‘We wanted a mystery driver; someone who would remain anonymous and remove the
human element from high-speed testing. Someone, in fact, who was
superhuman.”
So speaks the Stig, the Top Gear racing driver who became a household name. Or
rather, an enigma without a name, until the internet gave it away. What is
surprising is not that the Stig’s identity — or one of his many identities —
was revealed after months of speculation, but that Top Gear managed to keep
it a secret for so long.
“Who is the Stig?” was the reportedly most-asked question on the internet in
2008, to the extent that online and text-answering services, agencies that
employ armies of freelance researchers to find the answer to any question,
rated it one of the most popular questions of all time, along with the
meaning of life.
A testimony to the success of the Top Gear show and Jeremy Clarkson, who came
up with the idea, naming the Stig after the monicker given to new boys at
Repton, the school he attended with Andy Wilman, Top Gear’s executive
producer.
Yet few people apart from a handful of BBC production staff and journalists
(including some on this newspaper), knew who was behind the mirrored racing
visor. It was an impressive exercise in secrecy, especially given that it
was accomplished without the benefit of a gagging order from the courts, or
the protection of the Official Secrets Act.
“It made going to work quite difficult,” says Perry McCarthy, who was the Stig
for 22 episodes of Top Gear after the relaunch of the popular show in 2002.
“Before I got to the Dunsfold aerodrome I would actually get my crash helmet
out of the bag and wear it in the car with the visor down as I checked into
security. They would recognise my Audi and let me through.
“Then I would go into the gatehouse, where I had a little room out the back
for me to put my suit on — my Stiggy skin — and then drive into the area
where we had the studio. I would be fully Stigged up so no one could
recognise me.”
Even during breaks in filming, McCarthy was discouraged from speaking to
members of the audience lest his voice offer clues to his identity. “When it
came to lunchtime I would be in the queue for catering with everyone else,
including the celebrity guests and members of the audience. If I ever spoke,
I spoke with a really heavy accent. Everyone thought I was French. No one
ever twigged except Gambon, one of the celebrities. He caught on, and said,
‘I think that French accent’s a bit suspect, mate.’
“I saw him at an airport a couple of years ago and said, ‘Hello, you might not
recognise me. The last time I saw you I was in a helmet and suit’.”
McCarthy’s stint on the show came about after a chance meeting with Clarkson
in 2002 at the launch of McCarthy’s book Flat Out and Flat Broke. At the
event, McCarthy recalls, Clarkson approached him and told him the BBC was
thinking of resurrecting Top Gear. An audition for a role as a presenter
followed but then the Top Gear team had a brainwave: “They were finalising
the last few bits and decided they didn’t want a race driver as a presenter,
so they came up with the other idea: a masked racing driver who would remain
anonymous. The idea was to take out the personality from the purity of lap
times. It would give the true measure of a car’s performance.”
At its inception, Top Gear was a rather staid and traditional motoring
programme. In its revitalised format, celebrities were invited to
participate in a feature called Star in a Reasonably Priced Car. Part of the
Stig’s duties was to coach them in driving a Suzuki Liana (the Reasonably
Priced Car has since changed to a Chevrolet Lacetti) as fast as possible on
a lap of the Dunsfold circuit. Keeping anonymity in those circumstances was
especially difficult, recaclls McCarthy. His French accent and crash helmet
were enough to fool most of the guests, but not all.
“I knew some of them from being on the media circuit,” he says. “I remember
Ross Kemp was one of the drivers — and me and him are old mates. It seemed
silly to keep the crash helmet on and speak a French accent with him in the
passenger seat, so I just took it off and talked to him normally. David Soul
was another one. I had met him in a pub near where I live.
“One or two of the other celebrities tried to guess, but whatever they said, I
would answer, ‘How did you know?’ even if they had said, ‘Are you Michael
Schumacher?’”
Occasionally, he was starstruck enough to drop his guard. “When Patrick
Stewart was the star in the car I just couldn’t resist,” he says. “I looked
over from the passenger seat at Captain Jean-Luc Picard behind the wheel and
being a huge Trekkie, I dropped the French accent and just said, ‘Engage’.”
The driving ability of each of his guests differed widely: “Ross wanted to
tear the steering wheel off because it wasn’t going fast enough. Harry
Enfield, who was the first to have a go at the timed lap, thought it was all
a bit of a joke and didn’t try very hard, until he realised how seriously
other people were taking it, then asked to come back. Gordon Ramsay was
great because he actually listened to what I was saying, and Boris Johnson,
well, Boris was Boris.
“Tara Palmer-Tomkinson didn’t listen to anything. At one point we were going
towards the wall sideways and I leant over from the passenger seat,
controlled the car on full opposite lock, and when I was doing it, she took
both hands off the wheel and started hitting me, saying, ‘Stop it, stop it,
stop it’.”
McCarthy left the show in 2003. Accounts of his departure vary. Websites have
reported that he was loose-lipped and gave away his identity, forcing the
BBC to write him out of the third series. McCarthy says he never went back
on his word about keeping the secret and that there were differences of
opinion with the BBC when he tried to trademark the Stig and turn it into a
commercial brand.
For his on-screen demise he was filmed spectacularly driving off the end of an
aircraft carrier into the sea. But like Doctor Who, in which the character
lives on after the actor has been written out of the series, the Stig was
destined to survive.
Right from the very beginning there has been more than one Stig. When McCarthy
was unavailable to drive, Julian Bailey, 47, a former Formula One driver for
Tyrell, put on the black suit and stood in for him. Then when the Black Stig
met his watery end in 2003, he was replaced by White Stig. It was recently
reported that this Stig was Ben Collins, a film stunt driver and occasional
test driver for this newspaper.
Collins denied the claims and the truth is that the White Stig is not one
driver; the character has been played by at least four others, all
scorchingly quick on the track. In the spirit of the show and preserving the
mystery of the character, we’re not going to say who they were. Except one,
who was unmasked in the Swedish press and on the internet. For the Winter
Olympics special, where the Stig drove a rocket-powered Mini down a ski jump
and launched into the air, the team called up Dan Lang, a Swedish snowmobile
champion.
Of course, the beauty of an anonymous character is that anyone can play him,
provided they possess the necessary driving skills. Sometimes, only the
trademark suit and helmet are required: when Top Gear won Most Popular
Factual Programme at the National Television Awards in October, the Stig
ambled on stage to collect the trophy. He was later photographed leaving the
BBC without his helmet on and has been identified only as “Will”.
Perhaps the unveiling of the Stig’s identities was inevitable: “I remember at
that first meeting with Top Gear, when we talked about a mystery driver,
they were going to call him the Gimp,” says McCarthy. “I resisted. I said
nothing stays a secret in motor racing and I don’t want to be forever
remembered as the Gimp.”
Maybe nothing does remain a secret, but to millions of viewers, the Stig is
not a man but an idea, possibly an extraterrestrial, introduced in each
week’s Top Gear in trademark style with lines such as: “Some say his left
nipple is the shape of the Nürburgring . . . all we know is that he’s called
the Stig.”
Perhaps the more Stigs are revealed, the more mysterious the character will
become. Like the classic scene in Spartacus (“No! I’m Spartacus”), the more
people who claim to be him the stronger the myth grows. This may have been
what drove Clarkson finally to go public last week and out the driver
himself: “Here goes,” he wrote, “. . . it’s the BBC royal reporter, Nicholas
Witchell.”
The men in the helmet
Perry McCarthy
The original “Black Stig” made 22 episodes before being killed off. He’s
threatening to return
Ben Collins
“Outed” as the White Stig last month, Collins is a 33-year-old racing driver
from Bristol
Julian Bailey
The former F1 driver stood in for McCarthy as the Black Stig and was named in
McCarthy’s book
Dan Lang
The snowmobile champion played the White Stig in the stunt where he drove a
Mini off a ski jump
Suspected Stigs
Michael Schumacher
McCarthy says the F1 driver was the name most often suggested by Top Gear’s
celebrity guests
Damon Hill
Once featured in Star in a Reasonably Priced Car and seemed to hint he was the
Stig
Sir Tom McKillop
Top Gear’s website said the Royal Bank of Scotland boss had been moonlighting
as the Stig, which might explain the bank’s losses
Clarkson's choice
Nicholas Witchell
Prince Charles said the BBC royal watcher was ghastly; Clarkson said he was
the Stig. Only one was right
Some say...
He never blinks, and he roams around the woods at night foraging for wolves
He appears on high-value stamps in Sweden, and can catch fish with his tongue
He naturally faces magnetic north, and all his legs are hydraulic
His heart ticks like a watch, and he’s confused by stairs
His voice can only be heard by cats, and he has two sets of knees
