After an article in the Daily Mail this morning (since removed) randomly suggesting a Top Gear movie involving the lads going around the world in 80 cars.
It looks like this was taken from a suggestion originally posted in an ‘ideas for Top Gear’ thread on Digital Spy a while ago – but the idea is interesting.
I’m not saying a Top Gear movie would be the best of ideas of all time but there is more that could be done with the format.
Especially as it might be useful/interesting for Top Gear to do a Doctor Who/Torchwood and cut things back for a year.
The DW team took a year off from a normal series of the show and instead had a number of bigger budget specials.
Top Gear could do a similar thing – take 2011 off (I’m sure a lot of planning/work/money is already invested in 15/16 for this year) and instead of two series which is about 14 episodes – have four specials.
One could go out around Easter, one in the summer, one around October and another at Christmas – I’m sure a Christmas Day Top Gear special would do well.
Then, with car news, information and ideas brimming from a year of having to come up with fewer ideas – the lads could start again properly with series 17 in 2012.
In fact I think they’d do well taking the same approach as other BBC shows and maybe having one 8 episode series a year (maybe running from May) and then a special around Christmas.
I love Top Gear and there has been some great stuff over the years but spreading the money and ideas over fewer episodes I think would help keep it going for longer.
So the Sunday night will kick off at about 19:30. I’ll get the youngest children to bed and then sit down to watch Doctor Who (slightly delayed thanks to Sky+) with my daughter.
Then I’ll get her to bed before switching to the recording (in progress) of BBC Three’s Doctor Who Confidential for a look at how the episode was made and the chance of a glimpse at the new series/Christmas special.
Then it’s back to BBC Two in time for the start of series 14 of Top Gear where the lads will investigate a famous Romanian road.
And if that wasn’t enough BBC Four has a Mars night with a Horizon guide to Mars, To Mars by A-Bomb and the Sky at Night Exloring Mars – so Sky+ will be working pretty hard all night.
I’m putting the details of the episodes I’ve mentioned above below so you can decide to skip it if you want to stay spoiler pure.
The Top Gear episode features an Aston DBS Volante, a Ferrari California, a Lamborghini Gallardo Spider and Ramania. James is on the track in power limos and a Bananananana.
In Doctor Who the year is 2059, the local is Bowie Base One and the planet is Mars. The message ‘don’t drink the water – in fact – don’t touch it either’.
In addition to all of that brilliance both will be available on BBC HD, so if you have a HD TV/box you’ll be able to go from Doctor Who, through Confidential and then on to Top Gear without even changing the channel.
For me, I’ll be able to make my second watch a high quality watch on my 22 inch monitor from a BBC iPlayer HD download – beautiful.
Which means Monday will be equally impressive – I’ll have the Spooks from Friday (yes I gave in and watched the ‘next episode’ on BBC Three), a repeat of Doctor Who and Top Gear – not to mention the mass of other shows I’ve recorded or downloaded including Family Guy, How I Met Your Mother, Big Bang Theory and Stargate Universe.
BBC 2’s flagship entertainment based programming featuring a bit of motoring and three childish middle aged men, Top Gear, will return in just under two months and will be in HD!
I’ve resisted calling it a motoring show as it has moved away from that over the last few years, becoming a more generic entertainment show that has motoring at the heart but focuses heavily on the entertaining fringe.
Anyway, BBC HD boss, Danielle Nagler has confirmed in a BBC Internet Blog post that the shows 14th series will air on the BBC HD Channel from November 15th.
She said: “Yes, after several hundred emails from you as to why you feel Top Gear needs to make the journey from the SD to the HD world, I can confirm that the team is now working with HD cameras on the new series.”
In the past this would mean I’d need to get myself a shiny new HD tv to enjoy the series but I’m not ready to give up on my old trusty CRT 100hz flat front television yet.
However, we now live in an iPlayer world and I’ll be able to download Top Gear in 3.2 Mbps MPEG 4, 1280 x 720 , 25 frames/sec or, as I’ll be getting 8mb/second up and 650kb/s down from October – stream it.
Or there are ‘other ways‘ for those outside the UK who don’t have the luxury of iPlayer.
I can’t believe I’m about to start ANOTHER blog post with the words ‘I’m a massive Top Gear fan’ but there you go – I did it – but this one is about more than just the television series.
Although I am a massive Top Gear fan, I wouldn’t say it is the best show of the last decade – it certainly is ONE of the best shows on television, but my heart would really want to see an original comedy series or drama fit that roll – even if TG is part both of those things.
But when the question comes up ‘what is the best television show of the Noughties?’ in a poll on the Guardian website – I find myself torn.
First there is my love of good drama and original comedy: shows like The West Wing and The Wire, The Thick of It, QI, Life on Mars, Flight of the Conchords, Doctor Who, Black Books and Spooks are all on the shortlist.
But then there is my loyalty to the community, brand and bigger multimedia experience that is Top Gear. You see Top Gear is more than just three blokes pissing about for an hour a week 12/13 weeks a year. It’s a magazine, a series of columns and books by the main personalities and most importantly a community.
There aren’t many British shows with online communities surrounding them the size of the one Top Gear enjoys – what with the hundreds of comments every new blog post attracts on the official Top Gear website to the 40 thousand member Final Gear fan forum.
The only other show I can think of off the top of my head is Doctor Who and its related spin-offs – Torchwood and Sarah-Jane Adventures – two shows with a long history and relatively recent major re-launch.
So back to the poll – as you can see I’m torn, between my love of a good drama and my loyalties to the Top Gear community – in the end I decided to vote twice – for Top Gear and Spooks.
But not before heading over to the Final Gear forums and posting a new thread with the details of the Guardian Poll and inviting members of the forum to go and vote.
I included the word Rig in the title but really what I was doing was attempting to mobilise the mass of internet savvy Top Gear fans.
Here was my thread opening post:
The Guardian are running a poll trying to find the best TV show of the noughties and Top Gear currently has 1.5% of the vote.
The top two shows are currently The West Wing and The Wire – they’d both get a vote from me if I could as would The Thick of It, QI, Life on Mars, Flight of the Conchords, Doctor Who, Black Books and Spooks – but you get to vote for one only.
So it went to Top Gear.
And I included a link to the Guardian page with the poll. As you can see when I posted it Top Gear had a share of just 1.5% of the vote and there were even comments questioning why Top Gear deserved to be in the shortlist at all.
Within a few hours it was up to about 3% and by the time I looked the next morning it was in second place with about 10%.
After lunch it had gone up again to about 12% – taking the lead and by the time I wrote this blog post Top Gear had 22% of the vote – a nearly 12% lead over second place The Wire.
The Guardian picked up on the mobilisation moves themselves with JasonDeans posting: “Although at the moment it looks like the Top Gear fans have got organised & that could be top soon. Let’s see if any other fanbases mobilise…”
Oh and in response, later, to a post saying ‘how the freak can Top Gear be in first place’ JasonDeans came back with: “cos top gear fans have got organised.”
Now, as I mentioned before – this isn’t a case of saying ‘look Top Gear IS the best show of the last ten years’ but more of how a strong community, when mobilised can easily influence things like polls, debates and even charts.
Although to be honest – it does only have 113 members and to have any impact it would need to break into the top 20 singles chart – for that you’d need to sell thousands of copies.
As I’m sure you’ve guessed from the many, many, MANY posts on the subject – I’m something of a fan of Top Gear.
So with that in mind I’ve tried my best to avoid doing the obvious and posting Top Gear episodes as my iPlayer pick – I usually rate an episode somewhere between eight and ten every week – so it would be easy for me to choose it.
But it would be to pointlessly obvious, you know I like Top Gear, you know where the iPlayer is so it sort of acts as a default Pick without me actually saying it.
However, all that said and done – I am picking Top Gear this week. There are a few reasons for it, one of which is the openly political – stop nannying us rant – straight after a scene involving a hot day, no air con and three middle aged men in a sealed up car. See it for your self HERE.
But also because it is possibly one of the funniest episodes of Top Gear in the last few years. I spent the whole 55 minutes clutching my stomach in pain from laughing so much.
The three brilliantly childish presenters confront the credit crunch, in a way only Top Gear could/would by finding three ’sensibly priced small cars’ and showing them off to bankers – they then paint them, add loud speakers and drive around Parliament Square.
Plus, James meets American stunt driving legend Ken Block, Jeremy tests the mildly insane Mercedes SL Black on the track, and Michael McIntyre is the Star in a Reasonably Priced Car.
As a bonus here is a video of Ken Block outside of Top Gear.
When I said Top Gear was a default pick of the week – to be honest – that’s true. My real pick of the week was supposed to be posted last week and was a radio pick. But I was stuck in Bristol and left it to late – the first part expires today.
But just in case you want to look it up on your favourite download service of choice – it was called Voyage and was an alternative history story on the tale of the American Space Programme.
In this alternative world JFK just got injured and we see the programme go on towards a manned mission to Mars in the mid-1980s.
Previously on my Top Gear obsessed blog – I wrote suggestions for Top Gear 100 – that was last series and it came and then went away.
Not that the Top Gear team noticed – Andy Wilman, show executive Producer, asked the crew to work out the number of episodes and tell him when it gets to 100.
He said: “Count up how many shows we’ve done since we came back on air with Top Gear because that has got to be a landmark show and we don’t want to miss the bugger.”
Andy then went on to explain that: “I’ve just worked out that the actual 100th show was the really shit one with the Renault Avantine so I’m sorry.”
So there we have it – no leaping over caravans, burning caravans – in fact no caravans at all – just a poor to middling, if not utter turd car. Oh well.
Here is a link to a great behind the scenes video from Top Gear 13×01 to take your mind off it. I can’t embed it though. You can watch what I think is episode 100 here.
However, something I can embed for you is Top Gear 13×01 as my tip of the week.
And to finish off a few words on this weeks Top Gear ratings – a pretty impressive one for Top Gear and BBC Two – but not the highest of all time.
The opening episode of Top Gear 13 saw an audience of 7.1 million and a share of 30.4% reaching a peak audience of 7.8 million by 8:45.
It was hte most popular show on BBC Two by a long way – with James May on the Moon taking the second spot with 3.2 million and a 13.8% share.
In fact Top Gear also gets the award for most watched show of the day by some margin – with BBC News at 10 getting 5.2 million in second and Stephen Fry’s Kingdom on ITV 1 getting 4.6 million in third.
Everyones favourite motoring based televisual entertainment programme featuring three middle aged men returns on 21 June 2009.
The 13th series of the iconic BBC Two show will be pretty much business as usual – but when that usual business leads to some of the best television in the world – I say keep on keeping on!
Top Gear producer, Andy Wilman said in a BBC Top Gear Blog Post: “I’m trying to distract viewers from what the title of the actual film would be, were this new series an actual film.
“It would be Top Gear 13, which sounds like something with Dolph Lungdren in it, or bad hotel porn.”
The next series will have seven episodes and will feature a mix of all the things we’ve grown used to over the last few years.
Andy said: “Over the coming seven-week series run a race or two will occur, supercars will slide from the left of your telly screen to the right of your telly screen in a cloud of tyre smoke, and a man in a white coat bearing a gold envelope will trigger a series of comedic and juvenile adventures.”
Some of the highlights from that blog and from the Final Gear Forum so far seem to suggest the following will, may or may not appear in series 13 of Top Gear.
The boys buy some old cars and join a group of beardy enthusiasts on a classic car rally – I’ve been to a couple of these for the Beeb and the smell – oh god the smell!
From the Mole blog post: “The twist? The office chose their co-drivers too…”
That’s the only preview from the official blog so far – but what has been suggested on the rumour mill that is the Final Gear Forum?
To avoid spoiling your surprise – just in case you stumbled across this hunting for a start date (although I put that in the title), I’m just going to give you the headline for the feature and a link.
You choose if you want to follow that link to find out more.
NOTE: These are not all proven to be true and some are probably not. Just a taster to wet your Top Gear appetite.
Veyron, McLaren F1, LP-670 Super Veloce and a 722 SLR
Affordable banker cars
School run cars
I’ll add more to this page as I find them – in the meantime take the above with the pinch of salt they may require – nothing should be taken as gospel until you read it on the BBC Top Gear Blog or see it on the show.
Top Gear series 13 returns to BBC Two on Sunday 21 June 2009.Find out more…
A post by Sonyxxx16 on the FinalGear forums – showing a photo of the latest Top Gearmagazine seems to confirm a June return for everyones favourite entertainment show featuring forms of transportation.
Or – Top Gear.
The first place to find out about new Top Gear always seems to be at the end of the presenters columns in the TG mag.
I’ll post a scan as soon as I can. No confirmation on topgear.com yet though – so could change and they DID get the date wrong last time.
Ok so lets kick this blog post off with a list of headlines and their associated links. Then I probably won’t need to write anything else as you will have worked out what I’m talking about already.
Have you got the idea yet? I was going to write a long winded piece about how the lack of journalists, or at least the increase in workload for journalists has led to an increase in silly quick hit stories.
I’ve fallen foul of it myself – having written a number of stories for the sake of ‘filling the gap’ until I’ve been able to properly research and write up a full original feature.
But I decided that the subject had been covered to death so would pick a single ‘quick hit make word story’ and link to all the newspapers that have covered – the Telegraph seem to have really sunk their teeth into the juicy, pointless morsel.
Do I want to know who the Stig is? does it really matter who the Stig is? Do fans really care who the Stig is? No – not really.
But it has got lots of people talking about it, I’ve just linked about eight times to The Telegraph and other newspapers thus increasing their Google Juice and a number of forums, blogs and twitteres have been doing much the same since the story first broke weeks ago.
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