I will admit it’s been a while since anyone thought about Top Gear with any degree of intent, but it is still going, out there, revving around. The last time you probably thought about it was when Matt LeBlanc was hosting; he is not hosting it any more. Or when someone drove a tank to the BBC to protest Jeremy Clarkson being fired from the show; that was seven years ago and the protest didn’t work.
The current hosts, in case you were wondering, are Paddy McGuinness from Take Me Out, Freddie Flintoff from cricket and Chris Harris from “my mate Chris quite likes cars?”, and this is the third full year they have hosted together. They are getting there: Flintoff is such a blokey TV natural that it’s almost a shame he wasted all that time playing sports. Harris is a calm anchor who stops the others from getting too “second-wedding stag do”, and Paddy McGuinness is Paddy McGuinness. To borrow a football analogy, they are quite Arsenalesque in their club rebuild: you can see the green shoots of a viable performance here, you can see the personnel just about starting to gel despite sporadic patches of form, but sadly it is all still overshadowed by that really good lineup they had in the early-to-middle aughts. Binning all this off and starting again would be foolish, but watching them get there slowly isn’t particularly fun, either.
