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Why Top Gear deserves a new bandleader
Imthishan Giado

Let me establish my Top Gear bonafides right at the start – and acknowledge a debt.

I wouldn’t be in this business at all if not for Jeremy Clarkson. I’m old enough to remember his first broadcast way, way back in 1988, reviewing a horrible mauve Bentley something or the other. With his strange, clipped dialogue and raised-eyebrow delivery, compared to the other dull hosts of the time Clarkson was simply impossible to ignore. You just knew he was going to be someone, and I knew, right then and there,  that I wanted to do his job.

I didn’t want to be a doctor, like my brother. Or an engineer, or a lawyer or anything else respectable. Back then, cars weren’t cool. Car culture was underground and not everyone was an instant expert via the collective knowledge of humanity in their pocket. In the Middle East, I searched hungrily for the barest scrap of car writing, clutching onto it like the last water bottle in the desert.

I wanted to be Clarkson, to travel the world and write about automobiles forever. To not just be seen in cars and make your mates green with jealousy – as so many think motoring journalism is about today – but to excoriate the bad ones and once in a while, find an automobile that makes your heart sing. And then tell the world about these amazing man-made creations that transcend their beginnings as transportation and in the cases of some, pass into legend.

So it is with a heavy heart that I watch this Top Gear tragedy unfold. The moment Jeremy’s clenched fist hit producer Oisin Tymon’s unready lip, the programme’s fate was sealed. You simply cannot go around physically attacking people in your workplace and expect to get away with it. Simply put, he left the BBC with no other choice. Especially after Jimmy Savile.

Imagine if this happened in Dubai. Imagine if you shouted at someone in your office and used the kind of expletives Clarkson is alleged to have used – we all know you’d be on the next flight home, with a brief stop in the klink. So everyone looking for someone to blame – blame Clarkson, not Oisin Tymon.

Grow up, and realise that your hero has feet of clay. I don’t know what demons drove him to act in such an unhinged manner – some accounts speak of a messy personal life – but that can never excuse such behaviour in the workplace. And though it may be the best job in the world, it’s still a workplace.

What is really odd though, is how I feel. Because I’m not sad about the end of this iteration of Top Gear. But in many ways, glad.

A lot of people my age seem to think that Jeremy Clarkson invented the programme Top Gear. Far from it. He invented ‘modern’ Top Gear, with its brash take-no-prisoners outlook and far flung adventures. The Top Gear I grew up with, the one my parents used to make fun of me for watching, was originally conceived as Midlands-only series in 1977 and covered every aspect of motoring, from road tests to social issues. It wasn’t sexy, wasn’t cool, but it was insightful and committed to making us better drivers and enthusiasts. Not bloody finding out which is faster around an old airfield – a P1, a LaFerrari or a Porsche that none of us can ever afford, or will ever drive.

That, by the way, is the crux of my issue with modern Top Gear. It’s changed so much that it’s borderline unrecognisable from what it once was and has precious little to do with the love of cars. Don’t get me wrong – there’s nothing wrong with trying new things. Clarkson must be applauded for taking risks, all of which have paid off. His ‘pokey motoring programme’ is now one of the most watched shows in Earth. He has made minorities watch. He has made young people watch. He’s even made women watch. By every standard, Top Gear is a monstrous success.

A boring success, though. Can you not see how frayed around the edges the show has become of late? Partly out of loyalty to the man that inspired me, I’ve watched every episode of Top Gear and the formula has become distressingly predictable. Boorish comments from Clarkson, cars sliding around Dunsfold, a big adventure that starts with arguing and ends with everyone ‘falling in love’ with their cars, more cars sliding around Dunsfold, roll end credits. There was a time when I rewatched every episode about five times. Now I’m lucky if I’m awake during the first one. And to be honest, the ugliness of this incident means I won’t be watching the old ones, either.

They’re not presenters any more, they’re actors. And bad ones at that – the nadir of the past few years being James May pretending to sit in a ditch holding a steering wheel of a car that had ‘blown up’. Or how about Clarkson smashing his Peugeot repeatedly into a wall to prove that Pug drivers are blithering idiots, in this very series? It’s not clever, it’s not funny, but it is immensely stupid and insulting to our collective intelligence.

What it is, is lazy. Clarkson, Andy Wilman, Hammond, May – they’re all multimillionaires now. They don’t have to work hard for their success any more. They’ve made it, and they’re doing the bare minimum every series to justify their outrageous paycheck. Compare this to the hundreds of people I see on Youtube every day trying to be the next Clarkson – writing, shooting and presenting their own efforts with literally no budget. They’re the ones with passion.

You too, you reading this – you have more passion for cars than Jeremy Clarkson. You could be the next Jeremy Clarkson. They told me that I could never write about cars for a living – a Sri Lankan, from Dubai, was I serious? But through sheer grit and pug-nosed determination, I ended up working for the very best magazine in the world – hint, it’s not Top Gear – and then co-creating Motoring Middle East, a place where everyone and everything is welcome. Just as long as you love cars, that is. But of course you do!

Clarkson’s time has passed. No doubt he’ll go on to create something else, but while it’ll probably make him even richer, it’s unlikely to ever have the same impact as Top Gear. Top Gear, which by the way, existed before Jeremy Clarkson, and will exist after him. It’s all about reboots these days anyway, isn’t it?

So roll on the future. Don’t be surprised if the next great Top Gear presenter isn’t English, isn’t white, isn’t a man. And wouldn’t that be the greatest riposte to the small-minded ugliness that Clarkson has espoused all these years?

I can’t wait to see who it is.