12 posts tagged “top gear”

From this month’s Children in Need fund-raiser on the BBC. The other video has been removed by the BBC from YouTube so enjoy this while it’s still there. Not as funny as the Dr Who ones in the past.
   I think this is the first time we have seen Ashes to Ashes’ 1982 hairstyles on telly. Chris looks more 1980s now but also a little strange.

Ashes to Ashes will be coming to New Zealand, according to the BBC. Though by the time it is on, I probably will have bought the DVD of the second series from Amazon UK. It will be on Prime, which either means no one will watch it, or it will become a destination hit as the Beeb’s Top Gear and Doctor Who have. I wonder if there are enough Lifers here since most mainstream viewers in 2007 went to watch Ugly Betty instead of Life on Mars, but if marketed with Doctor Who it might work.
   It would be nice to see Ashes here in New Zealand in the same year rather than having to wait a year as we did with TV One, maybe a little after Life on Mars finishes.
   Other concluded deals for series are listed in a press release sent to Scoop.

The Independent on Sunday has a good article on American remakes of British shows, though I should add that Britain has had its share of remaking others’. Anyone remember how Married with Children (Married for Life) and Who’s the Boss? (The Upper Hand) did not translate that well in the UK?
   Ready for the American treatment are:

ABC
Life on Mars

CBS
The Eleventh Hour (prod. Jerry Bruckheimer, starring British actor Rufus Sewell)
Worst Week (based on The Worst Week of My Life)

NBC
Top Gear
Gavin and Stacey

Big screen
State of Play (to star Helen Mirren, Russell Crowe and Ben Affleck)

Also coming
The Vicar of Dibley
Footballers’ Wives

   Don’t forget the Americans are also redoing Opportunity Knocks with Ashton Kutcher, though the concept sounds a little different from the original, Kath & Kim from Australia and Good Behavior (née Outrageous Fortune) from New Zealand (already remade in the UK as Honest with Amanda Redman).
   They join The Office, which of course has been a big hit in the US and perhaps led the way with this current crop, long enough for people to have forgotten Cracker with the late Robert Pastorelli. And, of course, American Idol and America’s Got Talent are rehashes of British shows.
   Once upon a time there were many versions of Popstars, which originated in New Zealand. Pity we now license New Zealand Idol, Stars in Their Eyes and Strictly Come Dancing. At least when the Americans remake things, they generally pick better source material.

Sad news for car nuts: automotive and technical writer Jeff Daniels has passed away, according to Keith Adams’ Austin Rover Online website. There’s a longer piece at Just-auto.com.
   There probably isn’t anyone of my generation who doesn’t recall the greats like L. J. K. Setright, Jeff Daniels, George Bishop, Phil Hill and Paul Frère.
   Jeff wrote a column called ‘Danspeak’ in Autocar for many years, and it is probably his style, more than anyone else’s, that informed me when I started my columns.
   I found him one of the more knowledgeable car writers out there and it is sad that much of this old style of journalism has given way to the Jeremy Clarksons of this world. Just as in television presenting, where the William Woollards gave way to the Jeremy Clarksons on Top Gear.
   While I love Clarkson’s style (since he could never get away with it without some actual research) and can be said to adopt elements myself, there is still room for the more technical, educated approach of Daniels et al.
   Jeff Daniels was 68 and continued working up to his death. He will be sorely missed.

I have been a regular reader of Autocar since 1980 but did not know about this hidden message in the 1992 Road Test Yearbook, which I bought 15 years ago. James May, of Top Gear fame, was one of the team that put the Yearbook together and was known for his regular column in the magazine in those days. He was fired over an incident where he put in a hidden message, using the initial caps of each road test summary in the Yearbook.

JamesMayAutocar

   It took Wikipedia to tell me—so it is good for something after all. The message is, with punctuation, ‘So you think it’s really good, yeah? You should try making the bloody thing up. It’s a real pain in the arse.’
   No one had spotted it internally, but readers eventually asked the magazine if they had won a prize.
   On Radio 2, May said in an interview, ‘So I had this idea that if I re-edited the beginnings of all the little texts, I could make these red letters spell out a message through the magazine, which I thought was brilliant. … It took me about two months to do it and on the day that it came out I’d actually forgotten that I’d done it because there’s a bit of a gap between it being “put to bed” and coming out on the shelves. When I arrived at work that morning everybody was looking at their shoes and I was summoned to the managing director of the company’s office. The thing had come out and nobody at work had spotted what I’d done because I’d made the words work around the pages so you never saw a whole word. But all the readers had seen it and they’d written in thinking they’d won a prize or a car or something.’
   Shame he was fired over this. I thought the British sense of humour would have seen him through. But then, he might not have gone on to do his other things.

PS.: I got out my copy of the September 23, 1992 issue and note that eight pages are missing from the above thumbnails. That makes 16 missing characters. The full message is, with punctuation: ‘Road Test Yearbook. So you think it’s really good, yeah? You should try making the bloody thing up. It’s a real pain in the arse.’ 

Top Gear used to take the Geneva Motor Show pretty seriously, but with the new format, it hasn’t. No longer do we see Jeremy, Quentin, Michelle, Tiff and Steve fly to Switzerland. Still, it sent reps from the print edition to Genève to check out the cars, but we wound up with two so-so videos on YouTube.

   Car magazine did a better job, and TV isn’t even its forte. This 10-minute video is more informative than the laddie ones and reminds me of the earlier heyday of Top Gear.

As mentioned on my main blog, the BBC has shown footage of Richard Hammond’s 288 mph car crash in the delayed new series of Top Gear. I found footage from Google Video, which is posted above.

The BBC has an unusually good piece on what Richard Hammond’s brain could have been through in his car accident. Like most medical types, it ignores the power of prayer, good wishes and karma, but what do I know?

060929 Sky News—Richard Hammond

The Hamster is looking better, with Sky News reporting from Leeds’ General Infirmary, from which he was transferred today.
   It’s not so much that I have this YouTube video, but that I have it before the same pictures were broadcast on the network news here in New Zealand.