Last year Top Gear won an Emmy for best non-scripted entertainment (meaning it is not written by a team of dedicated writers). Clarkson said he was unable to go to New York to receive the award because he was too busy writing the script for the next show. The programme is scripted up to a point. Clarkson writes an outline of events with a few funny lines but there?s plenty of room for improvisation and the usual sparring, and the crew rarely refer to the script once they?re on set. The joking and jibes between takes are funnier than many of those that make it onto the screen, although the majority would not pass the BBC censor.
Despite its success, Top Gear is an endangered species. Clarkson is convinced its days are numbered because, like any show, it will eventually run out of plot lines and gags. Wilman hopes he will have the courage to kill it off before it flags. There is at least one more series in the pipeline, which is due to start on October 8 and run until Christmas.
Critics will no doubt celebrate when it is towed to the scrapheap. It has become a target for activists and campaign groups on subjects ranging from global warming (Ken Livingstone has named flood-prone areas of London ?Clarkson zones, so people will know who caused them? when the polar ice cap melts) to damage to the environment (Clarkson drove a Toyota pick-up truck into a horse chestnut tree, and crushed some rare foliage driving up a Scottish mountain in a Land Rover). It has also been accused of promoting irresponsible driving, causing road deaths, persecution of cyclists and Germans (Clarkson suggested a German car should have ?a sat nav that only goes to Poland?), insensitivity towards social minorities by dint of being all male and all white, and . . . well, you get the picture.
It seems oddly far-fetched that a small crew working out of a Portakabin at the edge of an airfield filming a few fun-filled capers could stir up so much righteous anger. Could it be that its most vocal critics, such as Sir Jonathon Porritt and Janet Street-Porter, haven?t read, or have forgotten, the social satires of George Orwell or Kurt Vonnegut?
Once Top Gear has gone, who will hold the line against the march of political dogma? Spare us the mind-numbing imbecility of Big Brother and breakfast TV and the presenter banter that sounds as though it has been scripted by the Ministry of Fun. Better surely to be wiped out by global catastrophe than suffer a slow daytime death at the hands of Richard and Judy.
Clarkson says it is a battle they cannot hope to win. ?The eco-ists have the ear of the prime minister, the leader of the opposition, the whole of the BBC, most of the country?s newspapers, every single university campus and nearly every government in the world. Whereas I have the ear of the Ford Capri Owners Club. Which is comprised of half a dozen men in Dennis Waterman-style leather bomber jackets.?
, apparently...
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