There was an unspoken rule on Top Gear which was so
unspoken I don’t think we could bear to admit it to ourselves.
It said that the regular features we planned would most likely
turn out to be useless whereas the big ideas that became
successful were almost certainly accidental. It was hard to
acknowledge this because what could you do with that
information? Start planning to do things accidentally?
You can see the fruits of this theory in carefully planned but
never-loved features like Barn Or Bin and the utter tossfest of
Top Gear Stuntman. And conversely, the 2006 attempt to
make a normal-sized VT out of an American road trip, which
spiralled out of control, earned a whole show all to itself and
spawned the idea of the annual Top Gear special, completely
by accident.
There are a couple of things people seem to remember from
that inadvertent special. The first is the cow on the roof of a
Camaro. Jeremy came up with this one in the field, possibly
literally, and since there weren’t any dead cows lying around
he rang the office back home and one of our researchers
hammered the phones into the night until he found a nearby
farmer with a recently mooing corpse we could use. I often
thought Top Gear had the most talented and dedicated
production team in television and there’s your proof: our
people could source locate a stinking, bloated, rotten, disgusting
cow corpse from 4,000 miles away.
The second thing the American road trip is remembered for is
the slogans daubed down the cars. I’m delighted to boast that
this was my idea. In fact, it was my idea from long before the
US road trip came about and it formed the backbone of
something called The Texas Smartcar Challenge, in which a
presenter was required to drive a tiny, bright pink car covered
in jauntily liberal slogans across the Lone Star State to see
how far they could get before a lynching occurred. This idea
was well received in the office but fraught with complications.
We’d need to ship the Smart over there, and have it wrapped
in pink, and we’d have to fly in our crews from the UK, and
it all started to sound like a lot of time, expense and effort just
to get someone’s head kicked in. So the idea went away.
It came back to me when we started planning an American
road trip and our intended route appeared to take in some
places where ‘liberal’ is basically a swear word. I mentioned the
slogans part of my Smart idea in a meeting. People seemed to
like it. ‘So basically, you want us to be killed?’ said Hammond
with mock indignation. No, no, no, I’m sure it’ll be fine, I
insisted.
Since the idea seemed to be a goer, I wrote some suggested
slogans on strips of paper, divided these up among three
envelopes with the presenters’ names on them and waved
everyone off to the airport. Around this time I’d started a
long-distance relationship with someone in Los Angeles. If you
live in London and start seeing someone in, say, Sheffield then
you can meet halfway. In Leicester, for example. Or Kettering.
Not places known for their romance, but at least they’re
driveable. If you’re dating someone in Los Angeles, the halfway
meeting point is New York, which is rather harder to reach in
a car. Instead, I took some time off while half the team was
heading to Florida and got on a plane to JFK.
I spent a few days dandering around Manhattan and heard
not a word from our Southern states road-trip shoot. Then
one afternoon we went for a drink with a friend called Tracey,
who’s from the American south. We’re actually filming in the
south at the moment, I said breezily. Yes, it’s all terribly
amusing, I went on, we’re writing slogans down our cars and
driving them through Alabama. Tracey looked aghast. ‘You’re
doing what?’ she spat. No, no, it’s fine, I laughed. We’re just
messing around, I’m sure it’ll just be a little bit awkward or
something.
‘Trust me,’ she continued in that casually aggressive tone New
York obliges its inhabitants to perfect. ‘I’m from down there, I
know those people. They. Will. Fucking. Kill. You.’ Oh dear me
no, I said, trying to maintain an upbeat tone. I’m sure it’ll all
be fine.
Shortly afterwards my phone rang. Several times in fact. I can’t
remember the specifics of what was said, but the words
‘properly angry’ and ‘bloody scary’ might have been used and
I think Jeremy possibly claimed they were ‘almost literally
killed’. A woman had shouted at them. Some angry men had
turned up. The atmosphere had turned sour. In the resulting
panic, Wilman had jumped into the wrong crew car as it
scarpered, leaving another team sitting on the increasingly
menacing forecourt staring at the empty seat in the back and
assuming its occupant had been kidnapped. God, that sounds
extremely frightening I thought, as I sat in a New York bar
preparing to order another cocktail.
The reaction to this sequence when it was broadcast in early
2007 was pretty extraordinary. Some ultrafans on the internet
minutely dissected it and concluded that some of the sounds
made by objects hitting cars seemed dubbed on, thereby
proving that all the locals in the scene were actors and the
entire thing was fake. I’ll let you into a secret: sometimes in
TV sounds have to be enhanced in post-production because
microphones don’t always record things with the clarity and
volume you would like, especially when they’re attached to or
being operated by people who are fearing for their lives. I can
certainly promise that at no point did one of our researchers
call up an Alabama am-dram society and demand that they
provide us with a job lot of their most toothless simpletons.
Some Americans didn’t seem to like this scene either and took
particular exception to the idea of pompous British bastards
coming to the nether parts of their great nation expressly to
poke the inhabitants with a stick until they bared their teeth.
On that score I suppose we were a bit guilty but I don’t think
we ever imagined our foolish plan would actually get such a
visceral reaction. I certainly never imagined that some idiotic
things I’d invented in an office in London could be daubed
down three cars to such dramatic effect. Secretly, I was quite
thrilled. Obviously, it’s easy to be thrilled when you’re 1,000
miles upcountry with your face in a bucket of mojito. Even so,
it was quite remarkable. It was one of several times when a
dumb, throwaway idea on Top Gear turned into something
unexpectedly memorable. I’m only slightly ashamed to admit
that it’s one of the proudest moments of my career.