TOP GEAR

When I was a horrible little boy (because, like all little boys, even I was once a horrible one), I used to do dreadful things to my toy cars. Well, at least to the ones that hadn’t already been chewed up by my sister’s dog at any rate.

Nothing was too degrading for my poor, long-suffering examples of Corgi, Dinky and Matchbox toys. Me and my friends would hurl them full-tilt towards each other, trying our best to simulate the effects of the head-on collisions that we’d heard about on the news whilst our fathers slept in front of it, discovering that the metal that toy cars were made of seemed far more resilient and robust than that of the genuine, full-size cars that we weren’t yet old enough to drive.

Just a bit of chipped paint and the odd small dent would be all that remained of evidence of such careless and reckless driving, and so we would have to get more devious and sneak off down to the workbench and attack the poor vehicle with hammers, chisels and even the vice, in order to simulate that authentic “just-wrecked” look.

If I was feeling spectacularly anti-creative, some of them might find themselves temporarily consigned to the weekly bonfire at the end of the garden to achieve that genuine “raging fireball aftermath” look which could, I might add, look quite effective when the parts were sculpted together to make a “pile-up” die-orama on a piece of old Scalextric track.

Sometimes, afterwards, I would look upon my ruined toys with a certain amount of sadness and, perhaps even regret, and then inflict the final humiliation upon them by repainting them with my Humbrol Model paints so that even the grandest of Rolls Royce Silver Shadows could suffer the final indignity of finding itself bearing stock-car style markings, and so the games could continue.

I know now, of course, that this was probably all to compensate for some of the unspeakable things that were happening to me, things that I had hoped to be able to talk about one day but which, it turns out, were actually genuinely unspeakable after all.

It appears that unspeakable means exactly what it says it means.

Which brings us to “Top Gear”, BBC2’s Sunday night pratting about of three blokes and a lot of vehicles, where they do much the same thing as I once did, only they do it with full sized cars.

For some reason, which sometimes bewilders even me, this show remains massively popular and was the most-downloaded television programme on iPlayer last year and yet, despite any misgivings I may have about its merits, I will still park myself in front of it without fail every week when a new series comes along (but – strangely - rarely for the repeats), despite various protests from other members of the household who will roll their eyes and go off into another room and find something far more intellectual with which to waste their evenings.

I still don’t know what it is that draws me towards “Top Gear” unless it is the genuine fascination that also causes passing motorists to slow down and gawp at those motorway pile-ups that so fascinated the youthful version of myself.

“Car Crash TV” is a phrase which seems so very apt here that I resisted using it right until now in the hope that something better would come along, but nothing did.

You see, I really dislike most of the individual parts. The time-trials bore me, the “Supercars” appal me, and the interview section makes me cringe with embarrassment. Most of the stunts seem massively contrived, and the races and the set-ups are so obviously artificial, planned, scripted and played out for “comedy” effect, that the programme seems to be trying not only to insult the viewer’s intelligence, but to pummel it into submission before wrapping it in plastic and digging it, perhaps rather appropriately, into the shallowest of shallow graves.

I find the presenters, at best, vaguely amusing, and yet, for some inexplicable reason, they remain compelling. I’ve seldom enjoyed the humiliations involved with so-called “Matey Banter” when I’ve been involved with it, so watching it unfold, however artificially, on TV seems like the third-worst kind of self-abuse to me. Most of the time they’re smug, arrogant and downright rude, quite often to each other, and in a terribly scripted way, and yet I will still park myself in front of the set and lap up all of this nonsense and find that I even look forward to the next series when I hear of its imminent return.

Because, just occasionally, there are moments of pure and genuine genius and wit in amongst all of the debris and chaos; I’m still chuckling over the “You are being chased by the fifty” line from a couple of weeks ago and some of the films that they make, such as when the “Three Witless Blokes” make a mutually destructive trek across some country or another, or when they are trying one of their “epic fail” construction stunts, are utterly brilliant in execution.

The photography of the cars and the landscapes they speed through is superb, and, from time-to-time, they will put together a short film that is genuinely insightful and moving, especially when they are supporting the troops, or flying the flag for the very best of British engineering.

So here I find myself, forever fascinated, and utterly appalled with myself for being so, quite often both at the same time. Every week, I do stand up at the end after hitting the “off” switch and find myself feeling grubby of mind for having sat through another edition, but equally sure that I’ll be tuning in the following week and lapping it up, which is, of course, perhaps a suitable bombshell upon which to finish for today.