And On That Bombshell: Inside the Madness and Genius of TOP GEAR
Richard Porter
Language: English
Pages: 256
ISBN: 1409165078
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
I was Top Gear's script editor for 13 years and all 22 series. I basically used to check spelling and think of stupid gags about The Stig. I also got to hang around with Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May. It didn't feel like something you should get paid for.
From the disastrous pilot show of 2002 to the sudden and unexpected ending in 2015, working on Top Gear was quite a rollercoaster ride. We crossed continents, we made space ships, we bobbed across the world's busiest shipping lane in a pick-up truck. We also got chased by an angry mob, repeatedly sparked fury in newspapers, and almost killed one of our presenters.
I realised that I had quite a few stories to tell from behind the scenes on the show. I remembered whose daft idea it was to get a dog. I recalled the willfully stupid way in which we decorated our horrible office. I had a sudden flashback to the time a Bolivian drug lord threatened to kill us.
I decided I should write down some of these stories. So I have. I hope you like them.
And now, a quote from James May:
'Richard Porter has asked me to "write a quote" for his new book about the ancient history of Top Gear. But this is a ridiculous request. How can one "write a quote"? Surely, by definition, a quote must be extracted from a greater body of writing, for the purpose of illustrating or supporting a point in an unrelated work. I cannot "write a quote" any more than I could "film an out-take".
'Porter, like Athens, has lost his marbles.' - James May
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reviewing. If you want to find the bridge between old Top Gear with its sensible trousers and earnest appraisals of fuel consumption and new Top Gear, when it got big and silly and everything fell over, the first series is it. There was a very straight road test of a new Mazda, a review of some second-hand bargains and a studio segment in which two car designers were invited to talk at some length about how styling worked. But this was fine. We weren’t setting out to make a crash, bang, wallop
dragster was found. The jet bit was the important thing. It was basically a massive fighter-plane engine on wheels and everything else was just along for the ride. A suitable airfield location was booked and it was arranged to give Hammond a bit of training in league with a racing driver called Ben Collins who was not The Stig, oh dear me no, what gave you that idea? We always had safety cover for any Top Gear track test but our researcher Grant Wardrop decided to step it up on this occasion and
script. When he was in a cheery mood he would sing a revolting song of his own invention about the effect a piece of good news was having on his nether regions. He was a deeply annoying man. Fortunately, he was also a genius. While Clarkson, Hammond and May formed a perfect triangle on screen, Wilman was the clever and talented off-screen force that made it all happen. I was going to describe him as the fourth Beatle but I realise that would make him Ringo Starr. He wasn’t even the best drummer
lots of speculation about who he might be, we wanted to make a big thing of him unmasking himself, we thought he should come into the hangar, walk through the crowd to the stage, and then Jeremy would ask him to take off his helmet, if that was okay, and then he might ask some odd questions because we had a running joke about the things The Stig got up to when he wasn’t driving but don’t worry about that, and then maybe you can talk about other things. Schumacher didn’t say a word during any of
mind on Top Gear. Whenever an idea started to get silly or bloated or had a needless flash fire written into it, the fear would rise again. ‘Instead of this,’ someone would mutter. ‘Why don’t we get a car, and a ramp, and a shark …’ Jumping the shark seems to happen when the makers of a programme become desperate to top what’s gone before and do so with some cack-handed stunt or gimmick. In Top Gear’s case, it led to moments when we couldn’t trust that funny things might happen naturally, as