The Top Gear Story - The 100% Unofficial Story of the Most Famous Car Show... In The World. Martin Roach
written in, thinking they’d won a prize or a car, or something.’
He was subsequently sacked.
Still, a start in motoring journalism had been made. Unemployed briefly and with little money right before Christmas, he pitched numerous ideas to Car magazine and the publication was sufficiently impressed by his knowledge, experience and passion to offer him his own column. James May’s writing is very fluid and understated in its humour (quite the opposite of Clarkson’s brilliant and deceptively deft smash-and-grab prose) and he quickly acquired fans within automotive journalism and the wider reading public.
And this is how his path started to turn towards Top Gear; when Channel 4 launched the Top Gear rival, Driven, as we have seen he was approached and became one of the show’s main three presenters. May impressed although the programme didn’t, but nonetheless a stuttering move into television had been made.
As Jon Bentley has mentioned, the real leap came when Jeremy Clarkson decided to leave old Top Gear, which inadvertently provided the perfect opportunity for James to bring his many talents to the nation’s foremost motoring show. At that point, by his own admission, he ‘never imagined in a million years that it would turn into the phenomenon that it has. If I had, I would have thought twice about it, to be honest – I find being famous slightly embarrassing.’
Before that could happen, however, the old version of Top Gear itself was facing what threatened to be an almost terminal turn of events …
When the BBC announced in the late summer of 2001 that Top Gear was being taken off-air for the aforementioned ‘full service and an overhaul’, many industry insiders predicted the programme was effectively in its death-throes. The announcement came some 23 years after the show had first been broadcast; given at the time of writing, the current more successful generation of Top Gear has only been on-air for eight years, that gives you some indication of just how successful and rare its predecessor’s longevity was.
However, the turn of the Millennium was a very different place in TV-land from 1977. For one, the television landscape had changed immeasurably since the heady days of 6 million car enthusiasts tuning in. Magazine shows were a tired old format and recent additions to primetime schedules such as Changing Rooms and Ground Force proved hugely popular.
Second, despite various sources seemingly re-writing much of the old Top Gear’s history into a staid and unadventurous programme like some kind of benign and cosy old uncle, in its latter years the first generation of the show was a highly controversial programme. Jeremy Clarkson worked so well when he first appeared on our screens because he was outspoken, this is not something that evolved over time. This fact is reflected in the response from many quarters when the news filtered out that Top Gear might be facing a petrol-fumed end.
Although the BBC’s statement simply said that every aspect of the format and show was under review, when directly asked about how terminal the decision was, they declined to rule out the series being abandoned for good. By 2001, ratings were well down on their lofty peak and the programme’s style was increasingly criticised by industry insiders for being ‘old fashioned’. Since Clarkson and Quentin Willson had left, ratings dropped further, struggling to get past between 2 and 3 million for most shows (although this was still substantial for a BBC2 programme and in fact had even turned back onto an upward curve of late).
Nonetheless, according to one motoring writer, Chris Gray of the Independent, ‘Top Gear has become a rotting old banger with less sex appeal than your granny.’ Gray went on to vilify the programme, saying that ‘Britain’s most famously politically incorrect motoring show’ was being pulled and bemoaned ‘Clarkson’s childish sexism and love of foreign stereotypes … he turned laddishness into an art form and MPs condemned the obsession with speed and acceleration.’
Slightly oddly, two new motoring shows – including one with the name still involved (Top Gear: Car Jack) – were already scheduled for the following year. The Car Jack format was a review programme with most features done by the general public. The second show was to be called Panic Mechanic and boasted a bent for weird and wonderful design features as well as ‘tough physical challenges’, something more reminiscent of the latter-day success of Pimp My Ride. And so there were mixed signals.
The spectre of Top Gear wasn’t finished yet, however. In 2002, a special was broadcast from the Birmingham Motor Show, presented by Northern Ireland’s excellent Jason Barlow, who had presented alongside James May and Mike Brewer on Driven before moving to the BBC for the last two years of old Top Gear. Jason Barlow also went on to present the new BBC show, Wrong Car, Right Car, which ran for two series.
That said, the migration of presenting talent between rival TV stations was generally in the opposite direction: already several of old Top Gear’s presenters had transferred to Channel Five’s new motoring show, Fifth Gear (initially written as 5th Gear), including Vicki Butler-Henderson, Tiff Needell and Adrian Simpson. This was launched in 2002 with a host of famous faces and was at first a half-hour programme (until the longer formatted eighth series onwards) with a more factual bias. Sounds familiar? That’s because according to the latter show’s former producer Jon Bentley, any relation to the old Top Gear was not necessarily a coincidence.
Bentley had been approached to produce Five’s new motoring show and given his vast experience and renowned passion for the subject was unrivalled in terms of what he could offer. He was one of several former Top Gear faces behind-the-scenes at the new programme: ‘I’d kept in touch with some of the people who continued to work on Top Gear after I’d left. Late in 2001, I got a call from Richard Pearson and he said he’d left the BBC, joined North One Television and was setting up a new show called Fifth Gear for Channel Five. I thought this sounded great fun. I was series producer for the first few series.’
Bentley attended various meetings and the brief for the new show was made very clear: ‘What they said was that they wanted old Top Gear … they wanted exactly the same, a very straight magazine show.’ Five’s decision, it transpired, might have been just the adrenaline shot that Top Gear needed.
Maybe the gusto with which Five launched Fifth Gear caused consternation in the back-rooms of the BBC? It’s difficult to say, but what’s clear is that with just one series of Fifth Gear completed, the BBC made another announcement. Top Gear was to be relaunched in a new format, with some new presenters and the full backing of Aunty Beeb.
While conspiracy theorists were enjoying the ‘Will they/won’t they kill off Top Gear?’ etc, two former faces from that programme had been quietly re-inventing the wheel. Some time during 2001, Andy Wilman, the former Repton school pal of Clarkson (as stated, himself a Top Gear presenter), had called up his friend and they’d met over a pub lunch to talk about the show and a possible relaunch. Wilman had tired of the old format and has since stated – in his famously brusque way – that it had become ‘fucking old-fashioned’. Both he and Clarkson revelled in the opportunities to be outspoken, film outrageous features and generally make the show as much about entertainment as it was about cars.
And so they drew up a masterplan: the duo instantly became a potent creative force, drawing on their long friendship and substantial shared TV experience. As Jon Bentley says, ‘Andy’s a splendid chap, very hardworking indeed. They definitely have a very close relationship.’ Over the coming weeks, this intensely creative partnership drew up a brand new template for any potential Top Gear relaunch.
First, it would be screened from a central location, in this instance an old aircraft hangar rather than the previous magazine style; another idea was to not shy away from supercars, in fact they wanted to gravitate towards