Friday , April 19 2024
Top Gear has done it again.

Top Gear Races off with my Heart

Last week I didn't focus on it, so this week I'm kind of required to.  It's not in my contract or anything, it's just in my soul.  It's a burning well of desire and utter happiness.  It's a shining little light somewhere deep in my gut which may be the reason I need a colonoscopy next week, but right now makes me overjoyed.  It is a little television show known as Top Gear

As Archie repeatedly told Edith, stifle.  If you haven't watched the show I'm not going to sit here and let you tell me that my exuberance is irrational.  My exuberance is not only well-grounded, but well-founded.  The more episodes I watch of Top Gear, the more convinced I am of the pure genius of the program. 

I've stated it before, but it may not be bad to reiterate, I'm not a gear head.  I couldn't explain to you the difference between an independent rear suspension and the apparently much cheaper torsion bar.  I couldn't tell you the horsepower of my car.  I can tell you that it has Michelin Energy MXV4 tires, but that's only because in the less than two years I've had the car I've replaced three of them. 

Sure, James May and Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond (the show's presenters) may think it horrid of me to not know these piddling facts about cars, but I don't care.  It's wholly irrelevant for liking Top Gear.  The genius of the program is that it stands on its own, it exists as spectacularly good entertainment without knowing these things.  If I did know more about cars it's entirely possible that I would be over the moon watching Top Gear, but as it stands, I've reached orbit.

Last night the nutters went out and created a motor home grand prix.  Hammond and May drove motor homes to a racetrack in Essex, and proceeded to race professional drivers (of real cars, not motor homes) around the course.  Sure, the rules stated that despite the fact that "rubbin' is racin'" no bumping would be allowed, but it didn't take too long before some jostling occurred and some motor homes got destroyed.  No one was hurt (presumably anyway), despite the fact that one motor home actually flipped onto its side, and even my wife (who claims not to like Top Gear, though I am quite sure she is lying) was laughing as the race proceeded.

The whole crazy thing was capped off by the even more ludicrous motor home Clarkson claims he would have raced had he been invited.  The home featured marble everything, a plasma TV, which as Joey Tribbiani would have it "appeared as if from nowhere" and a swell little two-seater sports car hidden underneath the motor home.  For those of you who are curious, Clarkson informed everyone that sans the sports car the mobile home cost 750,000 pounds.  Yup, 750,000 pounds.

The one thing I wanted to know that we weren't told is whether any of the homes have actually been sold.  I imagine that the people that have that kind of disposable income tend not to be buying mobile homes, but maybe I'm wrong. 

So, let me throw it out there… if you had 750,000 pounds lying around would you be buying some massive über-ridiculous mobile home?

About Josh Lasser

Josh has deftly segued from a life of being pre-med to film school to television production to writing about the media in general. And by 'deftly' he means with agonizing second thoughts and the formation of an ulcer.

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