Compulsive Viewing
Fair play to Hugo Rifkind because his review of Top Gear is broadly similar to mine; I don't have the slightest interest in fast or expensive cars, but I am weirdly drawn to the three 'musketeers' or three 'gits' (take your pick) whose schoolboy antics I find compulsive viewing at times.
Basically, I agree with Hugo's wife who observed that Top Gear is essentially a beautifully shot travel programme interrupted by occasional words of wisdom and moments of sheer stupidity by three grown men.
But it's fun and harmless, by and large, even though some people get worked up into a terrible froth including violent Argentinian thugs whose idea of a legitimate protest is to throw large rocks at unidentified people driving past in cars.
Top Gear in trouble in Argentina - Rod Fountain
By Hugo Rifkind - The Times
Top Gear (BBC Two); Homeland (Channel 4); Esio Trot (BBC One)
I’ve thought about this quite a lot, and I think my main problem with Top Gear is that too much of it is about cars. I mean, Christ, but they’re only cars. How much is there to say?
The Patagonia Special was a wonderful bit of television, otherwise. On a good day, nothing on British television is shot like Top Gear. Not Attenborough, not the pointless middle bits of The Apprentice that they blow the helicopter budget on; nothing. Cameras rolled over the Andes, from desert to glacier and back again. “It’s like a long and lovely travel programme,” sighed my wife, who knows about these things, “entirely ruined by three gits in cars.”
Bit harsh on the gits, I’d say. Often, I find them very amusing. And when this began, indeed, I thought they might have branched out a bit. Right at the start, the little one (who dresses from Gap) declared 2014 to be the 60th anniversary of the V8. “The tomato juice in a can?” I thought to myself. “Seems awfully metropolitan for that lot.” But no. Not a Bloody Mary. Just another bloody engine. Which was fine, almost all of the time, except for when they felt they had to talk about it. Did you, too, glaze over for that long, involved conversation that the big two (who dress in country casuals bought from catalogues) had about what the pistons do? I bet you did. Clearly the cameramen did. Otherwise, they’d have panned away to catch that massive tumbleweed that must have been rolling past at the time.
Still, it gives them something to talk about, and the Top Gear dynamic of there always being two people faintly bullying a third for his apparently homosexual interior trim is almost a ritual by now. For this is a world of far more than cars, and it’s everything else that keeps getting them all into trouble. To nick a phrase off The Inbetweeners 2, Clarkson is the Archbishop of Banterbury. This is how much of Britain talks, from boardrooms to locker rooms, whether it should or not. And yet the same bits of Britain have learnt to be horrified when it ends up in their living rooms.
I can’t ever hate Top Gear. I’d like to, often, but I just can’t, because it keeps making me laugh. Down the length of South America, for example, the three of them in their failing sports cars were stalked by their silent, unsmiling Citroen 2CV back-up car, which kept appearing on horizons like the Ghost of Christmas Future. Even the script, which is often a bit Made in Chelsea — with all those fake-real conversations that you both are and aren’t meant to believe in — has moments of utter glory. Kudos to the team, especially, for managing to avoid actual racism this year. Because it can be quite jolly, the milder bubbling jingoism, if you’re on the right side of it. Consider Clarkson, here, explaining to Hammond and May why their Chilean river ferry can’t dock at the Argentine town of Ushuaia . . .
CLARKSON: . . . because all of these islands belong to Chile . . .
MAY: Right . . . ?
CLARKSON: . . . but Argentina thinks they’re theirs!
HAMMOND: No!?
CLARKSON: I know! But let’s not get bogged down with that . . .
Of course, they did get bogged down with all that, and badly. It’s a rare car programme that ends with a diplomatic incident, but this one most certainly did, thanks to a numberplate on Clarkson’s Porsche — H982 FKL — which many Argentinians believed was there to make a gag about the Falklands conflict. The last 20 minutes of this left you in no doubt that the Top Gear crew had, indeed, been in considerable danger from a considerable bunch of nutcases. In the end, it didn’t really matter whether the plate was an accident or not (although my considered verdict is: “my arse it was”) because the reaction was so terrifyingly deranged.
What I kept wondering, before that, was where were all the people? Most of the time there literally weren’t any. The Top Gear world seemed weirdly unpopulated. Towns were quiet, streets were empty. Turn off the sound and you could imagine them as the characters in some post-apocalyptic Stephen King novel; perhaps the last three gits in the world, heading south in a desperate belief there must be other gits out there. Who, it turned out, were also looking for them.
The last Homeland was a bit flat, wasn’t it? They keep doing this, lately, the big dramas. They put the exciting bits in the middle, and then make the finale little more than a lacklustre advertisement for the next series. Here, we were inexplicably supposed to suddenly start caring about Carrie’s relationship with her absent mother, which might be faintly interesting if it wasn’t for the way that the Taliban had just stormed America’s embassy in Pakistan, killing scores and stealing the names of every CIA source in Pakistan and Afghanistan. I mean, call me heartless, but that seems like a slightly bigger deal than the way she’s got a half-brother in Minnesota.
Hardly any of it made sense, anyway. Three episodes ago, Saul would rather have been killed than used as a tool by the Taliban, even though they were the only characters with beards almost as big as his. Now, he’ll stomach any dirty deal for his own professional advancement? Nah. And what the hell was whatsisname — the CIA director — doing at Carrie’s dad’s funeral? Frankly, I’m sick of these people. Bring back Brody’s family, who were always taking their clothes off. I liked them. Better still, ditch Beardy and his gurning protégé altogether, and give us a spin-off starring Quinn, the depressed hitman. Let’s see him travelling the globe, doing that punching thing with his elbows. We like that.
Finally, we had the terribly charming Esio Trot , starring a textbook Dustin Hoffman and a distressingly cleavagey Dame Judi Dench. Hoffman played Mr Hoppy, an old man quietly in love with the Dame’s Mrs Silver in the flat below. This was based on a story by Roald Dahl, as I’m sure you’ll know, but deftly updated with a sort of North London bohemian retiree vibe. Richard Curtis had a hand in it, and it showed.
It’s a love story, really. She has a tortoise, he wants to please her by helping it grow. So, he buys a job lot of other tortoises and starts swapping them when she’s out. No, I’m not spoiling it. It’s a kids’ book. It’s the same idea as the stick in The Twits. What, you haven’t read that, either? Sorry.
Damn them, though, because they went all Love Actually with the ending. The glory of true Dahl is the bittersweet edge; the way you’re never 100 per cent sure what’s nasty or nice. In the book, Mrs Silver never finds out about the trick, but marries Hoppy anyway, leaving him to sneak all the spare reptiles back to the pet shop, having basically conned himself a wife. Here she did, but decided it was all jolly touching. Vandalism. The soppy bloody cowards.
