Uppers and downers

Watching it on Sunday, though, I did find myself wondering whether, ever so slightly, it hadn’t jumped the shark. For a moment, I thought it was just me. But then I consulted the Rat, who has not missed an episode since he was about 13 and is now 23, and he agreed. ‘It used to be a bit creaky and now it’s gone just a bit slick.’

What bothered us was a segment we should both theoretically have loved. Jeremy Clarkson drove a souped-up, ex-drug-dealer’s motor over six miles of Dorset tank-training country while various squaddies in armoured vehicles tried to destroy him.

At one point, Clarkson negotiated a ravine by driving over the bridge-laying vehicle; at another, he sat quaking in the car as its roof was scrunched by a giant grabby-claw thing and then riddled with bullets from a .50-calibre machine gun. Except, of course, all the really dangerous stuff was staged. Clarkson was nowhere near the car when it was destroyed.

Would I have preferred to see Clarkson reduced to a pink mist by a .50-calibre bullet on television? Not necessarily. But at least in the old days there was a sense of rugged honesty about the enterprise. If Clarkson, Hammond and May raced from Land’s End to John o’Groats in a Ferrari, a Lamborghini and motorised dildo, you could be fairly sure the result wouldn’t be rigged just because the director had decided it would be funnier if the motorised dildo won. You thought — maybe you were wrong, but you did at least imagine — that this was a proper race, under proper race conditions and may the best vehicle win.

Watching Top Gear these days is like sitting down to watch The Italian Job and discovering they’ve scheduled Mission Impossible III instead. Not a disaster, by any stretch. Just not the homespun, charming, quintessentially English classic you used rather to enjoy.