I am not a Motorhead, by any stretch of the imagination. I know next to nothing about cars and don't really care to learn as long as they drive and work the way that I want them too and are fairly cost-efficient, I'm fine with that.
But: thanks to the glories of Netflix, a segment of '60 Minutes' and ten minutes on YouTube.com, I have found a new televisual obsession that has pretty much everything to do with cars. Namely, that BBC gem of gems: Top Gear.
This is a damn hard show to categorize properly. In one sense, it's bloody genius on the small screen, because it takes the big, uncertain and often-times snobby world of sports cars and indeed, cars in general and brings it to the masses on a silver platter of deliciousness. From test driving very fast and very sexy cars to having celebrities drive not so sexy cars around their test track (the latter segment being named 'A Star In A Reasonably Priced Car' and featuring everyone from Dame Helen Mirren to Simon Pegg and Simon Cowell) this show does it all and the three hosts, thankfully, each have their share of opinions and take the piss out of each other with glee and aplomb, all while making it perfectly plain to all and sundry that they are in fact, having a blast and a half.
Then, there's the Stig. Not satisfied with merely their opinions, the three hosts: Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May added a mysterious, always masked, voiceless and reportedly professional race-car driver to the mix- and while the hosts review the sexy and not-so-sexy cars, the Stig drives them- very fast.
These brilliant men of television, drive cars, they review cars- and they also do some truly madly wonderfully random things with cars. Converting random cars into amphibious vehicles, one episode features them driving a pick-up truck across the English Channel to France. Another has them pitting a Bugatti Veron against an RAF Fighter and yet another one has them each attempting to buy a car with a budget of only $1000. (The punchline of this last one of course, is that the trio is Miami- and the first part of the show is spent watching them drift into considerably shadier and shadier dealerships until they find their respective vehicles.)
I can heartily give this show an enthusiastic 'TWO THUMBS UP' and say that if you haven't watched an episode, it's well worth a try.
No comments:
Post a Comment