How Top Gear Has Crucified Car Humour

You try talking about cars without slipping into a JC impression. Has Top Gear doomed us all?

18 May 2015

Top Gear returns to the arse-end of the weekend next Sunday night, and along with the usual build-yer-own challenges and pervy interviews with sexy, young actresses...

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...there will also be Top Gear’s bread and butter: the power tests. Everything from CT’s 2012 Car of the Year to the crackerjacks Pagani Wirer (sorry, ‘Huayra’) will feature.

Those power tests will be crammed full of full-throttle woops, laughs and huge smokey drifts through the infamous Follow-Through. As for the description of the cars? Well, they'll be likened to 'burning bears', will brake violently enough to 'pull your face off and rearrange your organs', and will feature gearchanges akin to being 'hit in the back of the head with a bat'. Or a freight train.

Clarkson-ism metaphors are what made the bloke famous, and now Hammond and May copy him, they’re inescapable. But can you avoid it? Can most people use irony or metaphors to describe a car and not sound like a JC-wannabe? You try it, I dare you.

Last week, I was musing about family estate cars with supercar engines, and I wanted a simile to illustrate the madman-meets-family-man attitude of these wonderful machines. Couldn’t come up with one that didn’t sound like a Top Gear outtake, so I left it completely. Damn.

Then earlier this week, the Top Gear script happened in real life. While having a look around an Audi R8 Spyder with a mate (as you do), I played the ‘if I wanted a supercar I’d always have a coupe’ card. His reply? "Yeah, that roof; it's terrible. It looks like a tramp’s hat."

If you’re a half regular Dave-viewer, you’ll spot the straight JC quote straight-off. First used to describe the BMW 650i Cabriolet’s soft-top, Jezza then recycled the line to have a pop at the lovely Porsche Boxster Spyder. It’s bad that the bloke used the same material twice. It’s worse that someone actually used the line with a straight face in the real world. It’s the most tragic thing...in the worrrrlllld.