Xuenou > Television > Top Gear has become unwatchable – it's time to end this car crash
Top Gear has become unwatchable – it's time to end this car crash
Freddie Flintoff, Chris Harris and Paddy McGuinness are likeable enough chaps, but this format now feels as old-fashioned as a Model-T Ford

Top Gear has become unwatchable – it's time to end this car crash

The BBC celebrates its hundredth year in 2022, and it feels as if Top Gear (BBC One) has been around for at least 250 of them. When the sedan chair, the stage coach, the penny farthing and the very first internal combustion engine needed a roadtest review, you just know there were three joshing blokes there trading frat-house bantz and mugging like billio for the easel or the daguerreotype.

“WOOAAAHHH!” they will have hollered as one or another faceplanted into a pond or off a cliff. “DID YOU SEE THAT OR WHAT?!? MATE!” Perhaps Ye Stig attended in a topper. And a gurning claque mustered in the round to huzzah their scripted repartee.

Anyway, it is back. I won’t claim to be a lapsed devotee but long after the departure of what Fleetwood Mac scholars might term the classic line-up, there now seems to be a charisma void at the heart of the brand.

This is not to denigrate Freddie (né Andrew) Flintoff, whose documentaries on depression and bulimia unveiled someone comfortable with quiet vulnerability. But he’s been competently migrating around the noisy formats for years now and there’s little sense that his heart is in cars. At the other end of the track is Chris Harris who can achieve high speeds but is no performer. Completing the current trinity is Paddy McGuinness, essentially a foghorn with a driving licence.

This week they were in Florida to compete in some wacky races. Do I have to tell you about the cars? No, I don’t think I do. Nor the alligators. They got about in a gas-guzzling motorhome. A dash-mounted camera captured every Socratic hilarity. They got stuck in mud. Then Harris sprained his ankle and completed the show on crutches. It’s as if Top Gear can’t help meta-critiquing itself.

It’s genuinely awful, isn’t it? Alas there’s no way of enhancing what used to be a magazine show about cars – by including women, say, or taking a responsible attitude to global warming – without fatally hybridising whatever it is that secures its mystifying popularity. Maybe they could all go off and farm. Apparently that works.