Some people really know how to land on both feet. Such as the three blokes who host the absurdly popular TV show Top Gear, who are paid a whole shed-load of money to remain in a state of arrested mental development and live out an extended midlife crisis on television, while taking the piss out of people of other races whom they find stupid.
It’s assumed that men everywhere adore this program, hence the preponderance of Top Gear DVDs taking pride of place next to the socks and hankies every Fathers Day. It’s also said that women like the show too, that there’s something of a raffish, knockabout quality to host Jeremy Clarkson and his crew which the ladies find endearing or even irresistible. I know a few blokes who enjoy (or enjoyed) the show, but I’ve never met a woman who claims to like it, and suspect the latter assertion is made by men who simply want their wives or girlfriends to endure their seven-hour-a-week Top Gear habit.
Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond will be heading our way soon on one of their “Down Under” tours. It’s a pity that they didn’t choose instead to take their show on the road to another southern nation, namely Mexico, which was recently the subject of one of their zany gags, and whose excellent citizens would probably love the chance to see these blokes in the flesh.
The BBC was forced to offer an apology, albeit a mealy-mouthed and caveat-laden apology, when Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond said of a Mexican-made sports car that all vehicles reflect the characteristics of their nation.
“Mexican cars are just going to be lazy, feckless, flatulent, overweight, leaning against a fence asleep looking at a cactus with a blanket with a hole in the middle on as a coat,” Hammond said last month.
He then described Mexican food as “sick with cheese on it” – not bad coming from the nation which brought us tripe in white sauce, pickled eggs and the hot chip sandwich. Clarkson chimed in adding that it was unlikely they would get any complaints from the Mexican Ambassador because, being Mexican, he’d been snoring in front of the television holding the remote in his hand.
As it happened the Mexican Ambassador was watching and, along with hundreds of his countrymen, lodged a formal complaint with the BBC. Instead of offering an unreserved apology, the national broadcaster added that the program was “making comic use of a stereotype; a practice with which regular viewers of Top Gear will be familiar”.
This is one of the key problems with the show, and it’s become more of a problem as the car part of the program has been overshadowed by uninspired or tired gags about the Krauts and the Frogs. Rather than being innovative or ground-breaking, the program increasingly seems to belong to the same comic pantheon as a show such as Love Thy Neighbour, in which Alf Garnett fretted endlessly about the fact that a family of darkies had moved in next door. Even Manuel from Fawlty Towers was less of a caricature than the one Top Gear painted about the Mexicans.
There is another problem with the show, and it’s a bigger one. It’s about cars, and cars really aren’t all that interesting.
For every man who loves Top Gear, gets giddy with excitement about the advent of the Motor Show, has owned 10 different cars and knows the difference between a cam shaft and a carburettor, there’s one Top Gear-hating man – and possibly several men – who has owned two cars, wouldn’t cross the road to see the Motor Show, and couldn’t name a car part beyond the steering wheel and exhaust pipe.
The recent kerfuffle about the identity of The Stig – who for those of you who don’t know is the mystery person in the white helmet who test drives cars on the show – was about as juvenile a moment in pop culture as the unmasking of the rock band Kiss in the mid 1980s.
It seems kind of infantile to know so much about something which is essentially designed to get us from A to B. We all go through the stage in our childhood when we collect Matchbox cars, we all get excited about getting our licence and buying our first car, but after that, most blokes don’t maintain that same passionate interest in vehicles. As grown-ups we should no more get excited about cars than we should toasters or lawn-mowers. I’m flat out describing mine, other than to say that it’s silver, a station wagon, a Holden, and that the back seat can barely be seen for McHappy Meal boxes.
There’s plenty of better things to spend our money on, to aspire to, to talk about.
My suspicion is that most men feel this way but are afraid to put their hands up and admit that they don’t really know anything about cars, don’t covet cars, don’t even know anything about the car they actually drive, but we all sort of pretend that we’re into them because it seems less than manly not to. From here on in let’s come out of the motoring closet and declare that Top Gear is no more a program for adults than Play School is.
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