Clarissa Tan experiences the greatest show on earth, and laughs

I watched Top Gear (BBC2, Sunday) for the first time in my life last week (the rock under which I’ve been living is pretty large, practically a boulder). I thought I’d better plug this knowledge gap before it got too embarrassing, seeing that Top Gear is the greatest show on earth, the travelling Big Top de nos jours, a daredevil combo of acrobatic stunts, mechanical wizardry and freakery.

Fakery too, apparently, as it’s emerged that in a recent episode scenes that looked spontaneous were actually staged. These involved flashes of watery chaos, upturned tables and angry diners shaking their fists as an amphibious vehicle hastily built and even more hastily driven by Jeremy Clarkson & co. blasted past a bucolic restaurant by the River Avon, spraying all and sundry. It seems that the diners were actors, and their anger at Clarkson’s ‘Hovervan’ was faux fury.

Well, you could knock me down with a feather. Top Gear is the world’s favourite three-ring circus — what did we expect? Its job is to wow us with whizz-bang antics and tomfoolery, possibly also sleights-of-hand, all ring-mastered by Clarkson and aided by his two clowns James May and Richard Hammond. It’s clear to even an ignorant ingenue like me that large parts of it — the banter, the races, the speed laps, the celebrity interviews — are rehearsed, or at least planned, beforehand. Nobody watches Top Gear for its verisimilitude or because it brings us closer to real life. For that we have Newsnight.

I was relieved to hear those scenes of soaked bystanders were play-acted, and that no sentient beings were wilfully harmed in the making of the film. In the last episode, in which our three musketeers did an in-depth study of caravanning and compared cars for their towing capabilities, we saw Clarkson and May chucking all kinds of newly bought kit into recycling and rubbish tips, because they’d observed that that was what caravanners seemed to do.