The all-new ‘Top Gear’ might be even better

Chris Evans is no Jeremy Clarkson. I have watched far too many hours of Clarkson on "Top Gear" and almost nothing Evans has done, but I’ve met the latter so I feel qualified to make this assessment.

I chatted briefly with the new host of the hit motoring show at the Dunsfold Aerodrome in Surrey, England, where the show is filmed. The airfield is about an-hour-and-a-half southeast of London and had been the stomping ground for the 56-year-old Clarkson since 1988.

It was the coming-out party for the revamped show to the global media after the BBC declined to renew Clarkson’s contract last March. He had physically attacked a producer while shooting on location — something about steak — and the British tabloids gleefully reported the details.

“We don’t talk about catering on the show anymore,” Evans deadpanned in the first episode to appreciative laughter from the studio audience.

Clarkson’s sidekicks, Richard Hammond and James May, chose to leave with him and their new show "The Grand Tour" will debut this autumn on Amazon’s online streaming service.

Meanwhile, Evans busied himself gamely reinventing the show and assembling a new cast of presenters. American actor Matt LeBlanc is the other addition to the line-up with top billing.

In a solo segment in Morocco reviewing something called the Ariel Nomad, he’s comfortable in his skin, playing up his Americanness for the show’s primarily British audience.

“This is the most fun you can have with your clothes on,” he says in the premiere episode while driving the British off-road buggy. “A door would have been nice,” he’d said straight to the camera just minutes earlier after an overly dramatic struggle to fit into the cage-like automobile. The journalists from around the world chuckled when that section was screened.

TERRIFYING RIDE

That morning, I had taken a terrifying ride around the famous "Top Gear" track with German motor racing driver Sabine Schmitz, whose love for speed is legendary. Sometimes called “the world’s fastest taxi driver,” her special skill appears to be in making fully grown men throw up in her car.

She smiled and made small talk with me during the ride while we were doing speeds that would make the folks at the National Transport Safety Authority lose their minds. I have never been so frightened inside a car as I was, spinning around in the bright yellow Ford Mustang GT with her. She’s the only woman on the all-new show but is probably faster than all the six men.

While still collecting myself after the ride from hell, I spied The Stig walking to another car on the "Top Gear" lot. His identity remains a secret and he wears a white, full-face helmet and racing suit whenever he makes a public appearance. Even though he sat at the press conference with Evans, Schmitz and the rest of the new cast, he didn’t utter a word.

The rest of the newcomers — Rory Reid (who will also present a spin-off behind-the-scenes show "Extra Gear"), Eddie Jordan and Chris Harris — had plenty to say about joining “the world’s most widely watched factual television programme.”

Yes, they have a Guinness Book of World Records plaque from 2011 to prove that claim. Apart from LeBlanc, none of the others has much international name recognition for a show that broadcasts in 212 territories to an estimated audience of 350 million, according to BBC Worldwide.

When I asked Evans, the new main host about that, he wasn’t worried about it. The popular British radio and TV presenter is confident that people will judge the show on its own strengths and they will retain its global reach. The British press hasn't been so optimistic though, and early reviews were scathing, at best.

“This whole show feels like someone used the Internet to translate Top Gear from English to Swahili and then back to English again,” wrote The Guardian’s Stuart Heritage in his liveblog on the night it premiered. American actor Jesse Eisenberg and foul-mouthed British chef Gordon Ramsay were the guests. Yes, two guests. They’ve also swapped the “reasonably priced car” the stars usually drove on the track for a rallycross car, a Mini Cooper.

You might say that “The Three Musketeers” were so good that you need twice as many presenters and you would be wrong. This ensemble format will take some getting used to, but it takes the show back to what it should have been: a television programme about cars, not a sitcom.

There are still lots of sleek machines to gawk at and the field segments have the same excellent production values as before. Chris Evans is no Jeremy Clarkson, and that is a good thing because he is adding to a beloved franchise, not subtracting from it. The republic still stands.

Top Gear airs on BBC Brit, Dstv channel 120, on Wednesdays at 9pm

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WHEN GROWN MEN CRY ABOUT FOOTBALL

I now know 100 per cent more Spanish insults than I did before the Champions League final. No, I didn’t dive into Urban Dictionary, I just happened to sit with Atlético Madrid fans at the San Siro Stadium while they frustratingly watched their hopes of a title die.

They grew more and more animated and colourful in their language as the regular 90 minutes ran out and the game went into extra time.

Sitting next to me, my boss, Linus Kaikai, predicted that they would beat Real Madrid but quickly jumped on the fence within the first few minutes of the match. I’m not much of a football pro but it seems eminently unfair to determine the outcome of such an important fixture using penalties.

I consider them to be like a game of poker and the resultant pata potea. Apart from the players who were tearfully disappointed after the game on TV, I watched grown men break down and cry next to me. There was also the woman in her twenties who went into a full-blown wail as we exited the stadium, leaving me dumbstruck. If they had run into Juanfran, who missed their fourth spot-kick, he would be dead meat. Is it ever that serious?

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WHY ARE KENYANS SO RELUCTANT TO LEAVE PUBLIC OFFICE?

Justice Kalpana Rawal and Justice Philip Tunoi just won’t leave office. They’re both already in their 70s but want to hang on until they actually clock 74. When you’ve been lucky to live that long, do four years make a huge difference?

Is that difference so significant and momentous that you’d go through a tribunal, a Supreme Court case and no small amount of public ridicule just to stay in office? For a job such as theirs, where Caesar’s wife should be beyond reproach, isn’t just a claim of impropriety damaging enough to warrant stepping aside?

People often wonder what it is about power in the African context that makes people cling to it so badly. Maybe interrogating the good judges’ true intentions would be a good place to start.

It would be instructive to find out how much of it is self-interest and what percentage of it is about public good.

*****

FEEDBACK: With ‘sponsors’, our lazy youth live it up

Larry, the days when morality and social ethics were cherished by  society are long gone. It is unfortunate that the future fathers and mothers in this country have blindly indulged in disguised immorality without reflecting on the risks and dangers that come with them, among them sexually transmitted diseases and unplanned  pregnancies.

More worrying is the way society seems to have accepted this vice, making it seem normal. Irresponsible parenthood takes a big share of the blame in all this moral decadence.

The days when parents would teach their children at home went with the 19th Century generation.  Children are now the responsibility of house helps, from whom they learn strange things without parents’ their knowledge.  Meanwhile, teenagers have been left to be taught by the genius Internet and their peers.

The TV programmes to which the youth are exposed also play a role in shaping their behaviour. Most of them love Mexican soap operas, which make them fantasize about the kind of life they would like to live.  They then resort to finding ways of getting what they cannot afford by any means, even if it means looking for “sponsors”.

It is time we went back to the traditional way of maintaining ethics in our society. Parents should play their roles of instilling responsibility in their children. 

Moses Esamai

***** 

Larry, your article on sponsors and “lazy” youth was commendable. However, I do not to impose my values on other people. I can’t understand how any of the sponsors and the sponsored got to where they are. What you have addressed are the symptoms of a bigger problem. I will wait to read about the causes – from you. Be sure to include details of who the sponsors are (MCAs MPS, cops, “businessmen”) and where they get their tonnes of money from (traffic, tax evasion, chicken, tenders, NYS, “hardworking”).

*****

Also tell us why the sponsored youths cannot find gainful employment or benefit from uwezo funds - it has nothing to do with laziness. What plans does our society have for all the youths we keep churning out when the elderly are no longer retiring to go “mashambani” while those who did are recalled. Jobs advertised seek people with   experience. For youths...it is man eat man and dog, that is, survival of the weakest because the fit are already surviving.

Estlee