Why do women love Top Gear?

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On the whole, I like to think I’m a cultured, educated and quite feminine sort of girl. I like the theatre and the opera. I’m partial to a Bach fugue. A literature graduate, I can talk knowledgably enough about Shakespeare, Chaucer, Dickens and Proust. I enjoy walks in the country and horse-riding at weekends. I have so many pets I could open an animal sanctuary. There’s the spaniel, three ponies and two fluffy rabbits called Wendy and Tinkerbell ... you get the picture. Why is it then, that every Sunday night, when I’m finished with the horses, and the dog-walking, and a gossipy lunch at the local gastro-pub with my girlfriends, I sit down in front of my television to watch three middle-aged men telling jokes about cars? Top Gear. I love it. And the reason I love it is complicated. Everything about the show, which began its 20th series on Sunday, is counter-intuitive.

Yet over the years, Top Gear has made such an impression on me that whole episodes have seared into my brain. As my mother can remember where she was when Kennedy was assassinated, I still remember what I was doing when the TG team pushed a motorhome off a cliff.

Fine, so I was sitting in front of the television. But you know what I mean. I still remember how I laughed until I couldn’t breathe as the makeshift camper van tumbled towards the sea. Ah, the guilty pleasure of slapstick comedy.

But the enduring appeal of Top Gear is so much more involved than that.

There is something about the fabulously politically incorrect jokes, the irreverence, the insulting of minorities and, indeed, of entire nations, that is good for the soul.

Quite why such epic rudeness should be an attractive proposition to a liberal-minded woman is, as I say, a complex matter. Do I not know better than to laugh at a joke about gypsies, or a skit based on toilet facilities in rural India?

All I would say is this: if you live in a country where you dare not squeak for fear of being accused of insulting an ethnic group you hadn’t even heard of, then you are going to cherish a TV show where three blokes courageously, or pig-headedly - depending on how you look at it - insult everybody they come across and then refuse to apologise. In fact, you are going to consider it essential viewing.

TESTING THE BOUNDARIES

When Richard Hammond compares himself to a “pikey” because his Land Rover is a bit bling, he is not just cracking a bad-taste joke, he is upholding our God-given right to make fun of each other.

Sometimes, it feels like the hoary old Top Gear chauvinist threesome - Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Hammond - are the only ones testing the boundaries of our dangerously illiberal racial and religious hatred laws and upholding free speech in this country.

And for that reason alone, you will have to prise my Top Gear box set from my cold dead hands.

I don’t think it is overstating things to say that Top Gear tells us what it means to be British.

When they push a motorhome off a cliff, Clarkson et al say exactly what needs to be said about the quintessential British love of driving an uncomfortable home on wheels to a cold, rainy place and sitting in it for a week playing cards, feeling quietly dissatisfied.

But to understand Top Gear’s appeal fully, you must consider the psychology of watching fast cars.

We’re not meant to like speed any more - but we do.

No matter how much we tell ourselves that we care about the environment, no matter how enthusiastically we sort our rubbish into six different sacks, we love the smell of exhaust fumes in the morning.

Like a secret longing for raw meat, human beings have a need for speed. And in an age where you can barely get a residential parking permit for a car with a six-cylinder engine, and where a V8 will soon only be obtainable on the black market, Top Gear services this deep, dark need.

Of course, if you were’nt a petrol-head before you got hooked on Top Gear, you will be when you’ve been watching it for a while.

A few years ago, I bought a Volvo V70 because Clarkson suggested that it might be “cool”. This proves that just as smoking on TV is a bad influence on the impressionable, promoting gas-guzzlers during prime time leads astray silly women having a mid-life crisis.

Anyway, I had not had the V70 very long when it was stolen from my driveway and used as a getaway car. Before I even called the insurance company, my first thought was: could this be made into a Top Gear feature? They did simulate a bank robbery in the 16th series, but what about holding up shops and seeing which estate car is best for accommodating a cash register in the back?

Yes, I’ve got it bad.

The only reason I want to be successful in life is so that one day I might be the “star in a reasonably priced car”.

I dream of going round the TG track in less than one minute, 45.2 seconds. Cameron Diaz’ time, obviously. But as well as gratuitous speed, Top Gear is about gratuitous, well, gratuitousness. Watching Hollywood stars drive hatchbacks, while being very satisfying, is also just plain ridiculous.

Some of it is so pointless that there is a sort of grandeur to its banality. Driving a car from the back seat, even with Clarkson’s long legs, falls into this category, as does racing a Ferrari 612 Scaglietti against a plane and turning a Mercedes-Benz S-Class into a living room. For my money, though, the best shows are when the presenters test out vintage sports cars like overgrown schoolboys.

My favourite is the episode where they each buy a Seventies Italian supercar for under £10 000 (R150 000) and race from Bristol to a strip club in Slough.

How’s that for unbridled machismo?

Driving a Ferrari, a Maserati and a Lamborghini to Spearmint Rhino.

From time to time, of course, Top Gear does actually give you some advice on which car to buy. But I think we all know that we don’t watch it for that.

I love the macho posturing, the unconcealed rivalry, the casting of inhibitions to the wind.

Watching three ageing blokes having a whale of a time, an endless boys’ own adventure, is incredibly therapeutic. Above all, it’s just very funny. It’s great entertainment. It’s a national treasure. - Daily Mail