'Top Gear' roars in on first leg of world tour

TOP GEAR Liverolled back the recession last night. Maybe it is not as bad as we feared when 5,000 people can afford €75 to watch three blokes banter about cars in between stunts, every car has a six-figure price tag and even Anglo Irish Bank is hosting a hospitality suite.

The smell of petrol, burning rubber, fireworks and steel drums and the incredibly loud sound of a jet engine stuck on the back of a glorified go-kart filled the RDS Simmonscourt as the first Top Gear Liveshow hosted outside the UK played to an ecstatic audience last night.

All 49,000 tickets for the four-day event have been sold out, a testimony to the popularity of the BBC television show which is quintessentially English and yet global in its appeal.

A large model of Big Ben dominated the stage as the three presenters, Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May, arrived to the sound of steel drums, fireworks and the Led Zeppelin's song Rock and Roll.

"We're so popular, we've managed to fill the biggest cowshed in Ireland," said Clarkson, ever the wind-up merchant.

Clarkson, the alpha male of the trio, said Ireland was the first stop on a global tour which also included South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong, "all countries we used to own".

The big ticket price came with a big production set with a series of stunts involving cars careering around a seemingly impossibly small stage area.

There was also a Colander of Death, a sort of a wall of death in a spherical cage about the size of a small room in which four motorcycle riders rode around without causing carnage. The audience was overwhelmingly male, as evidenced by the long queues for the men's toilets and the non-existent ones for the women's.

Showgoers stopped to photograph themselves beside the array of car erotica around the arena, such as the Lamborghini Diablo 6.0, the Aston Martin Vanquish (€179,900), the Ferraris and the Morgan Aero 8.

The "look-but-don't-touch" vibe extended to the price, though there was some optimists who left mobile phone numbers for interested buyers.

Earlier, the incredible popularity of the show was already evident when hundreds of fans queued outside Brown Thomas yesterday morning for a book signing. The three were accorded a welcome more appropriate for rock stars.

Grafton Street may have been pedestrianised for 20 years, but an exception was made for the Top Gearpresenters who left from outside the front of Brown Thomas in a black Audi Q7 SUV with Garda motorcycle outriders.

At a press conference in the upmarket department store, Clarkson, May and Hammond were incredulous to be told that fans cannot drive to the event and have, instead, been told to take public transport, an indignity too far for any self-respecting petrolhead.

"It's like the sign at Silverstone which says, 'please drive carefully'," said the typically irascible Clarkson. "I apologise for that. Anyone who finds themselves on public transport after the age of 26 must consider themselves a failure."

May added: "There's a long tradition like that in England as well. There's always a sign outside Goodwood that says 'Goodwood Festival of Speed, Slow'."

Clarkson was equally dismissive to hear the Green Party were in government in Ireland - environmentalists, health and safety culture and Americans being three of his favourite targets.

"Greens, I wish them all the best with their idiotic ideas. They grow beards, green people," he said.

The three have been testing electric cars recently and are unimpressed with plans by the Government here to ensure 10 per cent of all cars on the roads are electric by 2020.

"Brilliant, is not a word I'd use to describe them, terrible is," said Clarkson. "They don't work.

They just won't go anywhere. They won't go to the shops, they won't go to work in the morning."

When asked of his opinion of Irish roads, Clarkson said: "Well, we built them didn't we?" Cue an awkward silence. "I'm talking about [EU] subsidies".

"And we built yours and your railways too," came the reply.