In pictures: Top Gear's winning formula

The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Monday 16 November 2009



The article below about the television programme Top Gear said that presenter Richard Hammond's Triumph Herald with a sail sunk in minutes when he attempted to cross the English Channel in it. We meant sank, not sunk, and Hammond was driving a Volkswagen camper van. The Triumph Herald belonged to James May, another of the show's presenters.

In 1977, the television equivalent of a beige Austin Allegro trundled on to our screens. With its quaint name and features about road safety, Top Gear undertook the serious business of reviewing new cars. In the years since, however, this Allegro of the airwaves has undergone a transformation every bit as dramatic as the family car, exploding into a colourful, snarling great SUV of a television programme.

Top Gear has in fact taken over the world. It is now broadcast in more than 100 countries, claiming a global audience of 350 million. It is the most illegally downloaded show on the planet. Its format, which its makers describe as "crap men adventures with crap cars", has turned three shabby, middle-aged motoring journalists into global rock stars. This month not only sees a new series but a world tour, Top Gear Live, which will take the show to cities including Sydney, Cape Town, Hong Kong and Amsterdam.

Top Gear is not simply BBC2's highest rating programme; it is a phenomenon. Schoolboys and teenage girls flock to public appearances by its presenters, Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May. Even environmentally conscious viewers get guilty pleasure from its ludicrous stunts filmed with enormous budgets. And it's political: it kicks against what it sees as New Labour's nanny state (a Downing Street website poll demanding Clarkson become prime minister attracted nearly 50,000 signatures) and does everything in its power to provoke the politically correct sensibilities of the BBC. Barely a month passes without the show crashing into controversy, with Ofcom rulings on its jokes about prostitutes and suicide, and accusations that it is sexist, environmentally reckless and glamorises speeding.

To properly understand the show in its current format you have to go back – perhaps unsurprisingly – to school. It was at the public school of Repton, almost 40 years ago, that a boy called Andy Wilman befriended a fellow boarder with "a massive gob, really bad music taste and massive hair – the full Leo Sayer": the teenage Jeremy Clarkson. The pair ended up working together on Top Gear, and according to Wilman, now the executive producer of the show, their schooldays have been a profound influence on the revamped model: the presenters behave as if they are still at school and are celebrated and condemned alike for their puerile sense of humour.

The arrival of the motormouth Clarkson in the late 80s shook up strait-laced Top Gear, but audiences declined after he departed in the late 90s. Wilman, a burly, sweary 47-year-old who, when we meet is frantically stitching together the new series in an edit suite in Soho, was actually sacked from the old model Top Gear in 1999. The show looked "fucking old-fashioned" next to new formats such as Changing Rooms, he says now, and after it was finally axed in 2001, he and Clarkson got together over a pub lunch to draw up a manifesto for a brand new Top Gear.

One, it would have a news section so "important but boring" cars could be dispensed with quickly. Two, it would be filmed before an audience in an old aircraft hangar, that would become "an oasis for people who like cars". Three, they would have an all-male line-up. Four, and perhaps most importantly, "it would always be an unfair show," says Wilman. "The BBC would say, 'You should get Professor Suchabody on talking about the environment' and we would go, 'Fuck off, he can have the Ten O'Clock News.' Do the Two Fat Ladies say, 'And if you want to have a low-fat version of this recipe you can use single cream'? They never do. They go, 'Pile it on; heart attack now'."

Other winning ingredients were arrived at more by accident. The show needed a professional driver – but "a racing driver with brains" was impossible to find. Clarkson suggested an anonymous masked driver who never spoke, like the Gimp in Pulp Fiction. Wilman approached racing drivers: "We'd ask, do you want to be this secret racing driver on Top Gear? They'd say, 'I'm on.' You'll be called the Gimp . . . They'd go, 'You can fuck off.'" So he and Clarkson relented: their "captive racing driver" would be called The Stig, the nickname for new boys at Repton.

The bolshy, rebranded Top Gear – a blend of TFI Friday, Tiswas and That's Life, according to Wilman – was relaunched in 2002, but it was not an immediate success. "It was just a car show on BBC2 so we were afforded the time without having to force it," explains Richard "the Hamster" Hammond when we talk. "There was no artifice, there was no, 'Jeremy will be the big bombastic one and you, Richard, can be the short, noisy one.' We just sat down and did what we did and we were afforded the opportunity to let it grow organically."

The on-screen gang was completed with the arrival of the cerebral James May for the second series. Whatever you think of these three white, middle-class, middle-aged men with their schoolboy humour, all three are smart. Or, as a Top Gear editor said recently: "Thick people doing thick things is not funny. Clever people doing clever things is not funny. But clever people doing thick things really is funny."

Their onscreen chemistry and cartoon characters took shape over several series. "Jeremy is walk through a door rather than open it, Richard's massively accident prone and cheeky chappie, and James is a pedantic nerd," says Wilman. His young children love these "black-and-white, tabloid characters"; Wilman jokes that Top Gear's audience is all schoolboys and prisoners. Hammond, who grew up as one of three brothers, points out that a trio works well: one of them always gets in trouble, or gets picked on. Like any gang, they mercilessly take the piss and have even started to speak the same: Hammond now seems to echo May's distinctive way of saying "I wuz" and "becuz".

As audiences grew and Top Gear attracted A-list guests from Joanna Lumley to Usain Bolt to race in its "reasonably priced car" each week, its stunts became more outlandish and its films more exotic. The trio graduated from converting old bangers into stretch limos to road trips across America, painting "Man Love Rules OK" in pink on an old pick-up for a ride through Alabama that ended with locals throwing rocks at them.

"One of our watchwords, a phrase that permeates our productions, is 'ambitious but crap'," says Hammond, chuckling to himself. "I love setting off on projects like trying to make a car and cross the English Channel." Hammond's Triumph Herald with a sail sunk in minutes and a coastguard called them irresponsible. "I love setting off with deliberately childish and innocent and wide-eyed hopefulness, and I think people enjoy that."

May, a donnish, genteel man nicknamed Captain Slow by his colleagues for his championing of comfort over speed in cars, thinks Top Gear gives viewers vicarious pleasure. "Maybe a lot of people would like to make an amphibious car but not everybody can – we'll tell you about it and hopefully keep you amused while we are doing it," he says. "We are not hidebound by the conventions of television or political correctness; we just do what we think would be a good laugh and film it for television. People quite like the refreshing honesty of it. It's a fairly simple concept, Top Gear: three blokes pushing the boundaries of automotive acceptability."

It appeared they had pushed the boundaries too far in 2006 when Hammond nearly died while filming a stunt at Elvington airfield near York. A tyre on his dragster burst as he reached 288mph and a serious brain injury left him depressed and disorientated for many months. "I'd get confused between responses to things and I'd respond in the wrong way to things; it would be heartfelt and genuine but wrong," he says now. "Ongoing from that was a phase of a propensity for depression, for compulsion, for paranoia. I experienced those things and they are very unpleasant."

When Hammond returned to Top Gear, Clarkson handed him a tissue in case he started "dribbling" – another crass joke that was jumped on by critics. "Just because we make light of it on the show, don't think for a second I make light of it myself because I don't – it was bloody horrible," Hammond says.

While Wilman is called "the boss" by Hammond, Clarkson is the "engine room" of Top Gear according to Wilman. "It's Jeremy's show. No question, because it can't be a democracy. It's Jeremy's vision. We've all got drive but his drive is noticeably amazing." Arriving home at midnight after a recent Top Gear Live event, Clarkson worked on a rough edit of the new series and called Wilman with his notes at 8am the next day. "I doubt Jonathan Ross is doing that," Wilman says.

Clarkson would not be interviewed for this article. He refuses all interviews, claims Top Gear's publicist, although he pops up in the pages of the Sun and the Sunday Times often enough. Which is a shame, because Clarkson is an easy hate figure for Guardian readers, even those who secretly enjoy Top Gear. He seems to ooze contempt for the environment. During filming for Top Gear, it was claimed he damaged a peat bog in Scotland. On another occasion, the BBC was forced to apologise after he rammed a pick-up into a chestnut tree to test the vehicle's strength. He rails against political correctness and health and safety regulations, and earlier this summer was accused of calling Gordon Brown "a cunt" in unbroadcast comments to his Top Gear audience, whom he has also referred to as "oafs". He has been condemned by chief constables for glamorising speeding, has joked about truck drivers murdering prostitutes, and said a woman presenter would be "a disaster" on Top Gear.

He sounds like a sexist monster and a bully, but then Clarkson's reactionary opinions are probably the calculated wind-ups of a professional stirrer. Wilman's account of their schooldays is revealing: "Going to school together is more important than most people realise with Top Gear," he says. At school, Clarkson found his niche perpetually needling teachers and those in authority. "He'd be like somebody doing that to you." Wilman leans over and repeatedly prods me with his finger. "If they do that to you for four years, you want to kill them."

The pair learned in boarding school that there was a limit to punishments – they already had bad food and early bedtime – so they felt almost untouchable. "Which is why I can't be arsed with Ofcom," Wilman says of their frequent brushes with authority. (The latest was this week, when the regulator ruled that Top Gear breached broadcasting regulations with its spoof VW advert depicting a suicide.) "If the BBC get cross with us, we struggle to take it seriously."

Curiously, the Labour government has been another ingredient in Top Gear's success. "I believe there is a load of reasons why Top Gear is popular – families like it, girls like to watch men being thick and we do that with aplomb, and the third thing is we are a release valve for people who get nagged to fuck," says Wilman. "We know this Labour administration has put more rules in since '97 than anyone else because they have passed more laws."

May agrees. "I hope people like the fact we're not going to be cowed into toeing the Labour party line. We don't like being told by other people how we should live and how we should think." He pauses and adds with genial irony: "We're striking out for freedom on Top Gear." Under a Conservative government, Top Gear's status as an enjoyably subversive pleasure may disappear. Wilman admits the team are "a bit Tory wanker", but argues they will "end up doing opposition" because any new government will "still pop the motorist because it's an easy target".

One analogy that keeps returning to Top Gear is of a rock band. After years of obscurity, this gang of four blokes has gone global. They may be at the peak of their powers – with their world tour, solo projects, long hair, helicopters and big houses in the country – but just like jaded rockers they sense their own mortality.

Indeed, May has said that if he had known how massive Top Gear would become, he would not have joined in the first place. Hammond is not convinced: "James is not without ambition. None of us are. You don't do our job unless you really want to. It doesn't happen by accident and don't think for a second it does. But none of us imagined it would get this big."

If personality clashes don't kill Top Gear (these days, the presenters sound increasingly convincing when they describe how much they dislike each other), then budget cuts might. On BBC orders, Top Gear has cut costs this year and must do so again next year. Wilman is worried that its lavish films – "our signature dish" – will suffer. It has been reported that each show costs £100,000, but "it's more than that," Wilman brags. "We spend that on crisps."

Global rights and merchandising make millions for Worldwide, the BBC's commercial arm, which then pays for a quarter of Top Gear's budget. The rest is from the licence fee. But reports that Clarkson earns £2m a year are "the biggest pile of bollocks," says Wilman. "They are not getting paid stupid money."

As well as the budget, Top Gear has been forced into a new, schoolboy-unfriendly 9pm time-slot because The X Factor results show is now at 8pm on Sunday. Wilman would happily have Simon Cowell back on Top Gear, but "this time we might cut through the brakes".

Critics may dislike Top Gear's swagger and argue that it appears more scripted these days (not true, says Wilman). For the new series, they have romped around South America in 4x4s, crashed a caravan-airship and are hoping to create a smash-hit art exhibition out of cars. If Top Gear is a rock band, aren't these expensive stunts a self-indulgent concept album too far?

Wilman insists they do not stage their misadventures but admits it is "less spontaneous" after 13 series. "We know we want calamities to happen. There is no surprise to us any more, just relief, when things go wrong," he says. Unlike great rock bands, he does not think they will be destroyed by their own hubris. "It will end because we are a one-trick pony, as all good shows are, and at some point we will run out of ideas or the public will go, 'We've got the point now.'" he says. "But we'll run out of songs first."

A new series of Top Gear begins on BBC2 at 9pm on Sunday, and also on the BBC HD channel.