The Top Gear Story Read online

  For my two little petrol-heads,

  Super Sport and Little Turbo

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction

  Chapter 1: ‘Old’ Top Gear

  Chapter 2: Jeremy Clarkson, Part I

  Chapter 3: The Hamster and Captain Slow, Part I

  Chapter 4: The ‘New’ Top Gear

  Chapter 5: The Star in a Reasonably Priced Car

  Chapter 6: Caravans

  Chapter 7: ‘How Hard Can It Be?’

  Chapter 8: The Top Gear Specials: ‘US Road Trip’

  Chapter 9: The Stig: Top Gear’s Tame Racing Driver

  Chapter 10: Jeremy Clarkson, Part II

  Chapter 11: Top Gear Haters

  Chapter 12: Cheap Car Challenges

  Chapter 13: The Bugatti Veyron

  Chapter 14: Richard Hammond, Part II

  Chapter 15: James May, Part II

  Chapter 16: Jeremy Clarkson, Part III

  Chapter 17: The Crash

  Chapter 18: Supercars and Top Gear

  Chapter 19: The Polar Trek

  Chapter 20: The Stig Versus Top Gear

  Chapter 21: Nothing Changes, Nothing Stays the Same

  Chapter 22: Headlines and Heat

  Chapter 23: Back in the Game

  Chapter 24: The Best Job in the World!

  Appendices

  Plates

  Copyright

  Acknowledgements

  The author would like to generously thank Jon Bentley, David Coulthard and Dr Kerry Spackman for their interviews. Top Gear has, of course, been the subject of huge media coverage and the following sources were extremely helpful in compiling this book: The Sunday Times, the Guardian, the Independent, the Sun, the Daily Mirror, the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Express, The Man in the White Suit by Ben Collins,

  Flat Out, Flat Broke by Perry McCarthy, Top Gear magazine.

  Also the brilliant fan site www.jeremyclarkson.co.uk,

  www.timesonline.co.uk, style.uk.msn.com, news.bbc.co.uk,

  www.petitiononline.com, www.hse.gov.uk,

  www.thefutoncritic.com, transmission.blogs.topgear.com,

  www.finalgear.com, www.c21media.net, web.archive.org/web,

  www.webcitation.org, news.scotsman.com, www.smh.com.au,

  www.theage.com.au, www.carsguide.com.au, jalopnik.com,

  www.vogue.co.uk, findarticles.com,

  www.computerworld.com.au, www.newstatesman.com,

  uk.askmen.com, www.imdb.com, www.brunel.ac.uk,

  www.thesun.co.uk, homecinema.thedigitalfix.co.uk, wikipedia.com

  The official Top Gear website is at: www.topgear.com

  Introduction

  When I was a kid, my dad drove a chocolate-brown Hillman Hunter. It had shiny, faux-leather seats and no seatbelts in the front or rear. The music system was a cartridge player which took up most of the dashboard, yet we only had an album each by The Carpenters and Elkie Brooks to play on it. Us three kids would be crammed in the back and to this day, I don’t know how we fitted everything in. We even drove to the south of France to go camping during two particularly ambitious summers – with a tent and two weeks’ supplies for a family of five in the boot. I’m not actually sure that’s physically possible, because now I’m a grown up, I seem to need a car the size of a small fuel tanker to get my small people around (which is still always full when we come back from Sainsbury’s). But back then, the trusty (rusty) Hillman got us all in, suitcases precariously tied to a creaking roof rack, and off we went over the Channel. I think it took us about 79 days to get there the first time.

  My dad used to fix cars on an evening after work to bring in extra money to feed his hungry hordes so my primary-school years were a time when cars were a piece of metal to get you from A to B or to generate cash for a new pair of shoes. They were a pragmatic assistant, a necessity and nothing more. For much of my early years, I had absolutely no idea there were car ‘brands’ and the caché of a so-called ‘prestige’ marque mattered not one jot because it didn’t even register. Besides, even if I had pined for a classic badge, we simply couldn’t have afforded one.

  In compiling this book, I have tried to pinpoint exactly why it is that Top Gear is so massively popular. At the time of writing, somewhere in the region of 350 million people watch each episode. That’s almost as many as Baywatch, yet Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond are certainly no Pamela Andersons. Of course there are several fairly obvious reasons: the brilliant presenters, the ludicrous stunts and adventures, the road-tests, the irreverent humour and bitingly funny scripts, all these things are core staples of a globally successful formula. But there’s something more, something a little more nebulous: it’s the fact that for some reason, to a sizeable chunk of the world’s population, cars matter.

  I remember vividly the very first moment when I suddenly realised this phenomenon. It was like a cloud of ignorance lifting from my eight-year-old eyes – I suddenly understood that certain cars were deemed ‘better’ than others. It happened when the music teacher at primary school bought a new car. I remember sitting in the maths class and one of the ‘trendy’ kids walked in and said, ‘Guess what? Mr Hanley has only gone and bought a Saab 900 drop-top!’ I didn’t know what he was talking about. After some explanation, I realised he meant to say, ‘Mr Hanley has only gone and bought a new car with a convertible roof.’ But he hadn’t just bought ‘a car’ – it was a Saab. And not just any old Saab, it was a 900 Series, no less … and convertible.

  Suddenly, the penny dropped.

  Ah, I get it …

  A whole new world had just opened up for me.

  Now, a good few road miles later, I sit here with that primary-school fascination for fast cars still burning brightly inside. When a supercar drives past me, I still emit the audible ‘Oooohhhh’ that the voice boxes of all genuine petrol-heads are equipped with. Or sometimes I opt for the sharp intake of breath – that works, too. When I recently saw a convertible white Bugatti Veyron in central London, I was quicker to stand next to it with my boys and get a photo than a stalker at a celebrity party.

  I buy Top Gear magazine religiously and have a subscription to the kids’ edition, Top Gear Turbo – in my son’s name, of course – and yes, I ‘help’ him collect the trading cards. We once went to a toy store for a ‘friendly’ card-swapping morning with fellow collectors and I nearly had to be escorted from the shop because a dad jumped the queue for the Lambo Murcielago LP640 (‘Rare’). I was outraged on my son’s behalf, of course.

  As I type this, I have a Top Gear battery-operated V8 engine pencil sharpener next to my keyboard; there’s a Stig key fob hanging from the door to my office; on the back of my mobile phone is a Top Gear sticker, which says ‘Only Supercars Allowed’; I have just had a shower with a Stig soap-on-a-rope and when I’ve finished for the day, I’ll drink a coffee from my Top Gear mug. Then I’ll read stories to my boys after first ticking off the latest trading cards we have just bought. Afterwards my eldest will go to sleep in a Top Gear duvet. I haven’t quite sunk that low yet, but perhaps it’s only time – they do make them in king size…

  And that’s what Top Gear so brilliantly taps into: it’s some primal and at times totally illogical fascination with cars. I admit, when watching the show I do tend to drift – no pun intended – if the Top Gear team spend too long on a vehicle that takes longer than is decent to get to 60mph, but let’s be honest, so do the presenters. That said, even when they are forced to focus on something that isn’t supersonic, the way the programme reviews, tests and discusses all types of car is truly unique. However, it’s the three presenters’ own schoolboy passion for cars that is the bigge
st single draw for most Top Gear viewers. Sure, they have a massive knowledge of the machines they are testing and are all very accomplished drivers yet it’s their child-like enthusiasm and playground camaraderie that is most infectious of all. Had Clarkson, Hammond and May been in my maths class that day at school, they would have been the first ones to jump up from their seats and run to the window to gaze adoringly at Mr Hanley’s new Saab. Years later, they are effectively still doing exactly the same every Sunday night on our television screens.

  I knew I had probably overdone the petrol-head life when my youngest, then aged two-and-a-half, saw his new pram and asked, ‘Daddy, can we get black alloys?’ I make no apology for this because I know that my little racing drivers understand, the presenters of Top Gear understand, the brilliant behind-the-scenes team at the show understand, and the millions of people all over the world who tune into the show every week also understand: Top Gear will be relevant and popular for as long as there are cars.

  Martin Roach

  CHAPTER 1

  ‘Old’ Top Gear

  With the ubiquitous success of the current version of Top Gear, it’s easy to forget that the show has a long and illustrious history. In fact, the first generation of Top Gear was broadcast for almost a quarter of a century, across 45 series and 515 episodes. The future television classic actually started off as a regional programme in 1977, but was deemed successful enough to be extended to a nationwide show the following year. Unconfirmed reports suggest the title may have been inspired by a John Peel radio programme of the same name and this first generation was broadcast from the old BBC studios in Pebble Mill, the then state-of-the-art complex in the Birmingham suburb of Edgbaston. The seven-storey site contained offices, television studios, radio studios, two canteens, a post office and a garden; among the projects that the studios were most famed for was the longest-running radio soap, The Archers, as well as the perennially popular Pebble Mill at One and All Creatures Great and Small.

  It was from here that BBC2 decided to broadcast their flagship motoring show to the nation. Using The Allman Brothers’ Band song ‘Jessica’ to open and with the closing credits usually sound-tracked by Elton John’s ‘Out Of The Blue’ (from the Blue Moves album), the show launched with a stellar cast of highly respected presenters. Many of those faces came from highly cerebral journalistic backgrounds: one of the more established names was William Woollard, a former Oxbridge graduate who also served as a fighter pilot in the RAF. Among his other varied jobs before Top Gear were roles for oil corporations in Borneo and Oman and he even worked as a social scientist for various global companies. However, it is as a veteran of countless highly respected TV shows – both as a producer and presenter – that Woollard is best known, perhaps most obviously as a presenter of the seminal science programme, Tomorrow’s World. This show was one of the BBC’s longest-running programmes ever, notching up an impressive 38 years before its eventual demise in 2003. Woollard was a key factor in its success, appearing for 11 years on Tomorrow’s World, winning numerous awards along the way, including several ‘Top Science Presenter’ gongs. He would also go on to present many series of Horizon.

  So when Woollard came to Top Gear in 1981, he brought an enviable degree of gravitas and knowledge (a wisdom reinforced by the fact that he was a practising Buddhist). Perhaps more than any other presenter at the time, Woollard was best equipped to talk about technical car information in a way that made the material palatable to the common man, a skill he was renowned for and a facet that had been a key part of his success on Tomorrow’s World.

  At this stage, Top Gear typically had a central location for the links that ran through the programme, which would perhaps be a foreign motor show such as Turin or Paris, or maybe a rally stage, or an historic car collection. Each feature would then link back to (usually) William Woollard, who was steering the whole ship. The initial nature of the programme was also very journalistic, with factual and balanced reviews of everyday cars supplemented by road safety features all of which was presented in what was essentially quite a dry fashion, with little or no sign of the irreverent humour for which the series would later become so well known. Straightforward car reviews, motor shows, road safety issues, classic car competitions and a popular slot following rally formulae were the main fare (the show was even a sponsor of the 1987 and 1988 Formula 1 ‘Winter Series’, the 1990 and 1991 Historic Rally Championships and the 1992 and 1993 British Rally Championships). It was a popular format: although initial ratings were modest – with the first batch of series attracting a few hundred thousand – the show was quickly launched on a steep, upward curve.

  Woollard was not alone in bringing quality to the series. Other presenters included TV favourite Noel Edmonds, who was at the peak of his power in the 1970s and 1980s. His huge profile on BBC Radio 1 translated seamlessly to television, with massively successful shows such as Multi-Coloured Swap Shop and Top of the Pops. Edmonds would later go on to become one of the most powerful men in British TV, but it is his role as one of the original presenters of the first generation of Top Gear that is relevant here. His huge public profile ensured the show enjoyed high ratings and may have been responsible for drawing in viewers who might otherwise not have watched a car programme.

  Another notable presenter was Chris Goffey, a motoring journalist who started out at the Slough Evening Mail and went on to enjoy a very fine journalistic background, writing for Autocar and Motor Trader (his son Danny would later become the drummer in Supergrass and subsequently appear on the charity show Top Gear of the Pops in 2007). It was Goffey’s understated approach that most early Top Gear viewers would recognise as a direct contrast to the ever more ebullient presenting of the show’s latter-day stars. Also in the ranks was Angela Rippon, the nation’s favourite newsreader, she of the long legs made famous by The Morecambe & Wise Show of the late 1970s. Many of the presenters were graduates and it is noticeable how many different names and faces were tried and tested, with nearly 20 main presenters over the course of Top Gear’s first incarnation.

  After the series had been running for a decade, a new face in the production team arrived and proved to be a major factor in the evolution of the show. Jon Bentley was an Oxford University graduate in Geography, who had initially taken a post-degree job working for Ford as a graduate trainee. He told the author how this eventually led him to working on Top Gear: ‘I’d wanted to work in industry and had been passionate about cars from an early age. Frankly, [working at Ford] was a bit dull – I had to work out things like how many windscreen wipers were required a day in the Cologne plant. It was like all your worst nightmares about the car production line, where you’re sitting there putting on the same bolt over and over again, but behind a desk. You end up looking at one tiny thing and never get to see the whole car.

  ‘So I thought I should look for a more interesting job. One Monday, late in 1983, while scanning through the “Media” section of the Guardian, I saw an advert for a researcher’s position on Top Gear so I applied for it.’ Despite this, Bentley does not pretend that at the time he was a die-hard Top Gear viewer: ‘I couldn’t say I was a fan when I started working on it, because I hadn’t really watched much of it – I was at the age when I didn’t get round to watching telly much. Fortunately, when I was preparing for the interview, I discovered the Ford press office had copies of the programme on VHS. I didn’t have a VHS player but a friend did, so I was able to make a critique of three or four programmes before my interview. I also approached another friend of mine who was working on Blue Peter and spent a delightful Saturday afternoon attending a recording of that show by way of preparation.

  ‘If anything, I think my boss counted my Oxbridge background against me but I came across as hugely interested in cars. I wrote things on my application form like the fact that I had several thousand car brochures – which was absolutely true. Back at university, for my rural geography dissertation I’d interviewed all the inhabitants of a village – the Top Gear produce
rs liked that – and the combination of being able to mention sufficient eccentric statistics to demonstrate an interest in cars plus the fact that I’d done quite a few media related things (some journalism at college and an interest in photography) all added up, and they thought it was probably worth giving me a go.’

  He remembers being thrown in at the deep end with a rather peculiar first assignment: ‘It was very boring – the sort of thing that shouldn’t really have been on the programme! I went up to Lancashire to investigate a company that had devised a tool for the home motorist to extract dents: you screwed a device into a hole in the wing and pulled out the dent. I don’t think we should have done the item but I remember driving up the M6 in a rented dark green Sierra, thinking, “This is a wonderful way of earning a living”, especially after having been chained to a desk at Ford.’

  It seems strange in the media-saturated post-Millennial world that you could just apply for a job at such a prestigious programme with no previous television experience, but that is what happened to Bentley. ‘It’s never been that easy to define TV roles so at first it was a bit vague: when we visited a foreign motor show, I’d provide information for William Woollard on what to say, I’d look into stories and see if they stood up. I can remember having to drive round a director who didn’t have a driving licence. There were very few researchers on the show back then, just me and someone else. It was a very small production team.’

  He also remembers being struck by the approach of the existing presenting team: ‘The existing presenters back [then] were very professional – people like William Woollard, Sue Baker, Frank Page and Chris Goffey (who was in my opinion the 1980s show’s enfant terrible).’

  However, despite the obvious respect Bentley had – and still has – for the veteran presenters, as a young buck taking his first steps into TV land, he was very rapidly and ambitiously projecting his own ideas onto the show’s format. After six months his researcher’s contract was renewed and he began to offer up more and more ideas for new features. Within a year of first starting, he would be directing his own pieces on the programme: ‘I felt we needed a more opinionated, controversial and passionate view. As soon as I got established on the show, I started ringing up editors of car magazines to assess their potential presenting abilities. However, I found to my great disappointment that some of the best [magazine and newspaper] journalists weren’t right for TV – they wrote wonderfully in print but weren’t able to communicate their enthusiasm through speaking or in a way that would work on TV.’