The 21st series of Top Gear began last night and, at first glance, it was business as usual. There were the usual cars. There were the usual legitimately harrowing shirts. There was the usual studio audience, all craning and tiptoeing to see past the usual wall of attractive young women that the producers always use as a front row. Years from now, last night's episode of Top Gear will become completely indistinguishable from all the other episodes of Top Gear. It'll be repeated on Dave and viewers won't even blink.

And yet, if you looked closely enough, you might have been able to see one tiny difference. Perhaps it was a one-off for the first episode, and things will be back to normal next week, but last night Top Gear finally did away with all pretence of realism.

The episode was a cartoon. It had almost no grounding in reality whatsoever. There were fake moustaches. There were electromagnets. A velvet-covered Volkswagen Golf was blown up by a stick of dynamite that had been inserted into its exhaust pipe by a little tiny police car. Incidentally, Jeremy Clarkson – who was driving the Golf at the point of explosion – was fine. He had a single black smear on his face, and the steering wheel had come off in his hands, but he was fine. The entire show was roughly one spinning moustache and a handful of sproingy noises away from being a Chuck Jones cartoon.

This might have been a reaction to all the accusations of fakery that Top Gear has endured over the years. There was an outrage when it was revealed that the hosts didn't really burn that caravan down by accident in 2007, or fly an airship over an operating airport by accident in 2009, or soak dozens of diners at a riverbank restaurant by accident last year. Any time Top Gear broadcasts any sort of stunt, in fact, it's usually met with howls of outrage from people who don't like to be reminded that television isn't just a series of unedited documents that have been recorded for historical accuracy. By broadcasting an episode where nothing – apart from the still-dreary Star in a Reasonably Priced Car segment – seemed to be in any way affected by the laws of physics, it felt as if Top Gear was going out of its way to show everyone just how fake it is.

As a result, it ended up being one of my favourite episodes of Top Gear for a long time. No longer burdened by the constraints of authenticity, it was free to be as stupid as it wanted to be. Nobody believes that anything they see on Top Gear is real any more, so why bother trying?

It's long been threatened that Top Gear would eventually turn into Last of the Summer Wine, but that day has now arrived. It hasn't been a show about cars for years, but now it's not even about that. It's just a show about three old men in vomit-patterned shirts lurching from one enormously contrived escapade to the next. And it's all the better for it.

I desperately want Top Gear to continue down this path. Next week, I want Richard Hammond to get run over by a steamroller and spend the rest of the episode flapping around like a cardboard cutout. I want James May to run off a cliff and not start falling until he realises that there isn't any ground underneath him. I want Jeremy Clarkson to be smacked in the head with an anvil. To be fair, I've always wanted Jeremy Clarkson to be smacked in the head with an anvil. But now that Top Gear has finally accepted its place as a full-blown cartoon, I might finally get my wish.