by Ben Collins
Reid flew around the park, getting pinched occasionally between the bigger boys who otherwise trailed in his wake. Showers of broken glass filled the air, pneumatic fluid bled, radiator steam hissed and rubber bubbled. There was no such thing as a glancing blow with these leviathans; every knock sheared off a sizeable chunk of metal and spun it across the tarmac. One access panel landed right in front of us.
The Bendies slid down the main straight, tails swishing one way then the other at 90 degrees to the front deck. One stonked into the cab of Hammond’s machine then swatted Tom Chilton’s snail-like double-decker on the rebound, but Tom soon had an opportunity to restore his honour.
During a break in the action we set up cameras by the sharp bank at the Rally Cross intersection and told Tom to roll it. The earthen mound looked perfect for the job if he could turn sharply with enough speed. After several attempts, Tom became the first person I know of to drive a double-decker on two wheels without toppling. Luckily, we had an ace up our sleeve.
‘So you want me to ram him going into that corner over there, yah?’ Reid enunciated in the crispest Queen’s English, as if being asked to serve tiffin.
I nodded. ‘I’ll cue you in on the radio so you can run up and hit him on the rear right just as he goes up the bank.’ I directed his thousand-yard stare towards the appropriate point on Tom’s flank.
‘O … K …’
We handed Tom a neck brace and some extra Brylcreem to help ease his blond afro into his helmet as Reid started lapping well in advance of the shot, for no apparent reason.
‘He’s not all there, is he?’ Owen said. ‘I mean, even you guys reckon Reidy’s a bit out there, right?’
I shrugged. ‘A little crazy. He’s still got it, though.’
Reid burst past the stationary double-decker one final time at terminal velocity.
‘Tom, is that thing running now?’
‘All set. Let’s do it.’
Given the fact that he’d never rolled a bus before, Tom was a model of composure.
‘OK, go now!’
He lumbered off, gradually building speed whilst Reid continued to circulate at full pelt. Tom reached the corner as Reid flew down the straight.
‘Feather it a touch, Reidy …’
Tom lurched up the bank on two wheels and Reid pummelled into him, kept his foot down and punched the Routemaster on to its side. The top deck fell with a mighty crash but was barely damaged. The Bendies were also – depressingly – indestructible. We sawed through the joint in the middle of one, so the front and rear sections were only held together by pneumatic hoses, and they still wouldn’t separate when rammed.
The rest of the buses were toast. The freshly coiffed grass in the middle of the circuit had been shredded and seared, and the track was littered with their remains. Despite repeated heart surgery, not one was driveable by the end of the shoot. They bore fitting testimony to how much could be achieved in a single day with some nifty planning, a stellar group of drivers and a great crew. Sixty tonnes of action cut together into a great film.
Chapter 33
Loose Cannon
Policemen develop a dark sense of humour in the line of duty. Hardly surprising given the suffocating volume of guidelines and targets they swim through on a daily basis wearing high-vis armbands.
When Avon & Somerset Constabulary arrested a notorious drug dealer, his Mitsubishi Evo 7 was seized and sentenced to death for being purchased with the profits of crime. Rather than crush it, they approachedTop Gear for a more public execution. Happy to oblige.
We pitched up at Bovington Camp to film a final confrontation between the Evo and the British Armed Forces. The vast training area encompassed every terrain from tarmac to gravel, jumps, woods and water. The idea was for Jeremy to set off with the Army in hot pursuit – with no quarter asked for, or given.
In the Top Gear corner: a road car backed by our hairy-arsed technology team. In the Army corner: the Mastiff armoured vehicle, Trojan tank, Panther advanced command vehicle and Jackal hunter killer, backed by the might of British Aerospace, Supacat and the MoD.
The military were equipped with .762 and .50cal heavy machineguns capable of putting 600 rounds the size of golf balls clean through an engine block, and several more beside it. Jezza was armed with a pack of Marlboro Lights.
I took our gangster wheels for a warm-up along a closed lane to record some noise from the exhaust. The previous owner had invested nearly £100k souping it up and we wound the turbo boost to its maximum output: a whopping 550 horsepower. It had masses of torque and all four wheels leapt from the asphalt with the engine banging off the rev limiter like a rally car. It also stank of petrol.
I checked the Evo back into NASA for Steve Howard to work his magic. We popped the hood; fuel was pouring across the hot engine from the inlet rails. It was ready to burst into flames and we hadn’t even filmed it.
Steve even ditched his fag. ‘Andy, better get over here, mate.’
A blur of high-vis appeared as Andy Harris covered the time bomb with fireproof blankets and began pointing his fire extinguisher nozzle with a glint in his eye.
Steve stepped back to admire the view. ‘Watch out, fellas – looks like Harris might finally get to shoot his load.’
Once the fuel had evaporated, Steve fixed the hatchet job as best he could, but I had my doubts the Evo would survive until lunch.
Filming a chase like this for a movie might take weeks. We had two days.
The terrain was suitable for tanks and the hardiest 4x4 machinery. The Evo had minimal ground clearance, so we jacked up the suspension and shielded the underside of the engine with sheet steel to protect its vital organs. Standard road tyres would have spun hopelessly around the muddy ranges, so we upgraded with rally spec gravel jobs with knobbly edges.
Managing so many assets over multiple locations, communicating with the Army brass and creatively directing was murdering Phil’s schedule. The boy was stressed, biting his nails back to the knuckle, and if that wasn’t enough his phone kept ringing with Jeremy’s last-minute changes to the script.
I’d already scouted the area with Phil. The upper plateau was strewn with lanes bordered by thick wooden posts, and a broad sweep of pale yellow dust leading to four rocky chutes dropped almost vertically to a sandy basin littered with trees, berms and jumps. There was also a mine-field, several tracked forests and a live firing range for the grand finale. I hooked up with the military to choreograph some moves.
Dressed from top to toe in tan desert fatigues, full body armour and helmets, the lads looked cosy under the baking summer sun. I was sitting in a motorised Molotov cocktail, but felt substantially more comfortable in jeans and a T-shirt.
To keep it simple, the Jackal’s OC would lead the other three vehicles.
‘So, Jackal,’ I said, ‘there’s a pile of rocks ahead by the fence line, over.’
‘Seen.’
‘I’ll handbrake-turn right behind them, come back in this direction and skim past you. You all follow, over.’
‘Roger, Jackal will lead.’
‘Mastiff received.’
‘Panther received.’
And so on.
The one I kept a close eye on was the 62-tonne Trojan tank with its spike-toothed bulldozer spade hanging off the front. The driver, who was often unsighted, was quieter on the radio than the other three. When we were parked up he had an uncomfortable habit of creeping forward. His thundering engine made your ribs rattle. He could flatten the Evo with a glancing blow and not even feel it, so I was keen to stay out of his way.
Staying ahead wasn’t a problem. Even the 5.9-litre, diesel-powered Jackal, which was capable of 90mph across any terrain, was no match for the Evo when my right foot beat the floorboards. The Mitsubishi had rallying coursing through its veins. It bit into the rubble and thrust the chassis into a majestic four-wheel drift at every opportunity, leaving the Army for dust. The incredible thing with a high-powered four-wheel drive was that regardle
ss how sideways it went, you just kept your foot flat out and the steering practically straight to drive out of it.
The deep ruts in the muddy tracks tested the steel plating. I crashed down them and listened to the panging of rocks smashing the undertray like a sumo wrestler’s dinner gong. Easing off on the straights and taking longer routes around the obstacles kept them close. We were ready to shoot.
The four camera crews deployed on to an area they’d never seen like it was their own back yard. The way they could instantly assess an area and find a beautiful shot said it all. I’d explained during the briefing that vision from the military wagons was poor, but found Iain crouched at the top of a vertical cutting.
‘Morning, big cock, am I all right here?’
‘You’ll get a lovely close-up of the wheels as they crush you. The drivers can only see ground or sky from inside these chutes so best shift further up the side of the bank …’
‘Oh, all right then.’
There was no shortage of machismo from the crew, and in some ways I had become their unofficial safety supervisor. They had impeccable standards, but I rarely slept before a big shoot like this for imagining the hazardous scenarios they might face and ways to overcome them.
A sexy, high-pitched whine rose in the background. I scanned the plateau for its source as a dust devil spun in front of us.
‘Iain …’
‘Got it.’ His first shot of the day.
The clatter of rotor blades suggested we were about to be joined by‘Flying TV’, a Robinson 44 with a gyro-stabilised camera flown by ‘Q’. Quentin Smith was a second-generation stunt pilot, Freestyle Helicopter Champion and the first heli pilot to circumnavigate the world. He was late thirties and lean, with a neat quiff and a prim French moustache to complement his silk cravat and black leather boots. His thoughts regularly ran away with him, but he usually returned intact. Q more often than not puffed on a pipe, but occasionally plucked a Havana cigar from his inside pocket.
‘Castro’ … puff … ‘makes for a bloody fine smoke, hmm, old boy’ … puff.
‘Sure does, Q. I’m kicking up a lot of dust out there, is that a problem for you when we get close to the trees?’
‘Absolutely no problem, old chap. I can cut around those and come down and up, and up and down and shoot through – should be a beautiful shot, yah?’
His hands swooped and dived at the appropriate points to underscore the strategy.
‘Don’t big up your part, Q. All that flying’s a piece of piss. The real skills are in the Evo, right?’
He clapped both my shoulders, gave them a squeeze and marched off laughing. Q was basically God in a flying suit.
The blue 44 pulled gently into a hover a few feet from the ground. I had UHF for talking to Phil and VHF to pick up with Q and co-ordinate our movements. The radio chattered as Phil took to the podium and began to conduct his orchestra.
‘All vehicles are coming through this bumpy lane then across the big open area. Casper and Toby, if you get the big wides … Iain and Dan, get some tight edgy shots. Everyone stand by and no one else comes into this area now, I want complete lockdown.’
I lined up with the Army toys out of shot behind a ridge and signalled, ‘Vehicles ready.’
‘Charlie Victor standing by,’ Q announced from the heavens.
With us in position, four cameras primed and a bird in the air, Phil released the Furies.
I feathered the approach to the lane, took the long route behind a pile of stone and flicked the Evo right with the Jackal cutting across my back end. We bounced along the lane; I zapped the power and dropped the entourage to head around the outside of the open plateau. I kicked the Evo into a long, sweeping powerslide, sending clouds of dust into the air. The Army vehicles punched through it and closed in on their tighter line, while Q was 50 feet above their heads, then plummeting through the air to less than 20 feet above ground and swooping across my windscreen. It made my hair stand on end.
The chalky ground looked like an even sheet of paper at 70mph, and I slammed into some hidden troughs so hard my feet came off the pedals. The car surely couldn’t take it. The chutes carved into the hillside, that had each appeared so distinctive on foot, now looked identical. Only one contained a camera and I had to choose quickly to make my exit.
I spied the minute cairn I’d placed as a marker amongst a sea of stones and dived into the chute beside it. My arms went straight as my head pressed into the head-rest and my stomach lurched. I never even saw Iain’s camera. The Evo shot down the earth corridor, absorbing some bloodcurdling bangs from the ruts as they boshed the sump guard. The car was a criminal; it deserved it. Shot One was in the can.
We gave Q another angle on the plateau, which involved him hovering in my line of fire near the precipice and gaining altitude as I slid towards him. Working alongside skill of that magnitude was epic; I put my faith in Q without hesitation.
We descended into the basin. I arrived from a flat section that dropped, caught some air and crashed further down whilst the Army vehicles took everything in their stride. Sand filled the wheel arches. Somehow the Evo kept going.
The plan was for the vehicles to do a frenetic Benny Hill chase in and out of the trees and knolls of the basin until we felt our sporadic routes conflict. I kept my eyes peeled as we whipped around its tighter confines, only to see a big blue hornet appear on the other side of some trees and begin mirroring my route. I spun around to accelerate through the heli’s camera frame and made eye contact with Q. The cheeky sod yawed sideways with one hand on the collective and the other pulling at his steering handle, yet still managed to give me a wave. I returned the greeting with my middle finger.
The heli hovered so close to the action at times I could almost touch it. We kept on going until I lost track of the Army and called it quits.
Having never been a fan of either the Evo or the Subaru Impreza as road cars, I had reluctantly fallen in love with my machine. Its narrow rally tyres gave as much grip on the loose as slip on the road. The wanton grunt was addictive; its catapulting slides across tarmac or gravel were so enjoyable I never wanted to stop.
The Bovington chase unfolded largely according to Jeremy’s master plan and Phil’s shot list. We knocked out a bunch of ‘ups and passes’, speeding past camera through woods and lanes, so that we were ready for Jezza to play his part.
He pitched up in his pride and joy, the mighty Mercedes CLS Black. On seeing me he parted his legs and extended his hands to and from his groin, treating me to the ‘big wanker’ greeting. I held my thumb and forefinger half a centimetre apart and rewarded him the traditional ‘infinitesimally small cock’ response.
‘What’s it like?’ he asked.
‘It doesn’t get any better than this. But you have to pull the handbrake like a demented milkmaid; the cable’s knackered.’
‘Good.’ Jezza was on typically jovial form, in his element around a bunch of nutters with expensive hardware. He was a huge supporter of the military. In a former life he was probably a general, the kind that never got shot. He joined the story together and inserted his typically brutal humour, referring to the £400k command vehicle as a Fiat ice cream van and ad libbing with the Army boys about how he planned to give them a good dusting.
Jeremy did some quality driving between out-takes of him scurrying about on a minefield rigged with pyrotechnics, sneaking up behind the tank and being ‘shot at’. He placed the Evo with absolute precision on the edge of a cliff and tore around the place with abandon.
We then waited a Top Gear hour (fifteen of our Earth minutes) for a deployable bridge to extend over a ravine, the gag being that Jeremy would make use of it whilst his pursuers lost sight of him.
‘Stay on me, Phil. Keep cameras on me, OK?’
‘Oh shit,’ Casper muttered, spinning his camera in JC’s direction.
I skipped over to Phil. ‘If he hits that bridge at more than 15mph the engineers reckon it might shake him off.’
Phi
l kiboshed any Dukes of Hazard aspirations Jeremy might have been harbouring and we filmed him grudgingly executing a model crossing.
The Evo had the measure of the military until the live firing range. The soldiers locked and loaded with live 1:1 tracer and lubed up their respective working parts.
In spite of much lobbying from environmentalists and his fellow presenters, we decided against Jeremy continuing to drive the Evo in person. Steve fitted it with a remote control unit and Jeremy ran off some in-car footage to marry up with the external shots.
A lot was being made of the precise direction the Evo would follow. The rules of the range required cameras to film from a long way back, so the operators were keen to fix visual references of the proposed route in order to pull focus on their lenses. My experience of remote-controlled vehicles suggested it would travel in every direction but the planned one.
Andy had the soldiers line their vehicles broadside to the range along a raised concrete platform. They gripped the butts of their guns against clenched jaws and racked the working parts. Interspersed between them, our film crews loaded fresh batteries and aimed their weaponry with similar anticipation. A few seconds later, the Evo set off.
The machinegunners let rip. One of the Gimpies jammed within a few seconds. ‘Stoppage …’ He cleared it, but without adjusting the gas, so it jammed again.
Sure enough, the Evo soon developed a mind of its own. Under heavy fire it veered off the dirt track and took cover in the undulating heather. The car dived up and down the network of gullies, wildly out of control, giving the gunners a serious run for their money.
A sustained burst of .50cal finally tore holes the size of a fist through the engine block, steering wheel, seat and boot lid. The editors combined the footage so brilliantly in post-production that it looked like the rounds were licking Jeremy’s heels. More’s the pity.
Chapter 34
The White Bubble
Three million visitors descended on Blackpool in September 2008 to witness a million lights coming to life. They clutched dribbly ice creams, squeezed into tight swimming costumes, queued for musicals, looked for thrills and got the beers in. Meanwhile, in Basel, Switzerland, three middle-aged men were preparing to run out of fuel trying to join them.