by Martin Roach
However, by far the biggest rumpus caused by a review on the old generation of Top Gear came after a piece by Jeremy Clarkson on the 1995 launch of the new Vauxhall Vectra. Among various negative comments, he said: ‘I know it’s the replacement for the Cavalier, I know. But I’m telling you, it’s just a box on wheels.’ Clarkson described the Vectra, especially the chassis, as one of the worst cars he’d ever reviewed. At one point, he stood next to the car and drummed his fingers on the roof without saying anything. The manufacturer was appalled, claiming his review had been ‘totally unbalanced’.
‘Jeremy was very critical about the car,’ remembers Bentley, ‘but in a more entertaining way than he had been before. When Jeremy had been highly critical of the Mk V Escort in 1991, he did it in a more straight, factual way and we didn’t get any criticism from the manufacturer although maybe Ford’s attitude to criticism was slightly different [to Vauxhall’s]. And besides, [Jeremy’s] message would have been the same even if he had delivered the criticism in a more conventional manner.
‘This time, however, we faced what amounted to an orchestrated campaign of letter writing, largely from Vauxhall dealers. We had to draft in extra staff to handle the thousands of letters. But Jeremy’s opinions on the Vectra were ultimately proven correct by the test of time. The car was rather lazily engineered and not very good – it didn’t handle well and was unreliable.’
British Leyland and latterly Rover have come under the glare too. Clarkson has made no secret of his dislike for many Rover models and this was rooted deep in the company’s earlier genesis as Leyland. Over the years, he has scoffed at Leyland’s designers for living in a town that housed the Bullring; he described the factory as no more suitable for producing a car than a stable and warned not to get him started on the unions, who at one point began over 300 industrial disputes in six months. He also said he’d been told by fellow journalist Richard Littlejohn that in the difficult 1970s, the latter had visited many homes of Rover paint-shop workers only to find their lounges decorated in TR7 yellow or their bedrooms painted in Allegro beige. And what was the Government subsidy (i.e. the sum paid by the taxpayer) for all this at British Leyland? According to Clarkson, some £3.5 billion.
Reviewing the litany of takeovers, failed designs, poor sales, strikes, government bail-outs and other assorted manufacturing disasters, Clarkson once said: ‘Never in the field of human endeavour has so much been done, so badly, by so many.’ He has also written that since he was a kid, he thought of the British car industry as ‘a fountain of woe, waste and doom’ populated by militant unionists in donkey jackets and Birmingham accents, standing around smoking braziers. It’s hard to see how someone who attracts several million viewers every Sunday on prime-time TV won’t make a huge impact with observations such as these.
Although both these comments came after the final death throes of Rover, they were preceded by many similar such statements. It was only Clarkson’s opinion of course, but his words are always high profile. If you want to place an advertisement in The Times taking up as much space as his column, it would set you back thousands of pounds. That sort of publicity hits home.
Indeed, workers at Rover were so annoyed that during the dying days of the Longbridge Rover plant, they actually hung an ‘Anti-Clarkson Campaign’ banner on the building. Given this was once the biggest car factory in the world and Rover was the last remaining British-owned-and-built car manufacturer, Jeremy’s criticisms proved particularly unpopular. Many went so far as to directly blame him for the company’s eventual demise. Walking a mile in their shoes, it must have felt harsh hearing his words on TV or reading them in a broadsheet: after all, their jobs, their incomes and their homes were at risk. But it wasn’t meant to be a personal attack and Clarkson was always extremely careful to criticise the management and unions rather than go for the workers: it’s easy to see how his words would have been wounding, though.
Richard Hammond clearly understood the serious side of the car industry: as already noted, his grandparents had worked in Birmingham car-making factories. Speaking later about the demise of Rover, he summed up the personal impact of the company going out of business: ‘When the Rover P5 was built, it was fashionable and it was a luxury but the world has moved on and I don’t think the brand did. What it comes down to is someone going home and saying, “My job’s gone.”’
When the manufacturer finally imploded, Clarkson said he sympathised with the workforce of 6,500 but could not get ‘emotional’ about the company itself. In fact, he admitted that his first thought on hearing the news was ‘good’ because Britain could now get on with something that it was good at instead. Writing in his Sunday Times column, he said Rover was far from a national institution and seemed unrepentant about his criticism of the company, again particularly the management. As for the Rover owners themselves, whose cars were now effectively without a warranty, he declared it was their ‘fault for buying a stupid car’ and for ‘buying British’ on principal in the face of widespread industry advice to do otherwise. But his sharpest venom was reserved for the management: ‘This is, of course, the plague that besets all British inventions. It’s always allowed to fester by idiotic management.’ No respect for the dead here.
But this was not just a personal vendetta: Clarkson rightly pointed out he was simply a motoring journalist – albeit perhaps the most famous one we’ve ever seen – but nonetheless when he specifically criticised a car, he was merely stating his opinion (and very often basic facts). It’s important to remember that although Clarkson is a super-famous celebrity, part of his job is still to review cars and so it follows, he countered: was he supposed to review a bad car and say it was a good one just because it was British? Also, it’s only fair to point out that he doesn’t hold back from berating foreign cars if he doesn’t like them. He needs to be objective, rather than sentimental (remember the headed notepaper: ‘Jeremy Clarkson, Journalist’?)
In response to the criticism, in Episode 7, Series 10, Top Gear ran a feature that set out to prove Leyland had actually made some good cars after all. It was hard to watch the piece and not notice a very large tongue in the cheek of each presenter, not least due to the nature of the challenges they set. Each one spent around £1,000 on a Leyland classic: Clarkson rolled up in a stylish Rover SD1, favourite of many 1970s TV cops; Hammond came in a once-trendy Dolomite Sprint, complete with alloys and wooden inlay; then James May came in third in his legendary Austin Princess from 1978 – famous, he said, for being the first production car to have ‘obscured windscreen wipers.’
The three ‘vintage’ cars were driven to an automotive test track, where the trio used them to undergo some of the most bizarre Top Gear tests ever. Thus we had a case of parking on a steep hill and using the handbrake – simple enough for all except Hammond’s Sprint, which immediately careered down the hill and even smashed into a sign warning of steep ascents. Then there was a skidpan test, a timed lap against a Japanese Datsun (widely seen as a symbol of the reliability from the Far East, which some argue killed the British car industry), there was also a ‘power’ lap and then a trip along a cobbled test track with a colander of raw eggs above the presenters’ heads. And finally, they did a lap around the Top Gear test track with the car completely filled with water. For this entirely pointless exercise, the presenters wore snorkels and wet suits: Hammond did half a lap, May completed two (despite his car being berated as an ‘Austin Colander’) and Clarkson never made it to the first corner because the rear door of his Rover fell off. And the winner was … James May’s mustard-yellow Princess!
In their defence, Top Gear also ran an extremely poignant feature – albeit again with a fair few smirks – on the demise of the British car industry in Series 15, Episode 6. Having already reviewed the stunning new Ferrari 458 Italia, the team then used a budget of £5,000 each to buy three British roadsters: the Jensen-Healey, a TVR S2 and a Lotus Elan. The presenters said they wanted to prove to the show’s producers that home-bred sports-cars
were not horrible and unreliable – and that hot hatches such as the Peugeot 205GTi did not signal the end of the British roadster.
They reported to the Lotus factory in Norfolk and were handed their challenges. The Jensen that Clarkson pulled up in was designed by a father-and-son team and designed by the same man who worked on the Aston Martin Lagonda; May’s TVR and Hammond’s Lotus Elan were then previewed with an increasing sense of comedy. May’s TVR’s carpet was pulled back to reveal some graffiti of a naked lady and the factory worker’s signature, ‘Nobby’. Hammond pointed out that at least the Elan’s engine was Japanese and therefore reliable.
As they drove round the track, they talked about their cars and the comedy increased. Hammond pointed out that the Elan was released around the same time as the Mazda MX5, but in his eyes was more elite and desirable than its Japanese counterpart, partly because it didn’t sell in such ‘massive, vulgar numbers’ as the Far Eastern rival. Meanwhile, May claimed the delay between pressing the throttle and subsequently getting any power in his TVR was an innovative safety feature to make sure the driver definitely wanted to accelerate.
The trio was then sent to Blackpool’s former TVR factory via the former Jensen building in the West Midlands – but not before ‘blowing up’ The Stig when he turned on the ignition in a German-made Astra, apparently a ‘known fault’. On the journey, the script turned more serious as Clarkson pointed out that in 1913, there were 140 car manufacturers in Britain but by now it had all gone ‘so wrong, so fast.’
Hammond, meanwhile, noted that because parts of his Lotus were falling off, he was lighter and therefore more fuel-efficient – again, a deliberate piece of British engineering; as indeed was a ‘safety feature’ gap in the window that allowed in rain and fresh air to alert the driver if he was becoming drowsy. Hammond’s number plate was an anagram of ‘Liar’, May’s was an anagram of ‘Gosh’ and we were left to work out what Jeremy’s number plate might spell out: CTU 131N.
Reaching the ‘beautiful’ city of Birmingham, Hammond reminded viewers that his grandfather had made Jensens. Things turned poignant as they walked around the derelict Jensen factory, wondering what the designers and engineers behind the marques (and indeed, former British manufacturing in general) might feel if they were to witness such widespread industrial abandonment.
After dragging a Citroën under a lorry (with The Stig ‘on board’), Clarkson then drove his TVR directly underneath the same vehicle only to emerge unscathed – further proof, they claimed, that the UK roadsters were safest. Next, they took the cars through a carwash and unsurprisingly, Hammond was completely drenched in his Lotus. A trip to a garden centre and on to Blackpool wearing various strange hats confirmed that by now the piece had descended into farce. Yet, even after all the hilarity, they walked around the disused TVR factory and suddenly the humour vanished: discarded car moulds and rusting bonnets littered a deserted factory: so many memories, now all gone. The trio later admitted that they hated this part of the feature and said it was genuinely horrible to film it.
For anyone in doubt as to whether the feature was objective or not, it’s worth bearing in mind two of Clarkson’s comments along the way: it never rains in the UK and you never see roadworks on a British motorway.
Although Top Gear inevitably attracts criticism from motor manufacturers (after all, it is a car review show), most of the haters speak out as a direct result of peripheral topics and comments discussed on the programme. The most obvious opponent is perhaps the lobby of environmentalists who despair at Top Gear’s attitude to global warming and other related ecological issues. When Jeremy makes such comments as ‘I care more about the colour of the gear-knob on my Mercedes SLK than the amount of carbon dioxide it produces,’ he must surely expect a reaction.
And in September 2008, that’s precisely what he got when a green protester attacked him with a pie after the TV host had attended Oxford Brookes University to collect an honorary degree. The award was for his long-standing support of engineering: in the BBC series Great Britons, he nominated Victorian engineering genius Isambard Kingdom Brunel to compete with others such as Winston Churchill, Oliver Cromwell, Charles Darwin, Admiral Lord Nelson, Sir Isaac Newton and Shakespeare. Five years earlier, Jezza had already received an honorary degree from Brunel University for a similar premise.
Back at Oxford Brookes in 2008, Clarkson even joked beforehand that he expected flour and eggs to be hurled when he arrived, enough to turn him into a ‘giant human pancake’. And he was nearly right. The incident started when he was in a marquee, while outside waited an environmental campaigner (or an ‘eco-mentalist’ as the presenter sometimes calls them) called Rebecca Lush. When he came out, she ran after him and threw a banana meringue in his face – organic and homemade, naturally. Later she declared that due to his lofty status, getting a direct hit on the face was ‘like playing basketball!’
Clarkson’s response was surprising and very self-effacing: ‘Great shot!’ he said, before pointing out to waiting newspaper photographers that the meringue itself was a tad too sweet for his liking. He later implied that a few of the paps in attendance were aware of what was about to happen and had even goaded him to come out from under the safety of the marquee. ‘I have to say that,’ he continued, ‘at the PR level, it was a fantastic result for the environmentalists. One-nil to them!’
But Lush was not alone in her distaste for Clarkson’s environmental views. Around 3,000 people had signed a petition in the weeks prior to his appearance at Oxford Brookes, asking for the honour to be withdrawn. Transport 2000 even went so far as to ridicule the entire ceremony, saying the decision to honour Clarkson was as if Scotland Yard had paid tribute to the work of Inspector Clouseau. Among the signatories were workers from the nearby Cowley BMW factory reputed to be unhappy with Clarkson’s infamous criticism of MG Rover workers.
Lush herself was passionate in her campaigns and had even gone to jail for four months in 1993 for her part in an early road building protest on Twyford Down. A self-proclaimed eco-activist, in the inevitable glare of publicity after the meringue-hurling incident, she was quick to publicise her cause: ‘It’s about the survival of our species, it’s about people, and transport is the fastest-growing contributor to climate change.’ Rebecca had previous form with pies, too – she’d thrown one in the face of an American envoy during environmental talks at The Hague and another at the then-transport secretary, Alistair Darling; she’d also chained herself to diggers and stood in front of bulldozers. Here was a woman of conviction and her tactics of direct action seemed to work. (Note: Lush’s three erstwhile Top Gear enemies would later chain themselves to buses at Hammersmith Bus Station in response to Greenpeace’s lengthy campaign against 4x4s).
But she was not alone, not by a long chalk: the list of incidents on Top Gear to enrage environmentalists is a long one. When Clarkson tested a Land Rover Discovery on the side of the Scottish mountain Ben Tongue in Series 5, there was uproar amid allegations that he had desecrated precious virgin peat bogs. The piece had simple enough ambitions: review the new Land Rover and decide if it was a genuine off-roader. He began by saying the Land Rover Discovery used to be the car you’d buy if you couldn’t afford a Range Rover (he’d used this damning broadside before, in a devastating blow to Porsche Boxster owners worldwide, saying they only bought the German soft-top because they couldn’t afford a 911). Clarkson claimed this was effectively broadcasting to the whole world the fact that their lives hadn’t quite worked out the way they wanted them to!
Forgetting the environmental rights and wrongs and the eco-campaigners’ impending fury for a moment, the actual appraisal of the Disco was a devastatingly simple piece of Clarkson car-reviewing brilliance – a reminder, if you will, of his longstanding roots in motoring journalism right back to Performance Car days when his writing and extensive knowledge got him noticed in the first place. He discusses the rear folding seats that enable seven people to board the Disco but then he picks up a small child and p
oints out a stunningly obvious flaw: if you are holding a child in one hand, it’s impossible to put the seat down with putting the child down (and onto a potentially dangerous road or car park) first. ‘Someone wasn’t thinking,’ tut-tuts Clarkson. His simple observation must have been devastating for Land Rover designers – harsh, but fair.
Journalistic brilliance is not what this piece will be remembered for, however. As a remix of Kate Bush’s ‘Running Up That Hill’ soundtracks the ascent up a mountain that Clarkson reveals has never been driven up before, you can almost hear the blood pressure of numerous eco-campaigners rising thunderously. He even utters the words ‘peat bog’ and that’s where it all went wrong. Environmentalists were furious at the potential damage they said he might have caused to the landscape, pointing out the fragile eco-systems that survive in such peat bogs and how the emissions and tyre marks could cause irreparable damage. Dave Morris, director of the Scottish Ramblers Association, remarked: ‘We found Clarkson’s stunt highly irresponsible. Driving to the top of a mountain over open ground is inevitably going to cause damage to the countryside. And when viewers see a man like Clarkson doing this it encourages them to try to do similar things. It is wrong for the BBC to promote such hare-brained and reckless behaviour.’
And it wasn’t only the eco-campaigners who were riled by Clarkson: after the shoot, he jumped into a helicopter to head down south for an urgent meeting but mistakenly took the keys to the Land Rover with him. He had to make a hasty about-turn and hover over the car before dropping the keys down to a frustrated and tired production crew waiting below!
It wasn’t the first time that the show had run into problems with environmentalists either. In 2004, the BBC paid £250 in compensation and issued an unreserved apology to a Somerset Parish Council when Clarkson deliberately rammed a Toyota Hilux pick-up truck into a 30-year-old Horse Chestnut tree in an infamous feature. His response was: ‘The Parish Council is funded by central government, which is funded by me so it’s my tree!’