The Top Gear Story Read online

  While searching for new on-screen faces, Bentley was fast becoming a major player in the show’s directing, even though he was first offered elements of that role when still only twenty-three years of age: ‘I think it was my passion that won through – a lot of TV is still like that.’ One of his first directing jobs perhaps reflects the (initially) more staid atmosphere on the programme: ‘I did a piece about an elderly chap called Tom Swallow, who had written a motoring magazine in a German prisoner-of-war camp, called The Flywheel. He died recently and I recall hearing bits of my item on the Radio 4 obituary series, Last Word.’

  Another item was inspired by Bentley’s beloved car magazines: ‘One of the great things about car magazines at the time – and you can still see it in Evo today – is the obsession with the corner on a deserted mountain road. I tried to replicate that in some of my first items by going up to the Yorkshire Dales, filming around Buttertubs Pass. There was a road test of the Fiat Uno Turbo and an item on the Naylor, which was a replica MGF made by a company in Bradford. The tests back then were more factual and less humorous, certainly.’

  But it wasn’t just the content of the scripts and reviews themselves that was vastly different to the current crop of Top Gear: the actual cars they reviewed were in huge contrast to the latter-day supercar focus of Clarkson and his crew (this monopoly of unaffordable supercars on the new generation of the series is the source of much criticism, which we will come back to later). Back in the 1980s, there was no such focus, far from it, as Bentley recalls: ‘When I joined, we weren’t supposed to road test supercars at all – it wasn’t thought to be the sort of thing the BBC should do. I remember having to persuade my boss’s boss that we should be allowed to do a road test of the Ferrari Testarossa versus the Lamborghini Countach as one of my first few items, and that it wasn’t in some way a betrayal of BBC values to have cars in the show which almost all viewers couldn’t afford. My argument was always that it was more elitist to suggest that everyone could afford to buy a new Austin Maestro (which nobody seemed to have any objection to us featuring) than it was to suggest that everyone didn’t have the right to dream about owning a Ferrari.

  ‘So I did get to direct the Testarossa versus the Countach at Bruntingthorpe … on 16mm film! We had Chris Goffey at the wheel, and it included some shots from the side of a VW Caravelle to get some good close-up tracking and a microphone under the bonnet for some cracking wild-track engine noise. [I was allowed to do this] providing I also shot a sort of apologetic intro, which would prepare viewers for the shock that we were testing cars that cost as much as a house.’

  Another contrast to the post-2002 Top Gear is that the older series occasionally looked at two-wheeled vehicles. ‘There was always no shortage of new cars,’ recounts Bentley. ‘However, I introduced a bit of bike culture with my early items as well – I can remember an eventful day shooting at a scooter rally in Scarborough – interest in scooters was going through one of its many revivals in the mid-1980s. Towards the end of the day, the scooter enthusiasts became quite lively and started throwing bricks at the camera car while we were doing tracking shots, albeit in a friendly sort of way! Fortunately no harm was done and the resulting positive piece was well reviewed by (of all newspapers) the Daily Mail.’

  Another area of the motoring world that Top Gear featured very heavily back then, but plays virtually no part in the current format was rallying. William Woollard also presented Rally Report, the Top Gear spin-off focussing on the Lombard RAC Rally. Interest was reinforced by the presence of retired rally driver Tony Mason, who had been navigator to Roger Clark in winning the 1972 RAC Rally, as well as actually competing in the race himself in other years. One notable feature saw Mason join forces with Clark to test out a replica Ford Escort RS1600 rally car in a forest.

  By the late-1980s – 1987 to be precise – Jon Bentley had graduated within the Top Gear ranks through the roles of researcher, assistant director and on to director. With the incumbent greater power and responsibility of this senior role, he felt able to instigate yet more changes: ‘I found that when I moved on to directing items that focussed your mind much more, you were responsible for delivering so many minutes of television and it was up to you to make it happen. So, item ideas were never a problem but it was more difficult coming up with ideas for whole programmes. We were [still] a very small team, about six or seven people, excluding presenters. At that stage there was the executive producer Dennis Adams, a producer, an assistant producer, one or two researchers and two production assistants. It was a very low-budget programme – we had about ten shooting days for a half-hour show in the budget and about seven editing days plus some time for research and preparation. The team did grow a bit over the years but it remained quite a low-budget programme right through the 1990s.’

  By now, Top Gear was winning substantial ratings, moving from the hundreds of thousands into 1.5 million and over the course of the 1980s and the start of the 1990s, on towards a peak of 5 million. This represented an audience share of 22 per cent, which for a BBC2 programme was superb; the show regularly appeared at or near the top of BBC2’s most popular programme charts.

  ‘From the start I tried to improve the show’s journalism,’ explains Jon Bentley. ‘My aim in the 1980s was to try and make it more like Car magazine; that was a magazine I used to wait for eagerly and devour avidly every month. That publication was quite critical and controversial in its opinions on cars. Back then I think cars featured more in general conversation: people in pubs used to talk about whether the Sierra was better than the Cavalier – it was the most sophisticated product people used at the time. In some ways, technology has now taken the role that cars used to have. People now might have a heated debate about whether PCs are better than Macs, or whether Android’s better than the iPhone. Back then it was about cars: a new Golf was an event.’

  Bentley’s rapid rise up the Top Gear career ladder continued and in 1987 (after a brief period working on attachment to the BBC’s Timewatch), he became the motoring show’s producer: ‘I was joined by Ken Pollock, who was very keen on motorsport. Being producer didn’t mean you stopped directing individual items but it did mean you were responsible for delivering the whole programme – still 30 minutes at that stage – and helping to manage any directors or other people who might be working on it.’

  However, for the purposes of this book, Bentley’s role as producer also came with one crucial new responsibility: he was able to introduce new presenters. Enter one Jeremy Clarkson …

  ‘I used to go on car launches occasionally,’ recalls Bentley, ‘either to shoot an item or, when the series was less active, to drive the new car and meet different people. On the Citroen AX launch (which I always remember as being in the New Forest, but may actually have been in Berkshire – well, it was in a forest, anyway!), I sat down at dinner and next to me was Jeremy Clarkson. He was a writer on Performance Car at the time, but I think he was on the launch because he used to syndicate local newspaper motoring columns and was writing a test of the new Citroën. We had a long conversation and he seemed exactly the sort of person I wanted as a presenter on Top Gear – funny, opinionated, passionate about cars but not in the least bit serious or po-faced. Perfect. I don’t think I considered for a moment whether he [looked the part] or not.

  ‘I’d become established as a producer [by then so] I felt in a strong position to back my hunch, arrange a screen test and convince my boss we should hire him. Of course these days if you feel like screen testing someone, you can just point your phone at them and record a video. Back then, in 1988, it was almost before the days of even VHS camcorders and you’d need a bit of investment in a crew with a sound recordist to go out and shoot a screen test, so I had to convince the powers-that-be to invest in a screen test day.’

  A full day of screen testing was arranged at Shugborough in Staffordshire and Clarkson, along with an array of other potential presenters including several high-profile car magazine editors and writers, was invi
ted along. ‘I tested Jeremy [on that day] along with a few other people I thought might have potential. I asked people to bring along a car of their choice and talk about it for two minutes then I would supply a surprise car for them to talk about unprepared. I chose the 2CV because I thought it was universally known and the sort of car everyone would have an opinion on.

  ‘Jeremy brought along a Range Rover and was very funny, streets ahead of the others. I hadn’t read much of [his writing] but he just came over very well as a strong, lively personality. I kept that screen test tape for ages but one day when I went to look for it, I couldn’t find it. A pity! I wish I still had it.’

  Clarkson was one of the first new faces Bentley put forward and he was delighted when Jeremy was offered a job. The producer’s gut instinct was quickly validated: ‘We had a few meetings and I explained that the best way to write a TV script was to put the pictures on the left-hand side and the words on the right-hand side, make breaks for music or action, and think about how long each sequence should be. Jeremy just took to it immediately. I went out with him for the first couple of items but thereafter he became the sort of presenter who could almost be his own producer. You could put him with a director who was brilliant visually and very good at pace and music, and you knew you’d end up with six or seven minutes of great, memorable stuff. Always excellent!’

  One of Clarkson’s very first features was a test of a new Mercedes S-Class in the south of France, around 1991. ‘I think the Merc S-Class was the first car test we did that had a bit of extra dramatic polish to it,’ recalls Bentley. ‘The director, Dennis Jarvis, cut a sequence of it driving round to Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game”.’

  And it wasn’t just Clarkson who Bentley introduced to the show. Quentin Willson was a brilliant addition in 1991, a former used car salesman with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the motor trade. Willson actually founded a car dealership selling prestige and supercars such as Ferraris and Maseratis. His journalistic background boasted a deputy editorship of the second-hand car magazine, Buying Cars. Again, Bentley was a big fan: ‘He was a car trader but also had an English degree, which may help explain his excellent way with words. I think he started running nightclubs in Leicester after university, and trading and writing about cars in his spare time. We needed a second-hand cars expert: I thought Quentin’s writing was very good and as a car dealer, he fitted into the “poacher-turned-gamekeeper” role very well. I talked about him with Jeremy, who had met him and thought he had potential, too. So I arranged to meet Quentin in a pub in Ombersley and he seemed great for the job. His early items went down well – one on buying a second-hand XR3 and another on why you shouldn’t buy a used Metro – slightly controversially in the case of the Metro, because of a perceived anti-Rover bias.’

  Willson would appear on every Top Gear episode for a decade and was rightly seen as a stalwart of the show.

  Contrary to widespread sources, Bentley confirms he did not introduce Tiff Needell to Top Gear: ‘My colleague Ken Pollock introduced him. He saw an excellent driver, who could actually talk about his experiences at the wheel while driving. He was the first professional driver the show had, I think.’

  He continues: ‘However, I was very pleased to introduce Vicki Butler-Henderson. We needed to find another woman presenter and here was one who could drive on the racetrack. I saw her picture in Max Power magazine – I thought she’d be the younger male viewer’s ideal fantasy girlfriend.’ Butler-Henderson was a racing driver who brought a touch of class and a certain sex appeal to the show; she was from a racing family, with her grandfather, father and brother all involved in motorsport. She began racing karts when she was only twelve years old. In her twenties, she started writing about cars as well as still racing them to a very high level. After working at Auto Express, What Car? and Performance Car, she became launch editor at the new publication, Max Power, which is where Jon Bentley spotted her. His Top Gear colleague Jeremy Clarkson would later call VBH ‘the personification of the Porsche 911 C4S’!

  Bentley failed, however, to persuade the powers-that-be to recruit a certain James May, at the time a relatively unknown motoring writer who nonetheless already had many fans among the car magazine-reading public: ‘I did a screen test with James on my drive with a Caterham in the early 1990s. He’d always been keen to work on the show. I thought he was great – funny and confident – but my bosses thought at the time that he was too similar to Jeremy, two relatively posh-sounding young blokes which is strange because when you put them together now, you see how different they are. He went on to join Driven [Channel 4’s rival motoring show, launched in 1988], which started his presenting career.’

  Notably, Driven had elements that differed to the old version of Top Gear but would prove very popular in later motoring shows: the presenters – initially Mike Brewer, James May and Jason Barlow – interacted with each other on items, rather than alone and there was also a central location, in this case a truck on a race track, from where certain features were based. At the time of its launch, Driven quickly attracted a healthy ratings fan-base, perhaps the first sign that Top Gear would not have it all its own way.

  Meanwhile, old Top Gear itself changed format in 1991. Instead of using the central location for key presenters to talk about upcoming features, it became a magazine-style programme (without a central location), namely just a series of totally independent items. By now, Woollard had retired from the show to pursue his own already highly successful television production company.

  Even Jon Bentley himself briefly appeared in front of the camera in the latter half of the 1990s: ‘I did around a dozen items. I think my boss and the producer who was then working for me, a chap called John Wilcox, thought I’d actually be quite good at it and should be given the chance to move from behind to in front of the camera. I really enjoyed doing it and I’m still proud of some of the items: I launched a car design competition, for example, and the person who won it went on to become a car designer. In the end, I didn’t have time to develop this side of my career at that stage because there were so many other demands on my time.

  ‘One of the last things I did as a presenter was an on-screen recruiting exercise, asking viewers to apply to be a researcher on Top Gear. The personnel department were a bit worried at first, but they approved it in the end – I don’t think anyone had done this with a BBC programme before. I seem to remember several thousand people applied; it took a lot of going through but I looked at them all and it was very exciting. We spotted some good people out of it too, including Richard Porter who’s currently the script editor on new Top Gear and the man behind car blog Sniff Petrol, as well as James Woodroffe who went on to be the executive producer of [Channel 5’s motor show] Fifth Gear.

  With such a glut of talent, Top Gear succeeded in shifting both public and motor trade perceptions: ‘I think it had become a credible car programme [by now],’ suggests Bentley. ‘When I started on it, you had to apologise a bit when you mentioned it to car enthusiasts. Now it had become credible, interesting and enthusiastically viewed by car enthusiasts while at the same time being entertaining and accessible to general viewers.’

  As Bentley’s role changed within the programme’s structure, so too did Jeremy Clarkson’s profile. ‘I recall buying my first Amstrad word processor,’ remembers Jon, ‘and thinking, “Right, now I’ve got a word processor, I need to think of some ideas for new programmes.” One I eventually managed to sell to my boss was what became Jeremy Clarkson’s Motorworld. It’s an idea anybody could have had – quite generic, really – but it became a successful pair of series for us.’

  This particular two-series show saw Clarkson travel the world looking at the car culture of various countries such as Monaco, India, Dubai, Japan and Detroit with each territory having its own show. There were 12 episodes across the two series and then a ‘special’ on the United Kingdom. Although the show was never a rival to Top Gear, it was important for two reasons. First, it highlighted just how capabl
e Jeremy Clarkson was, and how his outspoken views and dynamic presenting style were perhaps already outgrowing the veteran motor show on which he first appeared on our screens. Second, Clarkson introduced a new face to the team behind-the-scenes on Motorworld – Andy Wilman, an old school-friend of his. Between 1994 and 2001, Wilman himself would actually present features in 35 shows of Top Gear.

  Jon Bentley remained series producer of Top Gear until late 1996, when his boss Dennis Adams retired. He was then given responsibility for the whole motoring department at the BBC. During the next two years, his department produced 35 to 40 Top Gear programmes a year, a specialist show (Top Gear Motorsport), world rally coverage, a classic car series (The Car’s The Star), Jeremy Clarkson’s Extreme Machines and even a waterborne version of Top Gear called Top Gear Waterworld. The team also did a series of televisual car autobiographies, Several Careful Owners. By now, viewing figures for the main show were as high as 6 million.

  In 1993, Top Gear was deemed successful enough to launch a spin-off magazine of the same name, which has largely been in publication ever since (and by the mid-2000s was the UK’s biggest-selling car magazine). This hard-copy format allowed the production team to conduct surveys and certain features that might otherwiseSeveral Careful Owners. be restricted by the television licence fee’s regulations – so, for example, the magazine was able to run an annual survey polling car owners’ satisfaction with their wheels. Around this period, there was even a radio show spin-off too, although the format was naturally more limited in terms of talking about a car’s aesthetics.