...Top Gear

Top Gear is great, isn't it? It gives you something to do on a Sunday night (I say that, realising that as I type I've just missed tonight's episode. Thank you BBC for iPlayer...), it's a car program that you can talk about to people who have little or no interest in cars, and the presenters are fantastic - there are few shows where the presenters have such natural chemistry and it makes for fantastic entertainment.

Ah yes, the "E" word. It's unfortunate that the concept is lost on a lot of people. Not those who complain about Top Gear, you understand - they're worthy of a blog all to themselves - but those who like Top Gear so much that they take every word as gospel. I consider myself lucky that I do not personally know anyone like this (well, not many people like that anyway), as they are truly some who fell on stony ground.

They seem to congregate on YouTube, funnily enough. YouTube is like a lightbulb to all the World's idiotic moths. The masses swarm around it leaving their impression in the form of irrelevant, imbecilic, racist and sexist comments, making a lot of noise but not actually offering anything to the world. It's fun to swat at them for a while but unless you turn the lightbulb off they'll keep coming back for more.

I was watching an Autocar video on YouTube earlier, an economy race. Quite entertaining I found, though apparently the moths had been swarming and several had left comments accusing Autocar of somehow "copying" Top Gear's idea. I'm not sure which one - TG have had several economy challenges, none of which are even remotely similar to the one Autocar created, but nevertheless it's a video of some cars going around a circuit so it must be a TG rip-off.

Then I got to the comment that really tickled me:

"take jag ... i dunno wat type of jag. the 4 door one . 3 litre twinturbo diesel engine .
go race with these cars . i bet the jag could win easily . i can do almost 1000 miles in a single tank.

facts based on Top Gear BBC"

Now ignoring his desecration of the English language... Facts? Really? I can't remember the last time I heard TG offer a fact of any sort, and you'd have to be stretching the fabric of reality a little to take a well edited, unscientifically-observed economy run on Top Gear and come out with the assumption that it was in any way factual. I think Mr Moth here has hit his head off a lightbulb a few too many times recently. Or not enough.

Fifth Gear suffers from the swarm too. Undoubtably, they've seen Top Gear's success and started doing challenges of their own which do lack the impact of the BBC versions, but it's entertaining in it's own way and now appears far less scripted than TG, which is refreshing. I wouldn't waste your time scrolling down to the comments though, nothing of value lies therein. I can sum up 90% of the comments in a single line, if you like:

"Fifth Gear sucks, it's nowhere near as good as Top Gear!"

On the rare occasion you find something different, it's generally from someone who was unaware that Vicky and Tiff used to be on Top Gear, and if you find an old TG episode I can guarantee a poor, deluded moth will be flapping about how it's an episode of Fifth Gear because Tiff is on it.

So... Top Gear is great, isn't it? Well, yes, but it isn't that great...