It was the motoring show that became a global phenomenon, but Top Gear needs to join the original Stig and disappear.
The original English version has been on hiatus since Andrew Flintoff was involved in a serious accident and it should become a permanent stop. I know this won’t be a popular take for the millions of fans of the show (of which I once counted myself) but the show is simply barely recognisable from its best form and the longer it goes on the worse it gets.
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Top Gear existed before the version we all know and love, fronted by Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May. It actually began way back in 1977 and ran until 2001 as a consumer motoring program, only to be reinvented by Clarkson and producer Andy Wilman in 2002.
They made cars fun and entertaining for the masses. There was very little consumer information in racing a Bugatti Veyron against public transport across Europe, but it was awesome fun to watch!
But in television there’s a phrase called ‘jumping the shark’ that perfectly encapsulates what happened to Top Gear. The term comes from Happy Days, the 1970s sitcom that made Ron Howard and Henry Winkler stars. In an episode of the fifth season Winkler’s character, Fonzie, jumps a shark on water skis while wearing his trademark leather jacket.
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This jumping the shark phrase has come to mean the moment a show has reached its creative zenith and has begun to run out of the core ideals that made it great. I remember watching Season 22 of Top Gear and its ‘Thunderbirds’ sequence and thinking this was the show’s ‘jumping the shark’ moment.
How long Clarkson, Hammond and May would have continued making the show is unclear, but at the end of that season Clarkson was dropped by the BBC after a fight with a producer and it seems the shark was well and truly jumped.
But keen to keep it going and continue its popular program, for Season 23 the BBC drafted in a new array of hosts – and thus the root of the problem of Top Gear emerged.
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A big part of the reason it should disappear is because the BBC has seemingly never understood what actually made it so popular at its peak. Clarkson, Hammond and May were ‘car guys’ who became celebrities, they weren’t famous to start with. And yet, every time a new version of Top Gear appeared it was hosted by celebs with an interest in cars (maybe).
Top Gear’s hosts since the ‘original trio’ departed have included a radio personality, Joey from Friends and a cricketer. In the same way I don’t want to watch a cooking show hosted by Max Verstappen (with no offence to Max’s cooking ability), I don’t care what a former cricketer or an actor thinks of a new car.
The BBC and other networks tried to spin it off into regional formats, but it only served to dilute the original product even further. Top Gear Australia has been hosted by a cartoonist, a trumpeter and an actor, best known for his toilet jokes – it’s a mystery why it flopped…
Its most recent iteration had many of the same production crew as the UK version, but once again fell into the trap of hiring ‘famous faces’ and simply failed to work, in my humble opinion.
It’s interesting that post-Top Gear Clarkson, Hammond and May knew their success was built on their teamwork and stuck together, creating The Grand Tour for Amazon Prime. Although it never quite achieved the highs of peak Top Gear, it was a solid offering.
Crucially, though, the three men know that the time of this kind of show has run its course and have decided to hang it up. Better to bow out than be shuffled out the door.
Hopefully the powers-that-be at the BBC and other networks realise the time has come for Top Gear to head to the big car park in the sky…
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