Top Gear: Running on Empty?

"Tonight, James May examines a truly interesting car in an informative item that is much too short; Hammond does media pennance in a Mexican sports car and Jeremy does a tired car review and rehashes something that wasn't even funny the first time round." In other words, more of the same TG (Typical Guff).

Not long ago I complained about the Top Gear barrel-bottom scraping in Low Revs on Top Gear. My fundamental argument was that the format was getting a little jaded and tended to repeat its former glories. I had hoped that once the series got into its stride we would be rewarded with more original tomfoolery - and the occasional interesting report on the latest supercar.

The world's most beautiful car. Image courtesy of 

fordmustag.in

I have been sorely disappointed. Programme 3 rehashed the old dash across Europe format, which I did indeed watch due to the car - a beautiful Ford Mustang Shelby, but even that particular symphony of lines and V8 engine tones was not enough to lift the piece from the merely banal.

Episode 4 got off to a less-than-good start when the new Vauxhall Astra VXR was tested against the Renault Mégane RS  and the Ford Focus ST. But wasn't that last season too? And the season before that? And the one before that?

The unspeakbaly mundane Mastretta.

Image courtesy of autocars 4x4.com

Richard Hammond's eminently forgettable portion of the show was a fence-mending exercise, the result of unfortunate comments he made in the previous series. Probably to avoid legal action or revenue loss of some sort, Hammond road-tested the Mexican Mastretta MXT sports car. The road test involved Hammond driving rather woodenly along a Mexican road making rather neutral comments about a car that was positively screaming out to be called ugly. Where was the famous TG outspokenness and independence when it was needed?

And if that wasn't bad enough, it would seem that episode 4 was sponsored by the KIA cee'd which was road tested by Jeremy Clarkson and found to be better than an exploding superannuated Vauxhall Vectra.  To me this farrago of supposedly comically bizarre tests spoke of a lack of real creativity. Yes, I know that the show is deliberately infantile and that juxtaposing seemingly unrelated ideas can indeed be a basis for enlightening or comic moments both in life and on TV, but anyone with children knows that what is charmingly endearing the first few times can become unbearably tiresome if repeated ad nauseam.

Another picture of the world's most beautiful car, courtesy

of Wikipedia

Then we had the KIA rugby match at Twickenham, which was nothing more than a rehash of a previous series' Toyota Aygo vs VW Fox car football match. As a rugbyphobe, the churning up of the "hallowed" turf of Twickenham did not shock me - neither did the bumps and bashes received by the cars as I suspect that KIA was more than willing to supply their wares free in exchange for so much exposure on a single programme. But... wait a minute. Didn't we see Twickenham the previous week too? Wasn't it the starting point of the Mustang vs. train dash? Are the production team at Top Gear really getting so lazy, so complacent  and so condescendingly dismissive of the audience that they use the same location for two different items in two consecutive weeks? Was I the only one to notice?

The indestructible, but unroadworthy, Hilux; its

chassis is held together by the panels - an allegory 

of the present series?
Image courtesy of t3gstatic.com

Furthermore, was I the only one to notice the canned laughter that greeted the comments of the team at the very end of the show as they summed up the match? We could all see that the audience behind was smiling, not laughing - I don't even think it deserved a smile, but most definitely no-one was laughing.

Top Gear is in decline. It is like the Toyota Hilux from the programme's famous attempt at killing one. There is a dearth of real creativity. The programme's chassis is broken and is only just holding together thanks to some rather rusty panels. Perhaps it needs to be put into storage - for a couple of years at least. In a way the canned laughter is symptomatic of the situation. The production team cannot depend on the live audience to appreciate the programme as much as they used to. In the past it was obvious to one and all that the laughter was genuine. Now, however, post-production resorts to artifice.

When introducing the Stig for this edition, Jeremy Clarkson's introduction began "Some say he's 49% horse..." I'd say that Top Gear at the moment is at least 49% old ideas and about 46% desperation. What will we see this Sunday: a car vs. the British Army, a rocket-powered car stunt, an aquatic car or another Reliant Robin gag?

Worryingly, I have just found out that the last two shows are a special: the "boys" strike out in search of the source of the Nile - a nice paid holiday if you can get it. Yet again, we see that there is a creativity deficit. A two-show extravaganza in what are usually stand-alone TV shows of whatever type is usually the first tentative tug on the bell-rope of  their death knell. When the credits start to roll on such a programme and we see the (in)famous words "To be continued", we should always add the mental caveat: "but not for much longer".