The Top Gear Story - The 100% Unofficial Story of the Most Famous Car Show... In The World. Martin Roach
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had a shower with a Stig soap-on-a-rope and when I’ve finished for the day, I’ll drink a coffee from my Top Gear mug. Then I’ll read stories to my boys after first ticking off the latest trading cards we have just bought. Afterwards my eldest will go to sleep in a Top Gear duvet. I haven’t quite sunk that low yet, but perhaps it’s only time – they do make them in king size…
And that’s what Top Gear so brilliantly taps into: it’s some primal and at times totally illogical fascination with cars. I admit, when watching the show I do tend to drift – no pun intended – if the Top Gear team spend too long on a vehicle that takes longer than is decent to get to 60mph, but let’s be honest, so do the presenters. That said, even when they are forced to focus on something that isn’t supersonic, the way the programme reviews, tests and discusses all types of car is truly unique. However, it’s the three presenters’ own schoolboy passion for cars that is the biggest single draw for most Top Gear viewers. Sure, they have a massive knowledge of the machines they are testing and are all very accomplished drivers yet it’s their child-like enthusiasm and playground camaraderie that is most infectious of all. Had Clarkson, Hammond and May been in my maths class that day at school, they would have been the first ones to jump up from their seats and run to the window to gaze adoringly at Mr Hanley’s new Saab. Years later, they are effectively still doing exactly the same every Sunday night on our television screens.
I knew I had probably overdone the petrol-head life when my youngest, then aged two-and-a-half, saw his new pram and asked, ‘Daddy, can we get black alloys?’ I make no apology for this because I know that my little racing drivers understand, the presenters of Top Gear understand, the brilliant behind-the-scenes team at the show understand, and the millions of people all over the world who tune into the show every week also understand: Top Gear will be relevant and popular for as long as there are cars.
Martin Roach
With the ubiquitous success of the current version of Top Gear, it’s easy to forget that the show has a long and illustrious history. In fact, the first generation of Top Gear was broadcast for almost a quarter of a century, across 45 series and 515 episodes. The future television classic actually started off as a regional programme in 1977, but was deemed successful enough to be extended to a nationwide show the following year. Unconfirmed reports suggest the title may have been inspired by a John Peel radio programme of the same name and this first generation was broadcast from the old BBC studios in Pebble Mill, the then state-of-the-art complex in the Birmingham suburb of Edgbaston. The seven-storey site contained offices, television studios, radio studios, two canteens, a post office and a garden; among the projects that the studios were most famed for was the longest-running radio soap, The Archers, as well as the perennially popular Pebble Mill at One and All Creatures Great and Small.
It was from here that BBC2 decided to broadcast their flagship motoring show to the nation. Using The Allman Brothers’ Band song ‘Jessica’ to open and with the closing credits usually sound-tracked by Elton John’s ‘Out Of The Blue’ (from the Blue Moves album), the show launched with a stellar cast of highly respected presenters. Many of those faces came from highly cerebral journalistic backgrounds: one of the more established names was William Woollard, a former Oxbridge graduate who also served as a fighter pilot in the RAF. Among his other varied jobs before Top Gear were roles for oil corporations in Borneo and Oman and he even worked as a social scientist for various global companies. However, it is as a veteran of countless highly respected TV shows – both as a producer and presenter – that Woollard is best known, perhaps most obviously as a presenter of the seminal science programme, Tomorrow’s World. This show was one of the BBC’s longest-running programmes ever, notching up an impressive 38 years before its eventual demise in 2003. Woollard was a key factor in its success, appearing for 11 years on Tomorrow’s World, winning numerous awards along the way, including several ‘Top Science Presenter’ gongs. He would also go on to present many series of Horizon.
So when Woollard came to Top Gear in 1981, he brought an enviable degree of gravitas and knowledge (a wisdom reinforced by the fact that he was a practising Buddhist). Perhaps more than any other presenter at the time, Woollard was best equipped to talk about technical car information in a way that made the material palatable to the common man, a skill he was renowned for and a facet that had been a key part of his success on Tomorrow’s World.
At this stage, Top Gear typically had a central location for the links that ran through the programme, which would perhaps be a foreign motor show such as Turin or Paris, or maybe a rally stage, or an historic car collection. Each feature would then link back to (usually) William Woollard, who was steering the whole ship. The initial nature of the programme was also very journalistic, with factual and balanced reviews of everyday cars supplemented by road safety features all of which was presented in what was essentially quite a dry fashion, with little or no sign of the irreverent humour for which the series would later become so well known. Straightforward car reviews, motor shows, road safety issues, classic car competitions and a popular slot following rally formulae were the main fare (the show was even a sponsor of the 1987 and 1988 Formula 1 ‘Winter Series’, the 1990 and 1991 Historic Rally Championships and the 1992 and 1993 British Rally Championships). It was a popular format: although initial ratings were modest – with the first batch of series attracting a few hundred thousand – the show was quickly launched on a steep, upward curve.
Woollard was not alone in bringing quality to the series. Other presenters included TV favourite Noel Edmonds, who was at the peak of his power in the 1970s and 1980s. His huge profile on BBC Radio 1 translated seamlessly to television, with massively successful shows such as Multi-Coloured Swap Shop and Top of the Pops. Edmonds would later go on to become one of the most powerful men in British TV, but it is his role as one of the original presenters of the first generation of Top Gear that is relevant here. His huge public profile ensured the show enjoyed high ratings and may have been responsible for drawing in viewers who might otherwise not have watched a car programme.
Another notable presenter was Chris Goffey, a motoring journalist who started out at the Slough Evening Mail and went on to enjoy a very fine journalistic background, writing for Autocar and Motor Trader (his son Danny would later become the drummer in Supergrass and subsequently appear on the charity show Top Gear of the Pops in 2007). It was Goffey’s understated approach that most early Top Gear viewers would recognise as a direct contrast to the ever more ebullient presenting of the show’s latter-day stars. Also in the ranks was Angela Rippon, the nation’s favourite newsreader, she of the long legs made famous by The Morecambe & Wise Show of the late 1970s. Many of the presenters were graduates and it is noticeable how many different names and faces were tried and tested, with nearly 20 main presenters over the course of Top Gear’s first incarnation.
After the series had been running for a decade, a new face in the production team arrived and proved to be a major factor in the evolution of the show. Jon Bentley was an Oxford University graduate in Geography, who had initially taken a post-degree job working for Ford as a graduate trainee. He told the author how this eventually led him to working on Top Gear: ‘I’d wanted to work in industry and had been passionate about cars from an early age. Frankly, [working at Ford] was a bit dull – I had to work out things like how many windscreen wipers were required a day in the Cologne plant. It was like all your worst nightmares about the car production line, where you’re sitting there putting on the same bolt over and over again, but behind a desk. You end up looking at one tiny thing and never get to see the whole car.
‘So I thought I should look for a more interesting job. One Monday, late in 1983, while scanning through the “Media” section of the Guardian, I saw an advert for a researcher’s position on Top Gear so I applied for it.’ Despite this, Bentley does not pretend that at the time he