Roving the world

In these books, two handsome and popular telly adventurers consider, from viewpoints that are sometimes overly autobiographical, the culture of internal combustion in two of its most distinctive forms. Ben Fogle is obsessed by Land Rovers while Richard Hammond is fascinated by motorbikes.

Fogle came to notice in 2000 when he survived a harrowing year in front of the cameras on Taransay for the reality show Castaway. Here he says he found a rusting Series II Land Rover. This is odd because their bodies are made of aluminium, which corrodes in a different way. Hammond, the cute pixie of the Top Gear trio, made his own career move when, again in front of cameras, he crashed a dragster in 2006. Bravado in its different forms is a part of each account.

Fogle is better at social observation than corrosion. The 1959 Mini was always described as ‘classless’, but 11 years before, the original Land-Rover (then hyphenated) achieved that social karma. The Queen still drives one, a Defender of the Faith perhaps, persuaded by the Times’s 1948 announcement of a ‘special vehicle designed for agricultural and industrial work’. This design survived longer than the Model T Ford, Volkswagen, Porsche 911 or Mini.

There was a Diana-like outpouring of grief when, after 67 years, production ended on 29 January this year — an indestructible machine stalled by safety bureaucrats and cost accountants. Because the car connected us to that simpler agro-industrial past, before muck and brass were replaced with glossy globalised intangibles, it moved the emotions as well as moving great clods of earth. Item: the highest per capita Land Rover ownership is in the Falklands.

Truth be told, the Land Rover was a bit of a lash-up, thus symbolic.