It was a brilliant deception, but with one flaw. The secretive underworld devoted to exposing the Stig – which numbers among its members judges, politicians of all parties, academics, poets, military leaders and the heads of police forces – had noticed that, as with Michael Jackson and his sister, I never appeared on screen at the same time as him. The producers responded with a handful of simple scenes in which I did – a game of Top Trumps, for example – because the Stig was now an animatronic version made by Jeremy in his own workshop.