Top Gear is another one of those fantastic British shows that teaches you that there is no real limitation to any genre. Ostensibly a show about three guys who love cars and spend an hour reviewing them, driving them, and salivating over them, the show is actually a comic masterpiece filled with stunts, jokes, silliness, Formula One drivers, bromances, and occasionally, some useful facts about cars.
Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May are the three presenters of this long-running show (currently in its 17th season after the spiffy relaunch in 2002) and they are simply mad about cars. These men can talk about chassis, the advantages of manual versus automatic, gearbox placement, engines, trunk sizes, and an endless array of automobile-related minutia for an enthusiastically long time. Then why does someone like me, who doesn't even own a car and hasn't driven one in almost two years, continue to watch Top Gear with endless fascination? Because. It's just that good.
The joy of this program really lies in the challenges. Every week, the show's producers come up with some of the most devious and ingenious challenges to throw at their presenters and what follows is a series of accidents, mishaps, minor explosions, and endless squabbles over whose car is the best. Especially fun is when the trio are whisked away to a foreign land and the show becomes more of a travelogue than a car show. Their drive across Botswana was epic, while their attempts to ride all the way through Vietnam on motorcycles was nothing short of heroic, considering Jeremy Clarkson's particular aversion to bikes. The design challenges are also ridiculous fun, like their multiple attempts to build an amphibious car that mostly resulted in a near-drowning in the Channel. Or the attempt to create an affordable good-looking electric car, which just got them stranded in Oxford as they tried to find some place to charge their woefully inadequate batteries.
Perhaps what makes this all more amusing is that these aren't suave twenty-something singletons with a need to impress girls and go off on adventures. Instead, these are three middle-aged, not very fit men (Jeremy's bad back is a constant annoyance if he lands in a car with poor suspension), who are nonetheless in it together, driven only by their passion for engines, wheels, and the open road. They fight a lot over who knows more about cars, and they all have very distinct personalities. Clarkson is the extremely un-PC, non-environmentalist, gas guzzler-loving one who yells "Power" as he roars past his colleagues, while May is the practical, scientific, and methodical one, who will usually be left behind in the dust. Hammond is somewhere in the middle, keen on speed and power, but also cognizant of comfort and stability. Together, they balance each other out, and present a united front to tackle whatever insane idea arrives from the fevered imagination of their producers.
The reason I am writing about Top Gear now is because BBC America just started airing the Top Gear Top 40, a series of the show's best challenges as voted on by the viewers. Top Gear itself is a lot of fun and I heartily endorse it. But as I have just discussed, the challenges are the main reason that I tune in, so this Top 40 series is like a condensed mass of Top Gear excellence. If you get BBC America and have yet to experience the wonders of Top Gear, I strongly urge you to find it on your cable line-up and start watching every Monday night. Who knows, you might even learn something about cars.
Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, and James May are the three presenters of this long-running show (currently in its 17th season after the spiffy relaunch in 2002) and they are simply mad about cars. These men can talk about chassis, the advantages of manual versus automatic, gearbox placement, engines, trunk sizes, and an endless array of automobile-related minutia for an enthusiastically long time. Then why does someone like me, who doesn't even own a car and hasn't driven one in almost two years, continue to watch Top Gear with endless fascination? Because. It's just that good.
The joy of this program really lies in the challenges. Every week, the show's producers come up with some of the most devious and ingenious challenges to throw at their presenters and what follows is a series of accidents, mishaps, minor explosions, and endless squabbles over whose car is the best. Especially fun is when the trio are whisked away to a foreign land and the show becomes more of a travelogue than a car show. Their drive across Botswana was epic, while their attempts to ride all the way through Vietnam on motorcycles was nothing short of heroic, considering Jeremy Clarkson's particular aversion to bikes. The design challenges are also ridiculous fun, like their multiple attempts to build an amphibious car that mostly resulted in a near-drowning in the Channel. Or the attempt to create an affordable good-looking electric car, which just got them stranded in Oxford as they tried to find some place to charge their woefully inadequate batteries.
Perhaps what makes this all more amusing is that these aren't suave twenty-something singletons with a need to impress girls and go off on adventures. Instead, these are three middle-aged, not very fit men (Jeremy's bad back is a constant annoyance if he lands in a car with poor suspension), who are nonetheless in it together, driven only by their passion for engines, wheels, and the open road. They fight a lot over who knows more about cars, and they all have very distinct personalities. Clarkson is the extremely un-PC, non-environmentalist, gas guzzler-loving one who yells "Power" as he roars past his colleagues, while May is the practical, scientific, and methodical one, who will usually be left behind in the dust. Hammond is somewhere in the middle, keen on speed and power, but also cognizant of comfort and stability. Together, they balance each other out, and present a united front to tackle whatever insane idea arrives from the fevered imagination of their producers.
The reason I am writing about Top Gear now is because BBC America just started airing the Top Gear Top 40, a series of the show's best challenges as voted on by the viewers. Top Gear itself is a lot of fun and I heartily endorse it. But as I have just discussed, the challenges are the main reason that I tune in, so this Top 40 series is like a condensed mass of Top Gear excellence. If you get BBC America and have yet to experience the wonders of Top Gear, I strongly urge you to find it on your cable line-up and start watching every Monday night. Who knows, you might even learn something about cars.
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