan: cling to James May. May would act as my
gateway drug into Top Gear. I would get so stoned on May that I
wouldn’t notice if I ended up injecting between my toes with 500mg of
Clarkson. After all, I had enjoyed May’s two series with Oz Clarke on wine
and beer. For pinko liberals and homosexuals, May is the acceptable face of Top
Gear, with an altogether more relaxed and liberal air than Clarkson. He
comes across like someone who was at public school with the younger brother
of someone from Pink Floyd. It’s no surprise to discover that May owns a
Brompton folding bicycle, which he uses for commuting in difficult London
traffic. Clarkson, you presume, just drives over the gridlock in a tank,
shouting, “Pancake a peasant!”
Sure enough, May was delightful company for my first hour of Top Gear.
The conceit of the episode was that it was 1949, and Hammond, May and
Clarkson were racing from London to Edinburgh in three of the fastest
vehicles of the time: a Vincent Black Shadow motorcycle, a Jaguar XK120 and
a Peppercorn Class steam locomotive, the Tornado.
In a world otherwise filled with Waterloo Road and Cash in the Attic,
there wasn’t much to dislike in such an idea. The dragon- green locomotive
shot up the East Coast, accompanied by camera crews in helicopters and
Clarkson in the firebox, stoking the furnace with 33lb of coal per mile. May
took the Jag up the Great North Road in a series of part-sighed, part-purred
eulogies to leather seats and the internal combustion engine, while Hammond
broke down repeatedly on his motorcycle, in the rain, in 1949. May won in
the end — he was halfway down his first pint in the Balmoral Hotel bar by
the time that Clarkson, covered in coal-dust, ran through the door. It was a
like a Boulting brothers version of Cannonball Run. A big hoot.
And of course within minutes, it was clear that my initial fear about Top
Gear — that Jeremy Clarkson was the second-most dangerous substance on
this Earth, after heroin — was completely unfounded.
In his traffic-cone orange shirt, Clarkson’s objectionable 20th-century
worldview is rendered harmless by him being both intellectually disengaged
and unexpectedly sexless. Previously, I’d presumed he was a Daily
Mail version of Aleister Crowley — all “Do As Thou Wilt In A Supposed
45mph Zone” — dangerously bewitching people into a pre-PC world of
boorishness and intolerance. In reality, he’s just Mr Toad with sat-nav. His
only message is “Poop poop!” I’m not going to get screwed up on Clarkson.
But Richard Hammond — Richard Hammond worried me immensely. He is a
disconcerting television presence; his eyes have become bigger as his face
becomes pointier, giving him the look of a man who spends most of his life
in the dark, straining to pick out objects in the gloom. This etiolated
cadpiggishness is exacerbated by his demeanour around Clarkson and May. He
makes out like Salacious Crumb — Jabba the Hutt’s sniggering, ratty little
sidekick. In one of Hammond’s links he giggled, “James is bringing up the
rear — hoping to take me from behind, and then press home his advantage. And
I’m going to take Jeremy in the tunnel.”
I thought we’d officially ended this kind of Jim Davidson-esque casual
homophobia — especially on a pre-watershed family show on Sunday evening.
But then, as we know, Hammond did suffer quite a blow to the head recently.
Maybe we should cut him some slack.
Having plighted some manner of televisual troth to James May, it was no
hardship to stay on BBC Two after Top Gear had ended and watch the
following James May on the Moon. This was a good, sometimes
unexpectedly profound hour of television — taking the 40th anniversary of
the Moon landings for us all to boggle, yet again, at the gigantic ingenuity
and total unlikeliness of men stepping on the Moon.
May walked us around Apollo 11 — an almost Victorian conglomeration of piping,
tubing and rivets. A gigantic spaghetti pipe-organ that flew to the Moon.
“It’s a bomb, really, isn’t it?” May said, as he contemplated the 960,000
gallons of propellant needed to fill the tank of the Saturn V launch
vehicle. “A bomb with astronauts sat on top.”
Eventually, of course, the needs of the documentary insisted that May himself
must go into space — 70,000ft up in a U2 spy plane. “Oh, it’s lovely!” May
cried, delighted. Below was the kindly, cloudy face of the world. Above —
strobing from blue to purple to oppressive, endless black — all of space.
“If everyone in the world could do this just once,” he said, looking as weak
as a kitten, “it would change the face of international politics, religion,
education. Everything.” Space, May implied, is Oz, and he was Dorothy. He
had to go all the way up to realise that really, there’s no place like home.
There being no place like home was — but in a totally different sense —
the message of Famous, Rich and Homeless. The show aimed to make us
realise how awful homelessness is, by making celebrities such as the
fragrant, delicate-wristed Annabel Croft sleep behind some bins for ten
days.
Alas, what the show actually did was reveal to us what Jeremy Clarkson
would be like if he wasn’t the presenter of a motoring show on BBC Two but
was, instead, heir to the Duke of Marlborough who lives in Blenheim Palace.
For in the Marquess of Blandford — often described in the Daily Mail
as “roguish”, by which we would understand that any normal person would
define him as “an unspeakable anus of a man” — we saw the extreme conclusion
of a life of pleasure, dissolution and disregard for others. Blandford had
inexplicably agreed to take part in this “social experiment” to highlight
the problem of homelessness. The only thing was that he seemed intent on
doing it without actually being homeless. Perhaps when you’re technically
being “palace-less” it all becomes a little confusing.
On the first night of sleeping rough he dismissed the camera crew as if they
were stable boys, huffing, “You can’t expect to film me all day. I’ve done
12 hours and I wish to be left alone. You must respect my wishes.” Behind
him was a five-star hotel. He seemed suspiciously shifty about this.
When John Bird — the founder of The Big Issue — tried to point
out the greater purpose of the show, Blandford shouted, “If I get tired and
cold, I’m not going to be very productive, am I?” before quitting.
In many ways, of course, in a single sentence he’d encapsulated the problems
of being homeless. But if the purpose of the show was to make the audience
think, “We really must make homelessness a thing of the past”, you were
actually left thinking, “We really must make the Marquess of Blandford a
thing of the past”, instead.
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Caitlin Moran's TV reviews
