Top Gear America
Something is very wrong here.
I really wanted to call this post "Top Queer", but I would be about fifty years too late for the word to be interpreted the way that I intended it.
Last night, I sat down and prepared to watch some subtlety-challenged Americans ham-fistedly ruin yet another British television programme (coming at this with an open mind, naturally). It struck me that I'd never intentionally watched anything on it before when it took me so long to work out how to use the TIVO recorder - even then, the automatically-started recording stubbornly cut off the first and last few lines of audible dialogue. It seems that home videoing technology has regressed a bit since the 1980s.
This all-new American interpretation spent its first minutes on an introduction that curiously concentrated on what the programme wasn't - to the backing of an alternative version of Jessica, the narrator explained that in this, nobody will date a rock star, nobody's voted off by the week and they're not going to ask you to decide how well people sing or dance. All of this is very welcome, although it's slightly worrying that on American television this is all considered to be genuinely surprising. With that done, it went to the familiar Top Gear gear logo, and into the studio.
And it was at that moment that my life slipped into an alternative dimension. I had got thirty seconds into it and was totally out of my depth - I had planned to write about this largely laughing at it, but the incongruity of it was too much for me to cope with. The setup of the programme is exactly the same to the point of eeriness - they have the familiar three presenters in the centre of the motoring-themed hangar with the audience surrounding them, except they're not the people that have been presenting this programme over the last decade. I actually had to pause because it was like I'd suddenly fallen asleep and was having one of those dreams where you're doing something very normal and suddenly one of your friends turns into Captain Kirk or a dog with a hat on or something, and you're expected to just carry on as if nothing's happened.
We're introduced to these usurpers - only one of whom has a first name as a first name, as Jeremy, James and Richard have been substituted with Adam, Tanner and Rutledge - through a normal-for-Top-Gear section where they try on wheels to outmanoeuvre a helicopter gunship, except they do it in a small town in America, in a car that Jeremy Clarkson hates, while referring to each other as "dude". Yet throughout this the presentation remains exactly the same, knowingly overblown Latin chanting and all - when they go back to the studio, they've got the power lap board with the magnetic stickers and everything, and it's all familiar and yet wrong, and the brain resultantly tries to tear itself apart.
They have a Stig, and the concept of him was introduced very clumsily with an explicitly stated "You will never see his face, you will never know his name - all we know is he's called The Stig". And after appearing chummy with each other from the start, the presenters do attempt to compete with each other about having the best Lamborghini for a challenge, but it's similarly done with absolutely no soul whatsoever, like they're reading it all off an autocue (it must be said that Top Gear removed any pretence at not being a scripted pseudo-comedy quite a while ago, but they can at least act it reasonably convincingly!)
With the transfer to American television comes adverts, so the programme is significantly shorter than the British version - combined with having constant previews of what's coming up and recapping what just happened, I would guess at the actual content of it being about half an hour. In places, it's noticeably rushed - the guest section, which here is called Big Star Small Car, rattled through Buzz Aldrin's automotive history, spent about thirty seconds talking about being in space, and then booted him round the track, after which it was already time to go away for another break. And, as those adverts remind us, the programme is sponsored by Mercedes Benz, which you would think would surely skew away any of the bluntness that the original is known for.
Contrary to what I would have expected, the programme looks noticeably cheaper than the British version, almost giving it the feel of people making a home-made version - something compounded by the occasional stumbling attempt at a Clarksoneque metaphor such as "dangerous and exciting, like being aroused at gunpoint". And the sound from the audience in the studio segments is either really badly pasted in or equally badly edited down. It's... weird.
Come on, I was never going to like this, was I? But I was prepared for them to just comically ruin it like they've done in the past - instead, I got what might be the most strangely uncomfortable thing that I've ever watched. Another quotation I vaguely remember from the car review segment was describing something as "all power, no finesse, and it doesn't give a damn what the rest of the world thinks about it" - which coincidentally pretty much adequately sums up most of the things that are wrong with America.
That and that its television is bloody horrendous.