The intentionally bad pun is one of the male vices that the presenters of Top Gear would rush to celebrate if the government ever placed a tax on puerile wordplay. Jeremy Clarkson prides himself on his dissident resistance to Nanny Statism, though it must be said that the BBC iPlayer, on which Top Gear is the chief attraction, is hardly samizdat publishing.
The first episode of the 11th series opened with Clarkson fighting back against the carbon-footprint brigade. To that end the hybrid Toyota Prius was driven as fast as it could go to show that it was less fuel-efficient than a large-engined BMW at 17mpg. I'm not convinced about the real-life scientific relevance of this research. As it happens, I've got what Clarkson calls a 'horrid eco-box' and a couple of weeks ago I drove it to and from Dorset at standard motorway speed - i.e. between 80 and 90mph. And I averaged just below 60mpg of petrol. So I reckon they must have been flooring the poor Prius at about 120mph on Top Gear. Note to readers: if you want to drive that fast, don't buy a Prius. And move to Germany.
The signature attitude of the show is that of a frustrated company executive letting his hair down, following a big steak lunch with a good bottle of wine, and leaning out of his powerful car to stick two fingers up to some passing vegan on a bicycle.
It's an attitude that you can hear in the very inflexion of the presenter's voices, a kind of overemphatic irony and exaggerated indignation that, such is its popularity, threatens to become the blokeish lingua franca of Middle England. Watching the first episode of the new series it dawned on me that Top Gear is the middle-aged Top of the Pops for the generation that grew up on Top of the Pops. It might almost have qualified as an original insight had Comic Relief not done Top Gear of the Pops last year.
There's the same set-up of a cut-out audience brought into the studio to add atmosphere, the same badinage between Jeremy Clarkson and his sidekicks as that between Tony Blackburn and the Hairy Cornflake in TOTP's heyday. And, of course, the cars are the bands.
It's a winning formula, but such an unchanging one that Clarkson felt compelled to joke that the new episode was not a repeat. 'You're not watching Dave,' he quipped. But we could have been. And many viewers will do in the months and years to come. Like some road monster, it just keeps going on and on. Carbon footprint? Top Gear is a lesson in recycling: it is its own carbon copy.