More than 350m viewers of all ages in at least 20 countries tune in to the show to drool over the fast cars, chuckle at the madcap stunts and laddish japes, and marvel that three grown men pay the bills by driving cars very, very fast and often to the point of destruction.
But is it all fun and games or are the high jinks and banter just an act? Does Jeremy Clarkson go into a sulk between takes if he doesn’t win all the challenges? Does “Captain Slow” — aka James May — drive like a nonagenarian? Do the presenters do the driving and the hard graft or leave it to lowly researchers? Who is the mysterious Stig? And has Richard Hammond had his teeth whitened?
Top Gear returns to BBC2 tonight after its World Cup break, so with just a few days of filming to go and after months of negotiation with the BBC, we were offered a rare glimpse behind the scenes and went in search of answers.
It’s a sweltering Friday and Clarkson, Hammond and “the other one from Top Gear”, as May habitually dubs himself, are competing in the White Van Challenge to see who will make the best “white van man”.
Each was given up to £1,000 to spend on the van of their choice and “typical white van man” tests will include tailgating a Ford Mondeo (to see who can drive closest “up its arse”); the loading challenge to see who can load and unload their van the fastest with household junk and “illegal immigrants”; and the decibel challenge to see whose van is the most noisily intimidating to other road users.
Clarkson is already getting into character. Or rather, he’s arrived in character. He’s stormed onto the set ranting about an article in The Sun claiming Friday Night with Jonathan Ross is the only un-PC show on BBC television (a reference to Ross’s recent interview with David Cameron in which the Conservative leader was asked whether he was sexually aroused by Margaret Thatcher). “We will have to beat him,” says Clarkson, only half joking.
Filming is taking place on the regular Top Gear test track at Dunsfold airfield, a location at the end of an unnamed road just south of Guildford, Surrey, that would flummox many a sat nav. The Top Gear team is tucked away in a corner of the former second world war Canadian air force base, the car park littered with the remains of Top Gears past, including the sorry shell of the convertible Renault Espace from the MPV Challenge — last seen going up in flames in a carwash.
Top Gear HQ is housed in a snot-green 1940s prefab littered with old mags, yellowing newspapers, discarded props, cans of pop and a life-sized cutout of John Prescott. The loos are in an outhouse. In what passes as a dressing room are an ironing board, a few distended woolly jumpers and an alarming number of haircare products. Surely the Get Spikey Radical Control Glue must be Hammond’s, but whose is the Mane hair-thickening spray/bald-patch cover-up?
If you thought Top Gear was all about supercars and celebrities and jetting to swish hotels in search of stunning test drive backdrops, you’re wrong. Today it’s 32C on the tarmac at the Dunsfold track and the only shade is by the side of a K-reg Ford Transit — which also happens to be Clarkson’s ride (although he arrived in an Aston Martin DB9).
“The Transit is the Hoover among vacuum cleaners; the Biro among ballpoint pens,” says Clarkson to camera with typical bravado as a long day of filming gets under way. “It’s a 2.5 litre diesel, it’s done 73,000 miles, apparently, and it cost £800.”
“It’s a hunk of shite,” says Hammond, casting a withering look at the battered Transit.
Cut to Hammond’s wheels. Hammond has bought, or rather the researchers have bought for him (“Of course we bought them ourselves. We bought them from Mr, er, Vanos at the, er, van, er, the van shop”) a very, very small 970cc Suzuki Supercarry. It’s about half the size of Clarkson’s Transit and about a third the size of May’s LDV Convoy Box Van.
Cue lots of heightist gags at Hammond’s expense — “Did you wash it on too hot a setting?” “Was this the only one that allowed you to see over the steering wheel?” “Was it bespoke measured?”
Clarkson, Hammond and May appear in high spirits, despite having returned jetlagged from 19 days of filming in the United States less than 48 hours earlier. But although it’s merciless ribbing as usual on the outside, there are signs that nerves are fraying. Hammond has taken up smoking again two years after giving up and Clarkson is gnawing feverishly on his nicotine gum (he announced he was trying to give up earlier this year).
May is also dragging shiftily on a Camel. “Don’t tell my mum I’m smoking,” he says. “She doesn’t like it and I only do it when these two are around. They stress me out.”
Continued on page two...()Continued from page one
It’s clear none of the presenters has been near the “hair glue”, May has barely managed to tie his shoelaces and Clarkson got dressed in such a hurry he looks like an escapee from a 1960s surfing movie. “Is that a picture of drugs on that T-shirt?” asks May.
“No, it’s a mountain, James,” says Clarkson chippily. “I’ve no idea where it came from.”
The Top Gear crew consists of one director, Phil Churchward (romantically linked to Vicki Butler-Henderson, presenter of Fifth Gear, a rival show on Five); a series producer, Pat Doyle, whose previous work includes Ten Years Younger, Channel 4’s extreme makeover show; an assistant producer; various camera and sound men and women; and three or four runners. Doyle is producing the show while Andy Wilman, the harried executive producer and Clarkson’s former schoolmate at Repton, the independent school in Derbyshire, is locked in a BBC editing suite.
Wilman is credited by everyone but himself with bringing the show back from oblivion and turning it into a worldwide success. It has become cult viewing in the US where it was shown until recently on the Discovery Channel and is now on BBC World. Top Gear was downloaded from the internet more times than any other show in the world last year.
The relationship between Clarkson and Wilman was described by AA Gill, Clarkson’s Sunday Times colleague, as “essentially homosexual” — the Elton and David of the motoring world. And it’s true that Top Gear’s appeal has a lot to do with laddish bonding between the cast. On one level it is a show about cars. But it is really a show about men talking about cars.
Past episodes have featured a race to see whether Clarkson could get to Tower 42 in London from Italy in a Bugatti Veyron (carrying a rare truffle) before May and Hammond could arrive in a light aircraft; playing football in Toyota Aygos; smashing up caravans in a game of “caravan conkers”; and a contest to turn three cars into amphibious vehicles.
Doyle raises an incredulous eyebrow at my question about hauling the bedraggled threesome into make-up. “Make-up?” And, true, there is not a stylist in sight.
For reasons that will later become clear Doyle is looking pretty shabby himself, sporting white shellsuit bottoms and a back-to-front baseball cap. But before we get to that, there is a quarter-mile drag race to contend with, which Hammond wins hands down because the Supercarry is so light it’s virtually airborne.
The decibel test follows, refereed by a “boffin” — Lisa from the Motor Industry Research Association, who measures how much noise each van can make. Hammond loses this one by a mile. “It sounds like a slightly angry wasp,” says May. “No, it’s like a fairly calm wasp,” betters Clarkson.
Then down to the more aggressively competitive stunts. First, it’s the tailgating challenge, the idea of which is to replicate the kind of motorway encounters for which white vans are notorious. Each of the three must get as close as possible to the back of a Mondeo without actually touching. At speeds of about 55mph with just millimetres of separation it’s quite hair-raising to watch. This is a test of “I don’t give a damn” attitude and Clarkson wins, as you might expect, although there is some argument as to whether he hit the Mondeo.
“It’s like working in a playground,” says Hammond, staggering from his little van and collapsing onto the tarmac with laughter. “My five-year-old daughter is always asking me, ‘Daddy, when you go and play with uncle Jeremy and uncle James, is that work?’ All her friends’ dads are bank managers or businessmen or builders.”
May ponders: “I thought the other day, if this ended and I had to get a proper job in an office it would be a disaster. I’d go and blow something up because I think it’s funny.”
But there’s no opportunity for reflection because it’s time for the loading and unloading challenge and the reason for Doyle’s peculiar attire. It soon transpires that this is to be renamed the Jonathan Ross challenge — that is, a contest to be even more politically incorrect than Wossy.
Clarkson and his fellow presenters each have their own badly dressed “illegal immigrant” to stow in the back of their vans along with a sorry selection of old furniture, car boot sale ornaments and a ropy oil painting. To press the point, the vans each have a copy of the Daily Mail on the dashboard, and Clarkson is “coming over all right wing”. Fittingly, Richard Littlejohn, the Mail’s “man of the people” columnist, is today blustering about immigration.
Clarkson has decided his immigrant is Albanian. “The natural habitat of the Albanian is under the mattresses in the back of the van,” he says, flexing his non-PC muscles. “He does not understand English apart from ‘DSS’ and ‘free house’.”
Then, as an aside: “If we don’t get more complaints than Ross, I will be seriously disappointed.”
Continued on page three...()Continued from page two
Clarkson, May and Hammond really do get their hands dirty to perform the tasks. All the loading and unloading is done by them, although Hammond gets a little help strapping his mattresses on the roof and Clarkson makes his immigrant (actually a runner called Pete) lift one of his — a concession to the two discs he slipped in his back.
For the next task, which involves removing one of the van doors and replacing it with one that doesn’t quite match — a common van feature — Hammond and May again get stuck in like good Boy Scouts. Clarkson, meanwhile, having failed to be excused on the grounds of “hay fever”, improvises by ramming his door off its hinges with May’s van before sticking the new one on with half a mile of black gaffer tape.
Last year Top Gear won an Emmy for best non-scripted entertainment (meaning it is not written by a team of dedicated writers). Clarkson said he was unable to go to New York to receive the award because he was too busy writing the script for the next show. The programme is scripted up to a point. Clarkson writes an outline of events with a few funny lines but there’s plenty of room for improvisation and the usual sparring, and the crew rarely refer to the script once they’re on set. The joking and jibes between takes are funnier than many of those that make it onto the screen, although the majority would not pass the BBC censor.
Despite its success, Top Gear is an endangered species. Clarkson is convinced its days are numbered because, like any show, it will eventually run out of plot lines and gags. Wilman hopes he will have the courage to kill it off before it flags. There is at least one more series in the pipeline, which is due to start on October 8 and run until Christmas.
Critics will no doubt celebrate when it is towed to the scrapheap. It has become a target for activists and campaign groups on subjects ranging from global warming (Ken Livingstone has named flood-prone areas of London “Clarkson zones, so people will know who caused them” when the polar ice cap melts) to damage to the environment (Clarkson drove a Toyota pick-up truck into a horse chestnut tree, and crushed some rare foliage driving up a Scottish mountain in a Land Rover). It has also been accused of promoting irresponsible driving, causing road deaths, persecution of cyclists and Germans (Clarkson suggested a German car should have “a sat nav that only goes to Poland”), insensitivity towards social minorities by dint of being all male and all white, and . . . well, you get the picture.
It seems oddly far-fetched that a small crew working out of a Portakabin at the edge of an airfield filming a few fun-filled capers could stir up so much righteous anger. Could it be that its most vocal critics, such as Sir Jonathon Porritt and Janet Street-Porter, haven’t read, or have forgotten, the social satires of George Orwell or Kurt Vonnegut?
Once Top Gear has gone, who will hold the line against the march of political dogma? Spare us the mind-numbing imbecility of Big Brother and breakfast TV and the presenter banter that sounds as though it has been scripted by the Ministry of Fun. Better surely to be wiped out by global catastrophe than suffer a slow daytime death at the hands of Richard and Judy.
Clarkson says it is a battle they cannot hope to win. “The eco-ists have the ear of the prime minister, the leader of the opposition, the whole of the BBC, most of the country’s newspapers, every single university campus and nearly every government in the world. Whereas I have the ear of the Ford Capri Owners Club. Which is comprised of half a dozen men in Dennis Waterman-style leather bomber jackets.”
By 3pm Hammond is dozing at the wheel of his Suzuki. A late lunch of sweaty sandwiches and sausage rolls is served from the back of a scruffy Mondeo. Whoever thought working in TV was glamorous? Pete, the runner and recent science graduate, has spent all day dressed in a red vest and “illegal immigrant” shellsuit bottoms, lugging various bits of kit and removing plates of congealed buffet savouries. He’s thinking of training to become a teacher.
The final test of the day requires a guest appearance from the Stig, who will be posing as a police driver for the getaway driver challenge in which our three presenters will try to stay ahead for as long as possible in their shonky old vans.
In a determined effort to uncover the face behind the mirrored visor, the Sunday Times photographer and I make a dash for base, only to arrive just at the moment the Stig, helmet already firmly in place, is sliding into the driver’s seat of a Vauxhall Astra police car. We follow, in hot pursuit, back to the trackside to find the Stig chatting to Clarkson, visor up. I can just make out white skin, straight brown hair, and are those blueish eyes? But then Clarkson spots our plot and snaps the visor shut. Foiled again.
From then on the Stig (Stig was the name Clarkson and Wilman gave to any new boy who arrived at school) remains silent for fear of giving away his identity. “He’s not a very talkative chap,” goads Clarkson. Most of the crew don’t appear to know who he is. One camera assistant tells me that last time she was on set he ate his lunch in the back of an ambulance “so no one would see him”.
The Daily Express claimed earlier this year that it had identified the Stig as Julian Bailey, 44, a former Formula One racing driver, but the Stig I saw looked younger. A snoop around the Stig’s dressing room yields few clues, although I can confirm that he wears size 10 racing shoes and appears to enjoy a game of Scalextric.
The presenters are equally cagey about plans for future Top Gear episodes, although I overhear something about a space shuttle, a dead cow and being roadies for the Who.
May, aka Captain Slow, lives up to his nickname by coming last in the getaway challenge. Which leaves one final unanswered question — has Hammond had his teeth whitened? There is no denying they are a suspiciously pristine pearly white. But he still insists they have not been bleached. “I have not had my teeth whitened!” he squeals.
“See, it’s the mutual loathing that makes it work,” says Clarkson without a grin.
The White Van Man episode will be shown at 8pm on Sunday, July 30, on BBC2
