The Top Gear Story

The author would like to generously thank Jon Bentley, David Coulthard and Dr Kerry Spackman for their interviews.
Top Gear
has, of course, been the subject of huge media coverage and the following sources were extremely helpful in compiling this book:
The Sunday Times
, the
Guardian
, the
Independent
, the
Sun
, the
Daily Mirror
, the
Daily Mail
, the
Daily Telegraph
, the
Daily Express, The Man in the White Suit
by Ben Collins,
Flat Out, Flat Broke
by Perry McCarthy,
Top Gear
magazine.

Also the brilliant fan site www.jeremyclarkson.co.uk,

www.timesonline.co.uk, style.uk.msn.com, news.bbc.co.uk,

www.petitiononline.com, www.hse.gov.uk,

www.thefutoncritic.com, transmission.blogs.topgear.com,

www.finalgear.com, www.c21media.net, web.archive.org/web,

www.webcitation.org, news.scotsman.com, www.smh.com.au,

www.theage.com.au, www.carsguide.com.au, jalopnik.com,

www.vogue.co.uk, findarticles.com,

www.computerworld.com.au, www.newstatesman.com,

uk.askmen.com, www.imdb.com, www.brunel.ac.uk,

www.thesun.co.uk, homecinema.thedigitalfix.co.uk, wikipedia.com

The official
Top Gear
website is at: www.topgear.com

W
hen I was a kid, my dad drove a chocolate-brown Hillman Hunter. It had shiny, faux-leather seats and no seatbelts in the front or rear. The music system was a cartridge player which took up most of the dashboard, yet we only had an album each by The Carpenters and Elkie Brooks to play on it. Us three kids would be crammed in the back and to this day, I don’t know how we fitted everything in. We even drove to the south of France to go camping during two particularly ambitious summers – with a tent and two weeks’ supplies for a family of five in the boot. I’m not actually sure that’s physically possible, because now I’m a grown up, I seem to need a car the size of a small fuel tanker to get my small people around (which is still always full when we come back from Sainsbury’s). But back then, the trusty (rusty) Hillman got us all in, suitcases precariously tied to a creaking roof rack, and off we went over the Channel. I think it took us about 79 days to get there the first time.

My dad used to fix cars on an evening after work to bring in extra money to feed his hungry hordes so my primary-school years were a time when cars were a piece of metal to get you from A to B or to generate cash for a new pair of shoes. They were a pragmatic assistant, a necessity and nothing more. For much of my early years, I had absolutely no idea there were car ‘brands’ and the caché of a so-called ‘prestige’ marque mattered not one jot because it didn’t even register. Besides, even if I had pined for a classic badge, we simply couldn’t have afforded one.

In compiling this book, I have tried to pinpoint exactly why it is that
Top Gear
is so massively popular. At the time of writing, somewhere in the region of 350 million people watch each episode. That’s almost as many as
Baywatch
, yet Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond are certainly no Pamela Andersons. Of course there are several fairly obvious reasons: the brilliant presenters, the ludicrous stunts and adventures, the road-tests, the irreverent humour and bitingly funny scripts, all these things are core staples of a globally successful formula. But there’s something more, something a little more nebulous: it’s the fact that for some reason, to a sizeable chunk of the world’s population,
cars matter
.

I remember vividly the very first moment when I suddenly realised this phenomenon. It was like a cloud of ignorance lifting from my eight-year-old eyes – I suddenly understood that certain cars were deemed ‘better’ than others. It happened when the music teacher at primary school bought a new car. I remember sitting in the maths class and one of the ‘trendy’ kids walked in and said, ‘Guess what? Mr Hanley has only gone and bought a Saab 900 drop-top!’ I didn’t know what he was talking about. After some explanation, I realised he meant to say, ‘Mr Hanley has only gone and bought a new car with a convertible roof.’ But
he hadn’t just bought ‘a car’ – it was a Saab. And not just any old Saab, it was a 900 Series, no less … and convertible.

Suddenly, the penny dropped.

Ah, I get it
…

A whole new world had just opened up for me.

Now, a good few road miles later, I sit here with that
primary-school
fascination for fast cars still burning brightly inside. When a supercar drives past me, I still emit the audible ‘Oooohhhh’ that the voice boxes of all genuine petrol-heads are equipped with. Or sometimes I opt for the sharp intake of breath – that works, too. When I recently saw a convertible white Bugatti Veyron in central London, I was quicker to stand next to it with my boys and get a photo than a stalker at a celebrity party.

I buy
Top Gear
magazine religiously and have a subscription to the kids’ edition,
Top Gear Turbo
– in my son’s name, of course – and yes, I ‘help’ him collect the trading cards. We once went to a toy store for a ‘friendly’ card-swapping morning with fellow collectors and I nearly had to be escorted from the shop because a dad jumped the queue for the Lambo Murcielago LP640 (‘Rare’). I was outraged on my son’s behalf, of course.

As I type this, I have a
Top Gear
battery-operated V8 engine pencil sharpener next to my keyboard; there’s a Stig key fob hanging from the door to my office; on the back of my mobile phone is a
Top Gear
sticker, which says ‘Only Supercars Allowed’; I have just had a shower with a Stig soap-on-a-rope and when I’ve finished for the day, I’ll drink a coffee from my
Top Gear
mug. Then I’ll read stories to my boys after first ticking off the latest trading cards we have just bought. Afterwards my eldest will go to sleep in a
Top Gear
duvet. I haven’t quite sunk that low yet, but perhaps it’s only time – they do make them in king size…

And that’s what
Top Gear
so brilliantly taps into: it’s some
primal and at times totally illogical fascination with cars. I admit, when watching the show I do tend to drift – no pun intended – if the
Top Gear
team spend too long on a vehicle that takes longer than is decent to get to 60mph, but let’s be honest, so do the presenters. That said, even when they are forced to focus on something that isn’t supersonic, the way the programme reviews, tests and discusses all types of car is truly unique. However, it’s the three presenters’ own schoolboy passion for cars that is the biggest single draw for most
Top Gear
viewers. Sure, they have a massive knowledge of the machines they are testing and are all very accomplished drivers yet it’s their
child-like
enthusiasm and playground camaraderie that is most infectious of all. Had Clarkson, Hammond and May been in my maths class that day at school, they would have been the first ones to jump up from their seats and run to the window to gaze adoringly at Mr Hanley’s new Saab. Years later, they are effectively still doing exactly the same every Sunday night on our television screens.

I knew I had probably overdone the petrol-head life when my youngest, then aged two-and-a-half, saw his new pram and asked, ‘Daddy, can we get black alloys?’ I make no apology for this because I know that my little racing drivers understand, the presenters of
Top Gear
understand, the brilliant behind-
the-scenes
team at the show understand, and the millions of people all over the world who tune into the show every week also understand:
Top Gear
will be relevant and popular for as long as there are cars.

Martin Roach

W
ith the ubiquitous success of the current version of
Top Gear
, it's easy to forget that the show has a long and illustrious history. In fact, the first generation of
Top Gear
was broadcast for almost a quarter of a century, across 45 series and 515 episodes. The future television classic actually started off as a regional programme in 1977, but was deemed successful enough to be extended to a nationwide show the following year. Unconfirmed reports suggest the title may have been inspired by a John Peel radio programme of the same name and this first generation was broadcast from the old BBC studios in Pebble Mill, the then
state-of
-the-art complex in the Birmingham suburb of Edgbaston. The seven-storey site contained offices, television studios, radio studios, two canteens, a post office and a garden; among the projects that the studios were most famed for was the
longest-running
radio soap,
The Archers
, as well as the perennially popular
Pebble Mill at One
and
All Creatures Great and Small
.

It was from here that BBC2 decided to broadcast their flagship motoring show to the nation. Using The Allman Brothers' Band song ‘Jessica' to open and with the closing credits usually
sound-tracked
by Elton John's ‘Out Of The Blue' (from the
Blue Moves
album), the show launched with a stellar cast of highly respected presenters. Many of those faces came from highly cerebral journalistic backgrounds: one of the more established names was William Woollard, a former Oxbridge graduate who also served as a fighter pilot in the RAF. Among his other varied jobs before
Top Gear
were roles for oil corporations in Borneo and Oman and he even worked as a social scientist for various global companies. However, it is as a veteran of countless highly respected TV shows – both as a producer and presenter – that Woollard is best known, perhaps most obviously as a presenter of the seminal science programme,
Tomorrow's World
. This show was one of the BBC's longest-running programmes ever, notching up an impressive 38 years before its eventual demise in 2003. Woollard was a key factor in its success, appearing for 11 years on
Tomorrow's World
, winning numerous awards along the way, including several ‘Top Science Presenter' gongs. He would also go on to present many series of
Horizon
.

So when Woollard came to
Top Gear
in 1981, he brought an enviable degree of gravitas and knowledge (a wisdom reinforced by the fact that he was a practising Buddhist). Perhaps more than any other presenter at the time, Woollard was best equipped to talk about technical car information in a way that made the material palatable to the common man, a skill he was renowned for and a facet that had been a key part of his success on
Tomorrow's World
.

At this stage,
Top Gear
typically had a central location for the links that ran through the programme, which would perhaps be a foreign motor show such as Turin or Paris, or maybe a rally stage,
or an historic car collection. Each feature would then link back to (usually) William Woollard, who was steering the whole ship. The initial nature of the programme was also very journalistic, with factual and balanced reviews of everyday cars supplemented by road safety features all of which was presented in what was essentially quite a dry fashion, with little or no sign of the irreverent humour for which the series would later become so well known. Straightforward car reviews, motor shows, road safety issues, classic car competitions and a popular slot following rally formulae were the main fare (the show was even a sponsor of the 1987 and 1988 Formula 1 ‘Winter Series', the 1990 and 1991 Historic Rally Championships and the 1992 and 1993 British Rally Championships). It was a popular format: although initial ratings were modest – with the first batch of series attracting a few hundred thousand – the show was quickly launched on a steep, upward curve.

Woollard was not alone in bringing quality to the series. Other presenters included TV favourite Noel Edmonds, who was at the peak of his power in the 1970s and 1980s. His huge profile on BBC Radio 1 translated seamlessly to television, with massively successful shows such as
Multi-Coloured Swap Shop
and
Top of the Pops
. Edmonds would later go on to become one of the most powerful men in British TV, but it is his role as one of the original presenters of the first generation of
Top Gear
that is relevant here. His huge public profile ensured the show enjoyed high ratings and may have been responsible for drawing in viewers who might otherwise not have watched a car programme.

Another notable presenter was Chris Goffey, a motoring journalist who started out at the
Slough Evening Mail
and went on to enjoy a very fine journalistic background, writing for
Autocar
and
Motor Trader
(his son Danny would later become the drummer in Supergrass and subsequently appear on the charity
show
Top Gear of the Pops
in 2007). It was Goffey's understated approach that most early
Top Gear
viewers would recognise as a direct contrast to the ever more ebullient presenting of the show's latter-day stars. Also in the ranks was Angela Rippon, the nation's favourite newsreader, she of the long legs made famous by
The Morecambe
&
Wise Show
of the late 1970s. Many of the presenters were graduates and it is noticeable how many different names and faces were tried and tested, with nearly 20 main presenters over the course of
Top Gear
's first incarnation.

After the series had been running for a decade, a new face in the production team arrived and proved to be a major factor in the evolution of the show. Jon Bentley was an Oxford University graduate in Geography, who had initially taken a post-degree job working for Ford as a graduate trainee. He told the author how this eventually led him to working on
Top Gear
: ‘I'd wanted to work in industry and had been passionate about cars from an early age. Frankly, [working at Ford] was a bit dull – I had to work out things like how many windscreen wipers were required a day in the Cologne plant. It was like all your worst nightmares about the car production line, where you're sitting there putting on the same bolt over and over again, but behind a desk. You end up looking at one tiny thing and never get to see the whole car.

‘So I thought I should look for a more interesting job. One Monday, late in 1983, while scanning through the “Media” section of the
Guardian
, I saw an advert for a researcher's position on
Top Gear
so I applied for it.' Despite this, Bentley does not pretend that at the time he was a die-hard
Top Gear
viewer: ‘I couldn't say I was a fan when I started working on it, because I hadn't really watched much of it – I was at the age when I didn't get round to watching telly much. Fortunately, when I was preparing for the interview, I discovered the Ford press office had copies of the programme on VHS. I didn't have a
VHS player but a friend did, so I was able to make a critique of three or four programmes before my interview. I also approached another friend of mine who was working on
Blue Peter
and spent a delightful Saturday afternoon attending a recording of that show by way of preparation.

‘If anything, I think my boss counted my Oxbridge background against me but I came across as hugely interested in cars. I wrote things on my application form like the fact that I had several thousand car brochures – which was absolutely true. Back at university, for my rural geography dissertation I'd interviewed all the inhabitants of a village – the
Top Gear
producers liked that – and the combination of being able to mention sufficient eccentric statistics to demonstrate an interest in cars plus the fact that I'd done quite a few media related things (some journalism at college and an interest in photography) all added up, and they thought it was probably worth giving me a go.'

He remembers being thrown in at the deep end with a rather peculiar first assignment: ‘It was
very
boring – the sort of thing that shouldn't really have been on the programme! I went up to Lancashire to investigate a company that had devised a tool for the home motorist to extract dents: you screwed a device into a hole in the wing and pulled out the dent. I don't think we should have done the item but I remember driving up the M6 in a rented dark green Sierra, thinking, “This is a wonderful way of earning a living”, especially after having been chained to a desk at Ford.'

It seems strange in the media-saturated post-Millennial world that you could just apply for a job at such a prestigious programme with no previous television experience, but that is what happened to Bentley. ‘It's never been that easy to define TV roles so at first it was a bit vague: when we visited a foreign motor show, I'd provide information for William Woollard on what to say, I'd look into stories and see if they stood up. I can
remember having to drive round a director who didn't have a driving licence. There were very few researchers on the show back then, just me and someone else. It was a very small production team.'

He also remembers being struck by the approach of the existing presenting team: ‘The existing presenters back [then] were very professional – people like William Woollard, Sue Baker, Frank Page and Chris Goffey (who was in my opinion the 1980s show's
enfant terrible
).'

However, despite the obvious respect Bentley had – and still has – for the veteran presenters, as a young buck taking his first steps into TV land, he was very rapidly and ambitiously projecting his own ideas onto the show's format. After six months his researcher's contract was renewed and he began to offer up more and more ideas for new features. Within a year of first starting, he would be directing his own pieces on the programme: ‘I felt we needed a more opinionated, controversial and passionate view. As soon as I got established on the show, I started ringing up editors of car magazines to assess their potential presenting abilities. However, I found to my great disappointment that some of the best [magazine and newspaper] journalists weren't right for TV – they wrote wonderfully in print but weren't able to communicate their enthusiasm through speaking or in a way that would work on TV.'

While searching for new on-screen faces, Bentley was fast becoming a major player in the show's directing, even though he was first offered elements of that role when still only
twenty-three
years of age: ‘I think it was my passion that won through – a lot of TV is still like that.' One of his first directing jobs perhaps reflects the (initially) more staid atmosphere on the programme: ‘I did a piece about an elderly chap called Tom Swallow, who had written a motoring magazine in a German
prisoner-of-war camp, called
The Flywheel
. He died recently and I recall hearing bits of my item on the Radio 4 obituary series,
Last Word
.'

Another item was inspired by Bentley's beloved car magazines: ‘One of the great things about car magazines at the time – and you can still see it in
Evo
today – is the obsession with the corner on a deserted mountain road. I tried to replicate that in some of my first items by going up to the Yorkshire Dales, filming around Buttertubs Pass. There was a road test of the Fiat Uno Turbo and an item on the Naylor, which was a replica MGF made by a company in Bradford. The tests back then were more factual and less humorous, certainly.'

But it wasn't just the content of the scripts and reviews themselves that was vastly different to the current crop of
Top Gear
: the actual cars they reviewed were in huge contrast to the latter-day supercar focus of Clarkson and his crew (this monopoly of unaffordable supercars on the new generation of the series is the source of much criticism, which we will come back to later). Back in the 1980s, there was no such focus, far from it, as Bentley recalls: ‘When I joined, we weren't supposed to road test supercars at all – it wasn't thought to be the sort of thing the BBC should do. I remember having to persuade my boss's boss that we should be allowed to do a road test of the Ferrari Testarossa versus the Lamborghini Countach as one of my first few items, and that it wasn't in some way a betrayal of BBC values to have cars in the show which almost all viewers couldn't afford. My argument was always that it was more elitist to suggest that everyone could afford to buy a new Austin Maestro (which nobody seemed to have any objection to us featuring) than it was to suggest that everyone didn't have the right to dream about owning a Ferrari.

‘So I did get to direct the Testarossa versus the Countach at
Bruntingthorpe … on 16mm film! We had Chris Goffey at the wheel, and it included some shots from the side of a VW Caravelle to get some good close-up tracking and a microphone under the bonnet for some cracking wild-track engine noise. [I was allowed to do this] providing I also shot a sort of apologetic intro, which would prepare viewers for the shock that we were testing cars that cost as much as a house.'

Another contrast to the post-2002
Top Gear
is that the older series occasionally looked at two-wheeled vehicles. ‘There was always no shortage of new cars,' recounts Bentley. ‘However, I introduced a bit of bike culture with my early items as well – I can remember an eventful day shooting at a scooter rally in Scarborough – interest in scooters was going through one of its many revivals in the mid-1980s. Towards the end of the day, the scooter enthusiasts became quite lively and started throwing bricks at the camera car while we were doing tracking shots, albeit in a friendly sort of way! Fortunately no harm was done and the resulting positive piece was well reviewed by (of all newspapers) the
Daily Mail
.'

Another area of the motoring world that
Top Gear
featured very heavily back then, but plays virtually no part in the current format was rallying. William Woollard also presented
Rally Report
, the
Top Gear
spin-off focussing on the Lombard RAC Rally. Interest was reinforced by the presence of retired rally driver Tony Mason, who had been navigator to Roger Clark in winning the 1972 RAC Rally, as well as actually competing in the race himself in other years. One notable feature saw Mason join forces with Clark to test out a replica Ford Escort RS1600 rally car in a forest.