Why Top Gear peaked: a fragile mix of banal banter and high-octane action

The history of the “British Institution” is a fuzzy one. Some of the things we consider most British, of course, hold their roots in faraway lands, such as fish and chips or curry culture. Only once we take things down a notch and start laying claim to more banal inventions such as the sandwich do we find our place; inventions we pioneered, only to lose their legacy as other great powers laid their claims. While the Earl of Sandwich remains a memorable innovator, the humble notion of putting some meat in some bread was preceded by the kebab and superceded by the hamburger. Only in its most banal form does the British sandwich maintain its esteem, in giant factories, at the hands of companies constantly trying to find new ways to keep salad leaves fresh and tomatoes from going soggy. 
It is in this banality, tied into an oft unexpected ingenuity, that the British Institution often sits. The telephone box, now a hotspot for free Wi-Fi. Doctor Who, now a harbinger for social change. Something often pacifyingly ordinarily, yet somehow still organic. It is in this unique space between the banal and the interesting that many of the best loved British creations find themselves, and Top Gear is no exception.

Top Gear has been running on the BBC since 1977, with only a brief interlude between its cancellation in late 2001 and its relaunch in 2002, with Andy Wilman producing and, from 2003, the trio of Clarkson, Hammond and May presenting. When it began, the motoring magazine was very much on the straight and narrow. The concept was effectively a national news style presentation with a motoring motif. This was reflected by the fact that many of the presenters had simply been drafted in from the BBC national news desk.

Until its redesign in 2002, Top Gear kept most of its niche appeal. While fresh faces like Tiff Needell (who later moved to Fifth Gear) and Clarkson himself helped to change things up, the show remained rather tame and boorish, aside from the occasional moment of madness. Despite this, the 20th century Top Gear was really a relic of its time; more akin to a plain-clothes BBC expose than anything particularly exciting. This was a programme for the motorist, in a time when the average car was exciting simply because it was anything but; the ubiquity that the motor car suffers from today had yet to set in.

It is with this in mind that the new, post-2002 Top Gear took a turn towards being more populist, with the artfully judged presumption that more people would be interested in a car show that was accessible even for those who weren’t in the market for a new Golf – or even those too young to imagine such a thing. The new Top Gear acknowledged that, in order to succeed, one has to know one’s faults. In Top Gear’s case, this meant acting the petrolhead as unabashedly as possible against a backdrop of boredom; a New Labour society where political correctness was the order of the day. At the same time, Top Gear, at least in its infancy, always remembered that it needed to occasionally have its feet on the ground, to be able to offer viewers some sort of useful takeaway about the world of motoring. Even the admittedly subjective Cool Wall could help you gauge whether it was worth throwing money at a convertible Nissan Micra, which, of course, it never is. Even Top Gear’s early challenges, such as the Botswana special, were testaments both to relatively unexplored parts of the world and the continuing integrity of the British used car market.

Of course, tastes change – both for the consumer and the producer. As Top Gear went from strength to strength, it learnt to further emphasise the parts of the show that would attract more viewers from the section of the audience that was remained least exploited: motorists who weren’t obsessives, the sort of people who could be attracted by flashy displays and slapstick humour, regardless of its basis in fact. This led to Top Gear changing into its latter-day incarnation, something inherited by The Grand Tour: that the construction of something potentially more amusing or impressive was worth more than something knowingly understated, and therefore far more real. This was reflected in the fact that the very first episode of The Grand Tour saw a facsimile of Jeremy’s House being blown up with the façade that it was real.

While not entirely my cup of tea, The Grand Tour is doubtless still an entertaining and occasionally amusing piece of television. Where it fails, however, is in its ability to embody the unique blend of banality and action that made mid-era Top Gear truly special; the fact that you could watch a trio of middle-aged men cross the English Channel in an amphibious Toyota Hilux on a budget and believe that they really did it, all to the credit of the vehicle itself. The race across London is another great example of a feature that both contained the trademark charm of Top Gear and some genuine (if minimal) motoring advice on the best way to get around the capital.

Top Gear was built on incredibly banal principles, and it was those principles that still lay at its foundations when Wilman and co. took over the show in 2002. To forgo those in search of vehicular hedonism is far from unreasonable; in fact, it clearly made economic and creative sense. However, it also meant leaving behind the spirit of the British motoring magazine that gave it so much charm. Perhaps I am giving the 20th century too much credit. Perhaps its end had already signalled that car culture was doomed to become high-octane and hedonistic. Perhaps all those jokes about The Stig were never actually that funny. Regardless...
Some say, the many children of the witty banter that Top Gear inadvertently birthed will always be worse off without its banal precedent. And I'd be inclined to agree.