I'm On The Audience Waiting List For Top Gear

Some say it is the greatest show on television, others defile it as a bunion on the sole of the planet; all we know is that it’s called Top Gear.

And it’s brilliant.

Sunday nights on BBC2 are never the same when Clarkson and his merry band of Hammond, May and exotic cars so expensive you have to be an oil sheik to be able to afford them aren’t around. I’ve been a fan of the show since it first launched and have always cringed when I hear of people aiming to slate it for the tongue-in-cheek, brash approach to motoring journalism.

Why, the show’s detractors cry, can’t they show an ordinary car? Why don’t they review something I might actually want to buy? Where are the Ford Mondeos and Vauxhall Vectras?

I’ll tell you why they aren’t on the show: it’s because they’re boring. That might not be fair to say if you are a photocopier salesman and currently drive a Signum, but at the end of the day Clarkson did once review the Vectra, and Vauxhall got very upset with him for being a bit mean about it.

The Vectra is a brilliant car – it’s spacious and comfortable and, these days, has a list of standard equipment that makes the accountants weep at the thought of lost optional extras and, despite the fact that it has a stupid indicator stalk, it’s quite good at doing what it’s built to do. But, to quote Jeremy Clarkson, it doesn’t stick its hands down my trousers and give me a good hard squeeze. I don’t sit here browsing Google Images, masturbating over pictures of the Vauxhall range, and the Mondeo – with its Jaguar XF pretensions – is pretty much the same.

The fact of the matter is this: if I want to know what something such as a Mondeo, or a Vectra, or a Skoda Roomster is like to drive, I’m part of the mainstream gentry that can simply wander in to a dealership and ask to test-drive one of their average cars. I can get to touch and feel the fabric and play with the plastic buttons and the dealer will let me borrow the car for ten minutes or a whole weekend to find out all about it.

I can’t do that with a Pagani Zonda.

There are a million programmes on the back-end of your digital television box hosted by botox-riddled presenters that can tell you, in their monotone voices, all about the poor build quality of a Citroën C1 and it doesn’t matter how much they dress their programmes up with Formula One pit-lane style girls, a motoring journalist from the Harrow Weald Evening Gazette attempting to power slide a Hyundai Sonata is not as exciting as watching The Stig put down a lap time in a Koenigsegg CCX.

I can’t afford to even touch a Ferrari 612 Scaglietti or a Lamborghini Murciélago LP640 and I doubt, aside from visits to the British Motorshow, that I’ll ever actually see a Bugatti Veyron in real life – and that’s what some people seem to forget that Top Gear is really about.

The show, put together brilliantly by Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May, brings these exotic cars to you – and the presenters make it fun. Rather than focusing on how much it costs to run or whether you’ll be able to park it in the garage of your three-bed semi, they’ll get their hands on a Nissan GTR and then see if it can beat a Bullet Train across Japan.

Your children will laugh at Clarkson’s cry for help when he can’t understand a word the Nissan’s satellite navigation is saying because it’s speaking in Japanese, your wife will laugh at Richard Hammond wandering along a train to find a drinks machine – and finding instead that he’s walked on to a carriage that isn’t actually attached to the train James May is on... And you will laugh when Jeremy Clarkson holds up a face mask of Bill Oddie to a pretty Japanese fuel attendant and tell her that this man could spot her beaver from a great distance.

So the show’s loyal fans – and there are a few million of them – don’t really care about the fact that James May poured a Gin and Tonic for Clarkson as he drove a specially adapted Toyota Hilux across a frozen wasteland, four hundred miles from the nearest road, in search of the North Pole. We weren’t insulted when Jezza boasted to a roomful of eight year olds that he’d done 186mph in a Bugatti along the Limehouse Link in London. We knew he was just trying to make young children and their bored dads laugh – after all, it’s almost impossible to reach the maximum speed of a G-Wizz on most roads in the capital.

Sadly, however, there are a few people who do complain, and they are the same type of people who complained to Ofcom a couple of weeks ago that the Doctor didn’t answer his mobile telephone number when they called it after seeing it flashed up on the screen of the TARDIS in the final episode of Doctor Who.

Consequently, because Top Gear has such a loyal following, everybody wants to be part of the audience. I have a huge advantage here, because my sister-in-law works for the BBC and is apparently in the office right below the Top Gear one. Therefore I have badgered her relentlessly to get me tickets, and she’s gone very quiet on the matter.

I thought it was because I was becoming a bit of a pain in the arse and that maybe I should cool it for a bit, but today it turns out that in reality it is because there are already 336’000 names on the list for tickets to see the show, and that means a waiting list of twenty one years.

I think I’ll stick with watching it on a Sunday evening and visiting the Motorshow the week after next for my fix of automotive pornography.