The Top Gear Masses
June 30, 2008 by upyourego
This blog post started life as a very long post on the Final Gear forums - but sometimes forum posts deserve a blog entry all of their own.
Before I give you the post in full should set some background. Every week a thread is posted to the Final Gear Forums for reviews of that episode.
Every week some think it was the best thing since sliced bacon and some think it was god awful. The split seems to spin around depending on whether it was a more car heavy episode or a more stunt heavy episode.
It was that split that prompted this post.
In a lot of ways you can compare Doctor Who and Top Gear and the main one is the ‘fanbase’ there are hardcore fans on both sites - although you guys aren’t quite as nuts as the DW guys - although I can’t say the same for the people on the James May Boards 
Image via Wikipedia
But the other is also Mass Appeal - Top Gear and Doctor Who both appeal to an amazing wide and diverse audience covering male/female and old/young (the ratings breakdown proves it).
Also both have a long history and a pretty geeky original subject matter. Which brings me to the point I wanted to make - I knew I’d get there in the end.
If you take a geeky show + a history + a hardcore fan base + a mass varied audience = two sides wanting different things from the show.
In the Doctor Who fan base those outside of the hardcore fans are called Not We’s - basically the people that just watch the show every week because it’s a great piece of entertainment and don’t particularly care about the subject matter.
If we only take the UK audience into account (sorry guys outside) as they’re the ones that the show is made - I would suggest that about two thirds of the total Top Gear audience is made up of the Not FGs.
And I would suggest that they prefer the cocking about episodes that don’t really focus on the cars - but are more about three middle aged blokes having a laugh.
God I wrote a lot to get to that point.
Which made me wonder whether it was worth finding a friend/family member each week who only watches Top Gear casually (doesn’t assess and strip it apart each week) and ask what they thought of it.
I have several people like that in my office and their reaction to this weeks episode was ‘yeah it was alright but last week was much better’.
It’s not just the episode as a whole that has that split though. If you split the episode up you can guess that the Not FGs prefer the stunts whereas the hardcore (FGs) prefer the cars - although this isn’t true in all cases - by FGs I’m talking about those that have obsessed since series 1 or 2 when it was predominantly about cars with the odd stunt per series.
The other area that makes a big difference and causes a split - although my theory on this one is the split would be more geographic and even the FGs are split depending on where they come from - is the Star in a Reasonably Fast Car segment.
Here was my post on that (and the thread that followed).
There seems to be a lot of hatred towards the Star in a Reasonably Priced Car segment but I personally really enjoy it.
It’s a nice break and is always good to get a couple of different voices on the show. Plus it’s great to see people I’m used to seeing in completely different environments - doing something outside of their normal comfort zone.
Having read through a number of threads with people saying things like “I have no idea who that guy is - scrap SIARPC” or “I hate the SIARPC segments” and such like - and noticing a number of those comments came from people outside of the UK - I thought it might be interesting to see how many people like it/hate it and where they are from.
So do you love/like/hate SIARPC and are you in the UK or out of the UK?
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Why are all the James May fans considered to be mad (and the word is “quite”, not “quiet”)? You either like a loud-mouthed scruffy individual who solves life’s problems with a hammer, or a huge-eyed Elijah Wood wanna-be who’s getting older every time he’s on telly. Or an intelligent, witty, very sexy guy with more to say for himself than most so called ’stars’ on telly. I know which one I’d pick.
The reason the second epsiode was not as good as the first (or the third, for that matter) is because there was very little James on it. See, you miss him even if you don’t like him (and you obviously don’t or you’d stop slagging him off here).
When did I slag James off? He’s my favourite, I have his books, I brought his audiobook, DVDs and watched all his TV series.
His bits are usually always the funniest - it wasn’t James I was slagging off it was a comedic (obviously not) remark about ’some’ of the threads on the James May Boards - I find him funny - not sexy
Every Monday I go through the Times, Telegraph, Sun and Mirror and print all the columns of each of the TG presenters - then on Monday afternoon on my lunchbreak I read through them - I always save James’ until last as his are generally the best.
Although Jeremy’s recent column about the BBC Eaterie (it wasn’t a BBC business but a sort of lentil cafe outside) was pretty funny.
Oh, sorry, I am just SO annoyed at people who think I’m weird because I think James is the best. You have no idea how much stick I get, and yesterday (after Sunday’s “Top Gear” where he was described as being childish because he got ‘annoyed’ with Hammond - I think he was having a laugh - by not towing him, and boring…for reasons best known to other people), I think I will just not talk about how great he is. It sounded as though you were joining the “You’re just not normal” brigade. Yep, I’ve had that thrown at me, along with “You’re the wrong sex”, “He’s completely scruffy”, “He only does it for the money” and the old “Why doesn’t he get a haircut?”. Why can’t people be more original?