Why I love 'Top Gear'

Top Gear originally appeared on TV screens in the 1990's with Clarkson in the lead presenter slot and James May also featured.

In 2001, the BBC threatened to axe the show, Clarkson put forward a new format plan and the show was given a serious makeover. The new-look 2002 series 1 had Jason Dawe and Richard Hammond as co-presenters, then James May returned to replace Dawe at the start of series 2.

The new format also introduced the Stig as a test driver. No-one really knows who the Stig is. The show's WIKI contends that there have been at least two Stigs, plus some celebrities who have 'unmasked' on the show. Unconfirmed rumours abound that one of the Stigs was Lewis Hamilton before he got his first F1 drive. We will probably never know.

The location is, and always has been a little test track in South-East England called Dunsfold.Park. It is also a privately owned aerodrome and the show is based inside an aircraft hangar.

Want to be in the audience? There is reputedly a 21-YEAR waiting list. Put your child's name on it when it's born!

The show format has also been adopted for spin-offs in Australia and the USA.

Jeremy Clarkson is nominally front man for the show, but James May and Richard Hammond take pretty well equal parts, especially when there are cars to be tested.

Jeremy Clarkson is 48 years old, and is married with 3 children. Apart from Top Gear, he is a journalist and writes columns for The Sunday Times and the Sun and has also produced videos showing him driving a number of exotic cars. He is well known for his dislike of petty bureaucracy especially if it involves preventing him from getting to A to B in the shortest possible time. His outspoken verbal style has occasionally got him into trouble!

Richard Hammond was born in Solihull in 1969. He has had a wide-ranging career in local and national radio as well as presenting a number of TV series including Brainiac and Science Abuse and currently appears in Morrisons supermarket ads. He narrowly escaped a serious car accident in 2006 driving a jet-powered Vampire car. He is nicknamed the 'Hamster' by his co-presenters. This link shows some still shots of the car. Hammond said he didn't want the film of the accident on the show website. It may or may not be somewhere in the BBC news archive but in tribute to him, I didn't go hunting for it.

James May is 46 and nicknamed 'Captain Slow' by Clarkson, unfairly, as he actually holds a speed record, driving the Bugatti Veyron (pictured above) at its top speed of 253 mph. He is a qualified pilot, and has presented a wide range of TV programmes with engineering and scientific content.

My favourite presenter? Clarkson? No, he hates cats. James May likes them and is quite cuddly, but who wants a bloke who spends his life in the shed fiddling with cars or bits of machinery. It just HAS to be Richard Hammond - the right size for a Caterham Se7en and for me.

And then, there is the Stig - who I talked about above - my theory is that there is no one person even within a single series. They have a list of racing and rally drivers and they use whoever is available. The recent unveiling of the Stig as Michael Schumacher was just a show feature - the BBC couldn't afford him full time! Who do YOU think is behind the black visor?

Well there are car tests, and more car tests - that's probably what I really like. Pedal to the metal, see how it corners, what's the inside like, how much do I have to win on the Lottery to buy one. I don't care if it doesn't have room for a week's shopping because I won't be going shopping in it.

The show usually starts with car and motoring news, which can include motorsport, new production cars and even traffic news if there are road works somewhere int he UK holding up a lot of people for a long time. Clarkson hates road works especially those with average speed cameras and where there are miles of cones and no-one working. I agree wholeheartedly.

Then there is 'Star in a reasonably-priced car'. This consists of finding an agreeable celebrity and getting them to do a few laps of the Dunsfold circuit. It's more fun to watch when it is wet. Celeb chef Jamie Oliver did a very respectable lap in wet snow. Jay Kay, a musician I really like and admire is fastest bloke. Dame Ellen MacArthur who is also someone I admire a lot is fastest lady. I am just waiting for them to get my fave celeb chef and car lover James Martin on the show.

You asked what car they used - a Chevrolet Lacetti - not a lot of them about, probably because they really are very boring.

Another fun feature is caravan destruction. This deserves a section all of its own so I gave it one.

Sometimes there are what can only be described as Whacky Races. One of the presenters drives a car to a destination and the other two use every and any form of transport they can to try and beat the car. Or, two presenters go and buy the best car they can for a set amount of cash - like £500 - and put it through a long distance drive and a track session. Basically a demolition derby to see who breaks down first.

On one show, Clarkson was on the train - pulled by a steam loco 'Tornado' - from London to Edinburgh. May was in a car - a classic 1949 Jaguar XK120 and Hammond was on a Vincent Black Shadow motor bike - also a classic of its time.. He lost - it broke down, but May beat the train by 10 minutes. Read the whole story here

The most recent variation of this feature was a 2009 Christmas special where the Top Gear team attempted to get 3 popular 4x4 models to complete a punishing drive across South America, - mainly Bolivia - including rain forest, a terrifying mountain road and desert. Two cars made it all the way to the finish. The third, due to a moment's inattention by Richard Hammond (possibly deliberate) rolled to its death on mountainous sand dunes within sight of the Pacific Ocean. Viewers saw the team well out of their comfort zone and now we know who hates bugs, who can't bear snakes and who suffers from vertigo.

Top Gear hates caravans - it's official. They have done more to creatively destroy caravans for the sake of motoring man (and woman)kind than anyone in Britain.

Drop it, squash it by dropping something on it, try to dissolve it in acid - and probably much more to come in the future.

They even tried an Evel Knievel type stunt of trying to jump a car and caravan over a stack of cars. They failed - beautifully! The attempt with a Volvo trying to clear a line of caravans was a similarly pleasing disaster - for the caravans.

In the most recent episode, James May had the bright idea to attach a caravan to a zeppelin type air balloon, put a fan on the back and fly it to a caravan park. Unfortunately he hadn't checked the weather forecast very well and he ended up seriously off course and in Norwich Airport air space. I think he probably got told off a bit for that. More than a bit, a LOT.
Read more about it here

Why do they hate caravans so much? Well, the majority of roads in the UK are one lane each way and wriggly. You try and overtake and like as not you'll find a tractor round the next bend before you've got past even the caravan part of the whole rig. So you have to sit behind it and swear or get your co-driver to try and find another way to your destination. They cause a lot of aggravation and stress.

Please don't buy one unless you live in a country like the USA or Oz where there is almost ALWAYS tons of room to overtake. Thanks.

Here's just one of the destruction attempts

I hope that in their private lives Jeremy, Richard and James pay more serious attention to being 'green' than they do on the show as they do burn a LOT of petrol.

In a recent episode they did attempt to build an electric vehicle from scratch. The result looked exactly like what you would expect the Tin Man from the Wizard of Oz to drive and it went v-e-e-r-r y v-e-e-r-r-y s-l-l-o-o-w-w-l-y because Mr May thought that 2 batteries would be sufficient - well they were for an electric milk float.

It had a sad, but hilarious ending, with the dreadful contraption rolling off into a ditch in a field, having run out of battery power. However, before that, they had managed to completely jam up the streets of Oxford and then the entire M40 motorway which they got onto by mistake.

In another programme, they found a tiny electric car - the Peel Micro car- which was small enough to fit in a lift and drive around the corridors of the BBC, but in general, green motoring has not found favour with them.

The gorgeous Tesla Roadster is more my idea of clean green fun and was also featured on the show, although Jeremy Clarkson ended up in a bit of a spat with the manufacturers over how far the car would go without re-charging and how long it then took to re-charge.

James Martin reviewed it and liked it too - see here

My every day car is a 2001 Golf TDI. For a diesel, it doesn't hang about and is very economical. It can also take lots of sailing gear, or enough boxes of collectables if I am doing a fair or car boot sale. However I am a very lucky girly because I have a second car.

While I was still with my husband John, he gave me, as a birthday present a Caterham Se7en SV Roadsport. The first Barbarella ended her short life in a vineyard in France and nearly took John with her. He had a passenger (not me) who also survived, and the insurance accepted their version of what happened. Basicaly they had had to swerve off the road on the crest of a hill to avoid someone driving too fast in the middle of the road in the opposite direction.

The insurance paid out in full, we ordered a pretty well identical car and Barbarella II was collected from Caterham's Surrey HQ in December 2004.

In August 2005, Barbarella went into a container with 5 other Caterhams (6 containers in all were shipped) and was shipped out to Houston, where we met her 6 weeks later. We were lucky to miss 2 hurricanes. including Katrina which the container ship had to divert to dodge. Two days after we left Houston in company, with an eventual destination of San Francisco, another hurricane ravaged the Gulf Coast including ripping apart the restaurant we visited our first night in the USA.

We had a great holiday, ending up with a track day at the newly opened Infineon Raceway just outside San Francisco.

Sadly John and I have split up, but my legal representative has assured me that under UK law, the car will remain mine when we divorce. Salt and frost are not good for Caterhams, so she will probably be laid up under cover for the winter.

In time, even the petrolheads at Top Gear are going to have to come to terms with the facts of climate change.

Hopefully there will be more developments like the Tesla which will keep some fun in it for all of us, or alternative fuels and cars will be developed that will not prejudice the future of the planet.

Since WWII the UK along with many other countries have created a society and a landscape that depends heavily on people having individual transport. Governments cannot keep trying to tax motorists off the road while not supporting public transport enough to ensure that everyone can get to and from the places they need and want to be. It doesn't work.

And hopefully too, the presenters of Top Gear will be around for many years to come, to tell us what's new in the motoring world and amuse and entertain us.

BBC Top Gear website