The Top Gear Story

by Martin Roach

  The convoy pulled up for petrol in a Bible-belt town called, bizarrely, Baghdad. Events soon took a nasty turn as they started to fill up. Suddenly the female station owner stormed out and started to shout at the trio, with one incensed comment caught on-camera being, ‘Are you gay and looking to see how long it takes to get beat up in a Hick town?’ The presenters were lost for words and clearly unnerved, even Clarkson, but it was about to get much worse: she disappeared to get ‘the boys’ and before long, a pick-up full of very large and scary-looking men skidded into the forecourt. Moments later, rocks began to crash down on the presenters’ cars as well as those of the crew. Genuinely fearing for their safety, the Top Gear convoy sped off. The appalled southerners gave chase and the screen footage was even left blank for a few moments when the team realised they could be in big trouble. After a frantic stop to hastily wash off the offending graffiti and a frenzied race to the county border, as in an unexpected real-life horror movie such as Jeepers Creepers, both trio and crew eventually made it to safety.

  Clarkson was left to rue the whole frightening episode: ‘In certain parts of America, people have started to mate with vegetables!’ On-camera, he admits that he’s now so homesick that he pines for a homosexual British flight attendant to serve him tea and scones.

  The brilliant piece of television came to a close with devastating poignancy: they arrived in New Orleans after all their tomfoolery and that redneck incident, only to suddenly be brought back down to earth by the horrific devastation caused to that city by Hurricane Katrina. The dynamic brilliantly brings home the human cost of this natural disaster. As the three drove round what looked like a war zone, their faces were genuinely pallid, open-mouthed and speechless at the blitzed landscape. Jeremy asks how America can sleep at night knowing New Orleans is still in such a mess one year after the hurricane struck. Suddenly, all thoughts of selling their cars and winning any challenge were gone; eventually they worked with a local mission to give the cars away to people whose lives had been wrecked by the storm.

  Back in Blighty, Clarkson was still clearly exasperated and the following week’s column in The Times made no attempt to hide his contempt for much of what he had just seen. Having kissed the ground when he landed back in Blighty, he proceeded to rail against the paranoia, the bureaucracy, the conservatism and litigation culture in what he called America’s ‘police state’.

  When the team reunited in the studio to screen the trip, they revealed that in New Orleans an American lawyer had expressed her disappointment at the car they’d given away, saying it was different to what she’d thought had been offered, and apparently even threatening to sue for misrepresentation. James May was safe, though – he couldn’t even give his Cadillac away! This masterful Top Gear special ends by rightfully being described as a ‘proper Boy’s Own adventure’, before Clarkson concludes they have learnt two important lessons: yes, you can buy rather than rent and second, don’t go to America. Genius!

  CHAPTER 9

  The Stig: Top Gear’s Tame Racing Driver

  As typified by the inclusion of Stig’s American cousin in the superb ‘US Road Trip’ special, the brilliant presenting talents of the three main characters in Top Gear are substantially complemented by the show’s ‘tame racing driver’, a cartoon character which had, in a very short space of time, become a central part of the programme’s massive appeal.

  At the time of writing, the real identity of The Stig has recently been the subject of a High Court dispute between the BBC and HarperCollins, publishers of the life story of a certain racing driver. Top Gear fans were shocked and excited in equal measure when it was announced that the man behind the famous white helmet had written his autobiography and was therefore about to reveal one of television’s most closely guarded secrets but for now, let’s rewind and trace the origins and history of one of modern TV’s most famous images.

  The Stig wasn’t always so well known. For the debut appearance on the first show of the new Top Gear, the character was a pragmatic and safe necessity. All three of Top Gear’s presenters are known to be very capable drivers indeed, far superior to the man on the street, but the quantity and speed of so many of the cars reviewed meant it made sense to have a ‘professional’ driver to really give the cars a lashing around the track.

  So Andy Wilman and Jeremy Clarkson dreamt up the idea of employing a professional racing driver, who would remain anonymous at all times. There were a number of contenders who might fit the bill, but they eventually plumped for Perry McCarthy. Clarkson approached McCarthy at a party also attended by their mutual friend, Damon Hill. He explained that they wanted an anonymous racing driver for the show and that he would be called The Gimp – inspired by the silent masked figure in a particularly brutal scene from Pulp Fiction. Perry was interested, but not if they used that name, so Wilman and Clarkson flagged up a moniker they’d first heard used to describe new boys at Repton: The Stig was born.

  Early Stig was a much less refined caricature at this point. Clarkson made his infamous gag about racing drivers having ‘tiny little brains and worthless opinions’ and also pointed out that they were usually very dull, something he termed ‘Mansell Syndrome’. They didn’t know The Stig’s real name and didn’t want to – all they wanted him to do was to go out on track and drive fast.

  The Stig’s first feature in the Zonda is then run and the all-black mystery driver clearly seen wearing green gloves rather than matching black ones. Also, the camera angles at this point are from the rear left passenger seats, rather than up close to The Stig from the front passenger seat, as became the norm in later series. The original angle actually showed more of the racetrack from The Stig’s viewpoint and was in fact a very interesting approach. Back in the studio, the presenters apologised for the sounds of the Lounge that The Stig was playing, claiming he played this elevator music to calm himself down on track (maybe his dubious musical tastes were inspired by Clarkson, himself a huge Genesis fan; he’d even written sleeve notes to their box set, Selling England by the Pound). Notably, The Stig drove the Zonda so fast that Hammond then issued a challenge to any company who had a production car that they thought could beat its time.

  Within a few episodes, The Stig’s listening habits were universally abhorred and have since been the subject of much analysis over the years. Suffice to say, you wouldn’t really want to have a long motorway journey with him, listening as he does to such music as Prog Rock, power ballads, jingles, Elton John, Abba, Chas & Dave, pan pipes, speeches, talking books, Morse Code and whale songs, to name but a few.

  Each appearance by The Stig is pre-empted by a weird introduction and over the years these bizarre descriptions have taken on a life of their own; initially they did not happen with every appearance on screen and if they did, they would only be a brief one-liner such as ‘His Holiness The Stig!’ However, over time the introductions increasingly began to reveal odd snippets about this mysterious character, usually taking the form of ‘Some say …’ followed by, ‘All we know is he’s called The Stig!’ Personal characteristics include having a left nipple shaped like the race track at the Nürburgring, his skin apparently has the same texture as a dolphin’s, if you tune your radio to 88.4 you can hear his thoughts, after making love he bites the head off his partner, his earwax tastes of Turkish Delight, he’s banned from Chichester, he isn’t machine-washable, his tears are adhesive and if he caught fire then he would burn for 1,000 days.

  As mentioned, the very first Stig was in fact the revered racing driver Perry McCarthy. Stepney-born McCarthy has a long and varied history of racing some of the fastest cars on the planet so he was perfectly equipped to be the show’s test driver. A former Formula 1 driver for Andrea Moda, he also tested cars for Benetton, Arrows, Williams and BMW F1 before injury ended his career. Perry was once dubbed ‘racing’s unluckiest driver’ but went on to build a hugely successful career in Le Mans. His reputation for being passionate about his chosen sport was confirmed when he once returned to a rac
e circuit just nine days after his appendix had ruptured. He qualified for that race but was apparently withdrawn by his own team’s doctors when they noticed his stitches had burst and his overalls were soaked in blood. During his career, he suffered some big crashes, including one at 170mph that his hero Ayrton Senna said he was lucky to have survived. McCarthy already knew Wilman and Clarkson and so when they approached him with the idea on that fateful night, he was delighted to be asked. At this stage, the secrecy was just ‘a bit of fun’ and he has since opined that no one could have ever imagined that the character would capture the public’s imagination as it has.

  McCarthy has since revealed that there had been plans to have him as a presenter on the show a few series in, not masked and hidden, but unfortunately this never transpired. He also quashed rumours that there were several Stigs in those early series, stating that it was always him apart from two occasions when other commitments prevented him from playing the role, at which point Julian Bailey – a former Formula 1 driver who raced for the Tyrrell and Lotus teams – stood in.

  Perry enjoyed the cloak-and-dagger requirements of the job. Speaking to the Mirror in August 2010, he gave some fascinating insights into his role as The Stig: ‘At first, it was great fun. I lost count of the times I’d be standing in a bar and some guy would be going, “Of course, it’s Michael Schumacher.” I never said anything.’

  He has also said that he often played the role 24/7 when working at the BBC. So, he would go in full costume into the BBC canteen and even keep his visor in place when trying to drink coffee through a straw or shovel sandwiches in through the small opening. Perhaps best of all, as Gambon suggested, Perry often spoke in a French accent – albeit faked – for extra mystery.

  Almost straightaway, the ‘Who is The Stig?’ conundrum caught the imagination of the viewing public and within a few episodes of Series 1, websites and chat rooms speculated frantically about his identity. The intrigue was sufficiently intense that in January 2003, the Mirror ran their own exposé claiming it was McCarthy all along. Quoting a ‘show insider’ as a source, the newspaper approached Perry about the story, but he simply said: ‘I do know who The Stig is, but I cannot comment any further.’ Besides, the talented driver himself was too busy at the time racing in Le Mans to worry about speculation, a neat reminder that The Stig is anything but a cartoon character and always a very real racer with extreme driving talents.

  However, the ‘black’ Stig lasted no longer than the first series. After McCarthy revealed his identity in his excellent 2002 book, Flat Out, Flat Broke, his contract was not renewed. By this time, he had already started to tire of the rigours of the job, though: ‘Burning round a track in a “Reasonably Priced Car” week after week soon became a chore. I always gave it 100 per cent but I was already getting tired of it.’ After a priceless Jag was tested and a complaint to the BBC followed, McCarthy became disillusioned. Remember, at the time he was racing for Audi in the Le Mans series and earning a hefty six-figure wage: ‘I’d had enough. And, I think, to be fair they’d had enough of me. I was becoming tricky to handle. They didn’t renew my contract and the money was rubbish.’ When interviewed on BBC Breakfast News in 2010, however, McCarthy was still visibly excited by the memories of playing the character. Referring to his caricature as ‘Stiggy’, he said it was a period of great fun.

  Of course, the demise of the first Stig had to be reflected in the show itself. His departure was dressed up in a challenge for the opening programme of Series 3. After his final on-screen test driving the Porsche 996 GT3, Clarkson then announced that The Stig ‘went off and joined the Navy’. The black Stig was seen being taken to HMS Invincible and asked to attempt to take a nitrous-oxide-modified Jaguar XJ-S to 100mph in the same 200 metres that it takes a jet fighter to achieve the same speed prior to taking off from the flight deck. In the previous series, the old Jag had beaten a fleet of supercars in a straight drag so he certainly had enough speed. The Stig even sat in with the fighter pilots for their briefing: this was explained as The Stig ‘going Top Gun’.

  On the aircraft carrier’s flight deck, The Stig did indeed reach this speed but the carefully edited footage then showed him unable to stop and he careered off the end into the sea, off the coast of Portugal. All that was visible in the dark waters was a single black racing driver’s glove. Back in the studio, Clarkson reported they had sent Navy divers down, but nothing had been found apart from the empty car.

  Although the demise of the black Stig was as a direct result of McCarthy’s departure, the filming of this aircraft carrier ‘accident’ hugely raised the profile of the character. Rather than ‘killing him off’, the ruse cleverly ramped up interest in the weird and wonderful figure. At the very start of the following week’s episode, the new white Stig was introduced. Clarkson announced ‘The Stig is dead!’ and then played a montage of video clips of the Man in Black’s finest moments. He then said: ‘There’s plenty more where he came from!’ and went on to introduce the new Stig, standing on a backlit pedestal, this time cloaked all in white while sound-tracked by the theme song from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The Stig’s first test was in a new BMW M3 CSL.

  As we have seen, at first The Stig’s main purpose was posting lap times in the array of supercars and more normal vehicles that the show was reviewing. Over the years, however, that role has expanded greatly as his fame and notoriety ballooned exponentially. For the ‘Star in a Reasonably Priced Car’ feature, The Stig was always on hand at Dunsfold, in costume and in character, to train each week’s celebrity. As his fame grew, The Stig started to make other personal appearances too. Away from Top Gear, he has also appeared in numerous Clarkson DVD titles such as Supercar Showdown.

  By 2008, The Stig was a bona-fide celebrity in his own right and as such, collected Top Gear’s third award for ‘Best Factual Programme’ at the 2008 British National Television Awards. At the ceremony, he did not speak but instead handed an acceptance letter from the Top Gear team to host Griff Rhys Jones. After an apology for the presenters not being there, the letter stated:

  If you are reading this, please remember to give The Stig the award in his left hand because the right one is magnetic. Also, it’s probably best to keep him away from the cast of Coronation Street since he seems to have got it in his head that Northerners are edible.

  Thanks again for the award.

  Jeremy, Richard and James.

  (Note: This was not the first time that the actual presenters couldn’t make an awards ceremony. Three years before The Stig filled in at the TV Awards, the show won an International Emmy in the ‘Non-Scripted Entertainment Category’. Clarkson was unable to attend the glitzy bash in New York and the reason he gave was that he was too busy writing the next show’s script. Top Gear has also been voted ‘Best Programme of the Decade’ by Channel 4, ahead of Doctor Who and The Apprentice, and has been nominated for numerous BAFTAs.)

  Over the years, The Stig character has evolved into the focus of a massive slew of highly popular BBC merchandising activity. The 2009 Where’s Stig? book, published by BBC Books, sold in excess of 250,000 copies. For Christmas 2010, you could buy a Stig advent calendar, a Stig keyring, desk diary, toiletry bag, pocket diary, wall calendar, jigsaws, flash drive keyring, tax disc holder, travel mug, mugs, bubble bath, a sonic toothbrush, T-shirts, stationery, duvets, lunch bags, school backpacks, floating pens, torches, alarm clocks, mousemats, posters, a soap-on-a-rope and even a Stig remote control helicopter and a children’s outfit. I’ve been doing the Where’s Stig? puzzlebook since Christmas 2009 – with my son, obviously – and I still haven’t a clue.

  As Top Gear literally expanded its horizons around the world with numerous overseas specials, then likewise The Stig had to broaden his universe beyond the confines of the BBC canteen and Dunsfold airport. With typical Top Gear verve, the fans were thus introduced to an extended Stig family tree, with numerous blood-relations. So, we have had the Stig’s African cousin, who appeared in their ‘Botswana’ episode in Series
10. He was dark-skinned and wore only his racing boots and a loincloth – alongside, of course, his white helmet. His track test was conducted on a patch of wilderness passed off as a rally circuit. In ‘America’, we had The Stig’s American Cousin with a suitably gargantuan belly forced into a rather unforgiving white race suit. He was re-named ‘The Big Stig’ – not so much a broadened horizon as a bulging waistline.

  There was also Rig Stig, who took the wheel of a brutally powerful racing truck, and true to Top Gear form, the stereotypes were in abundance with the whole right sleeve of his white suit being sunburnt. Just to even out the political scales, The Stig’s Communist Cousin tipped up for Series 12’s final episode wearing a suit in a fetching shade of Marxist red (later seen again in a DVD release for the ‘Vietnam’ special). His actual Russian clone on that country’s version of the show was called Stigushka. Back in Blighty, Herr Stig was introduced in Series 15, with a nicely predictable German mullet sticking out from the back of his helmet and finally, Vegetarian Stig has helped the team test a hybrid car – and yes, he wore green and had solar panels on his helmet. Re-named Janet Stig Porter, he came to an untimely end after inhaling the apparently ‘healthy’ fumes of a technologically advanced hybrid car. A personal favourite is the Australian Stig for that country’s own version of the show, who officially uses the same name but was unofficially christened ‘Stiggo’ by one of the presenters.