The other day I asked one of the office team to count how many shows we had done of Top Gear, “the new version”, since its launch in 2002.

“I don’t want to miss the 100th show,” I said. “That’s an important landmark and we should be ready for it so we can celebrate the occasion in some way.” A few minutes later the Top Gear worker bee returned. “We’ve done 105,” she said.

So there you go: the landmark centenary show, if you’re an interested Top Gear fan, was some time back in the last series — probably that really rubbish one we did with the customised Renault Avantime — and now lies in an unmarked grave somewhere on Dave.

This little tale of calendar-related incompetence sums up a lot about life on Top Gear from the inside. Without sounding immodest, we know the show is a hit and that it means quite a lot to some people, but in the vortex it never feels like that.

The night we won an Emmy, Jeremy will probably have got the news in a text while on a five-hour drive to God knows where for a shoot in the rain the next day. When we won the third National Television Award there was no champagne and girls jumping out of cakes — I remember somebody playing the big moment down the phone to me while I was standing in a freezing cold Earls Court eating a pasty and watching a Top Gear Live rehearsal fall apart.

I’m not complaining for one moment, though, because everyone on the team chooses this hair-shirt work ethic, and while most people have only their memories as a record of the past, we’ll have a nice bulging archive, with all our best efforts preserved for ever. Or until someone throws them in a skip.

The thing that makes me most proud of Top Gear, though, is not the contents of the archive or the awards cupboard or ­indeed the viewing figures; it’s the fact that we’ve kept this incarnation of it alive and kicking for so long. When we started, back in 2002, I predicted we’d be gone after 50 shows, but a hundred (and five) later, here we still are.

The reasons for that include the brilliance and chemistry of the presenters, the cinematography and the cheekiness of the tone, but there are other factors that have kept us fresh too. First, although it’s seen as one, Top Gear isn’t a format. A format is The Apprentice or Wife Swap or Kitchen Nightmares, programmes whose popularity depends on adhering to a strict set of editorial rules — here comes the incompetent restaurant owner with the crap menu; here begins the argument between the slob husband and the feminist wife.

Top Gear is much looser than that, and the beauty of it is that we can approach each new series like a band going into the studio to make an album. That sounds dreadfully pompous, but it’s true. Viewers know what sort of stuff they’re going to get, but there’s still an element of “Wonder what the Top Gear boys will get up to this time”. They don’t know if we’ve done an acoustic album, a punk album or, as it would be if Jeremy had his way, a prog-rock box set.

The other benefit of this looseness is that we can shape the show around what the presenters feel like doing. That alone keeps everything less predictable. At the start of the series Jeremy always springs into the office with a hundred “I saw this man/car/thing on telly and I want to do this . . . ” sentences. James and Richard are the same. Only three years ago Richard bounded in and said he wanted to know what it felt like to go “really, really, really f****** fast”, and that episode ended brilliantly — a superb example of the loose-format programme-making method.

Another reason we’re still chugging along is that we make it for the right broadcaster. It makes us laugh when, every time we get in a spot of bother, we read in the papers that the BBC will “gag Clarkson” or make us hire a girl or force us to slow down. It's all bollocks, and the proof of that is simple — just look at what goes out each week. Have you seen us slow down? Do you think Jeremy isn’t saying what he wants to say? Sure, the BBC can be a mother hen, but ultimately the grown-ups who control editorial policy have a deep understanding of what we are trying to do, and I doubt we could make the Top Gear you know anywhere else.

The other thing I’m most proud of? The way we crossed over from petrolhead land to embracing such a broad church. Our goal in 2002 was to reignite a car show, simple as that, with a target of 3m viewers; we never planned for or saw what was to come.

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