When Jeremy Clarkson punched his Irish producer while shooting an episode of Top Gear in Yorkshire in 2015, he set in motion a series of events that have finally reached their conclusion this week. The BBC has announced it is cancelling Top Gear “for the foreseeable” future. Eight years after Clarkson lashed out and was subsequently sacked by the BBC, the often farcical saga of the show’s decline has finally come to an end. Britain’s national broadcaster has taken a once hugely lucrative ratings winner – in 2015, it was worth £50 million a year – and driven it into the ditch.
The demise of Top Gear follows a crash during filming in late 2022 at Dunsfold Aerodrome in which presenter Andrew Flintoff suffered facial injuries and several broken ribs (the BBC later reached a £9 million settlement with the ex-England cricket international). It isn’t the first Top Gear near-tragedy. Jeremy Clarkson’s old compatriot Richard Hammond was lucky to survive after the jet-powered dragster he was steering in 2006 flipped and burst into flames. With that disaster still sharp in the memories, Flintoff’s £9 million crash has prompted executives to put Top Gear on breeze blocks.
But even had the collision not occurred last year, Top Gear was surely on borrowed time. It has been in decline ever since Clarkson was sacked after physically assaulting Tymon and calling him “a lazy, Irish c***”. He exited and was followed by his co-presenters, Hammond and James May. With that, Top Gear was effectively over. The difficulty is that it has taken the BBC the best part of a decade to come to terms with that fact.
The denial ran deep and for understandable reasons. At its peak. Top Gear was a global franchise, with seven million tuning in each week in the UK and some 350 million watching the show and its local spin-offs (Top Gear America, etc) globally. With Flintoff and his co-presenters Paddy McGuinness and Chris Harris behind the wheel, the series was wobbling badly, however – with ratings hovering around two million.
Flintoff and Co were the third attempt at rebooting the brand. Following Clarkson’s departure, the BBC had hired radio presenter Chris Evans for a disastrous one-and-done season. Evans was a keen motorist. But he seemed nervous about the inevitable comparisons to Clarkson. You could smell the anxiety. It clogged the nostrils like petrol fumes. When he quit, there was a sense that everyone – Evans and viewers alike – had been put out of their misery.
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The BBC next handed the keys to Evan’s more laid-back co-presenter, Friends star Matt LeBlanc. For LeBlanc, Top Gear was a lark. He didn’t need the money. Compared to Friends, this was a weekend excursion in a runabout. He powered through three seasons but then stepped away, citing time commitments and the strain of being away from his family.
After going through hosts like a boy racer going through brake pads, the BBC should have accepted the inevitable. For better or worse, the definitive Top Gear was the Clarkson version of the show. It was irreverent, childish, sometimes offensive and pandered to the worst instincts of its audience. Which is why it was so beloved and ultimately why it could not continue.
Like it or loathe it, there was no denying that Clarkson spoke to his demographic – predominantly middle-aged men, confused by this strange new world where cyclists had the right of way and you could no longer make jokes about Mexicans or Scottish people (as Clarkson did on Top Gear).
Over time, the BBC would learn that viewers were tuning in not for the cars – but for Clarkson, May and Hammond. After their exit, they were snapped by Prime Video, and while their show, The Grand Tour, was a mixed success at best, it fared better than the new Top Gear.
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It also showed that Clarkson didn’t just punch Irish people. By inviting Hothouse Flowers to perform on the opening episode of The Grand Tour, he demonstrated that he could groove to them, too. He went on to have success with Prime Video’s Clarkson Farm before his disgraceful remarks about Meghan Markle in a Sun newspaper column received widespread condemnation and it seemed his career might not survive. But he has – while Top Gear is now for the chop.
That’s no reflection on Flintoff, McGuinness and Harris (a motoring journalist who, like Clarkson, genuinely knows a lot about cars). But viewers were turning off and Top Gear no longer commanded the headlines. In the manner of a diesel SUV coughing out fumes on the school run, its time has passed. It has just taken until now for the BBC to realise it.
