For the past month, I’ve been on the Top Gear Live world tour so the only driving I’ve done is in a Lamborghini, indoors and sideways. The lights in the arena would go down, a voice of God would announce my name, I’d floor the throttle, kick the tail out, arrive on stage in a flurry of tyre squeal and fireworks and shout: “Hello, Sydney.” Which was a bit embarrassing if I was in Auckland.

There would then follow an hour and a half of more tyre squeal, explosions and shouting. AA Gill described it as all the headaches he’d ever had in one go — and he had to go through the process only once. We were doing it four times a day, which meant as night fell I was too exhausted and broken to operate anything more complicated than a bottle opener. Which is why I’d be taken back to the hotel by a driver.

This sounds very Elton Johnish but there is one big problem with using chauffeurs. Almost none of them can drive a car.

Let us first of all examine the case of the chap I used in Hong Kong. We’ll call him Albert, because that’s his name. Albert had a Porsche Cayenne and what he liked to do was test every one of the speeds it would go. We’d start off with 37 and then we’d do 105, 21, 16, 84, 9, 0, 163, 41 and so on until he’d established that they were all working properly.

Then he’d start testing the braking distances: 47 to 41, 50 to 5, 16 to 15 and, once, a terrifying 170 to 3. The range of possibilities was enormous and all of them were very bad, especially as Albert had the spectacularly annoying habit of impersonating the engine noise as we lurched along.

Cornering, however, was his speciality. He would make the noise of the tyres screeching as he turned each bend into a series of straight lines interspersed with a series of violent jerks. He was a lovely man. Which is why I felt so guilty, sitting alongside him, imagining what he might look like with a pencil jammed into his throat.

Elsewhere in the world the drivers were far better but each one of them had roadcraft habits every bit as irritating as hawking up phlegm. They’d follow the car in front too closely, sit too near the wheel, brake for no reason on the motorway, steer too vigorously, dawdle or, worst of all, pretend they knew where they were going when plainly they didn’t.

Naturally, each would claim he was an above average driver — we all do, despite the statistical impossibility of it being the case — and it’s probably true. They probably were better than most. But the fact is that everyone has their own driving style and it’s never quite as good as your own.

For instance. When the lights on a dual carriageway are red and you have a choice of lanes in which to stop, I would never pull up behind a Peugeot. This is because anyone with a Peugeot knows nothing about cars or they’d have bought something else. And because they know nothing about cars, they will know nothing about driving. Which means they’ll be sitting there in neutral with the handbrake on, and that means they won’t move off smartly — or even at all — when the lights go green. I have a rule at the lights. Always pull up behind the Beemer.

But other drivers don’t do this. What’s more, they fiddle with the radio, changing stations whenever they are presented with a song they don’t like. Why? Tunes are never more than three minutes long and I can just about handle CeCe Peniston for that long. Leave it. LEAVE IT. But no. Chchch, goes the tuner . . . “In parliament today” . . . chchch . . . “nothing but a dreamer” . . . chchchshshsh . . . “on the day that you were born” . . . chchch . . . “Jade Goody” . . . and then, “Aaaaaaaaarghgurgle,” as I jam a ballpoint into his epiglottis.

Worse, some drivers think an urban one-way street actually means you can travel on it in only one direction. Rubbish. If nothing is coming, then it’s idiotic to drive for miles just to satisfy some residents’ committee’s overinflated sense of self-importance.

There is a similar problem with speed limits. Of course they are a good idea. Absolutely. Definitely. But when it’s one in the morning, a driver who puts his licence ahead of your need to get home as quickly as possible is just annoying.

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