The Blackberry Walk

After talking about it at the pub last week, these past few days I've been travelling a journey of my youth, rewatching the Top Gear specials. Top Gear needn't much explaining; a show ostensibly about cars became a far larger phenomenon than any car journalism show had a right to become. I was into cars as a kid, and used to pour over my thick Top Gear car database book, reading the relative stats for each car to see how they compared. But the cars, as interesting as they might've been, were never the true appeal of Top Gear. If anything, the interest in motoring many youths like myself came away with was inherited from the true appeal of Top Gear: the cast. The main trio of Top Gear, Clarkson, Hammond, and May, have a synergy hard to match. When my friends and I went to Japan recently, we went as a trio; and whilst we were there, we spotted many other trios of guys on their lads trips to anime Mecca. There is some kind of pattern, a kind of power, to the trio. Watching the Top Gear trio travel their road tours to the US, to the North Pole, and to Vietnam, I couldn't help thinking about my own trip to Japan in kind. You encounter the same strange events, incidents abroad where you see something baffling, look at one another, and want to break out in laughter. The same moments where you enjoy winding one another up, the moments where you get on one another's nerves, and the moments atop high vantage points where you share such a beautiful view. Such is the octane of the lads trip; and Top Gear does it best. Whilst most of the scenes feel contrived and scripted, the production team manage to write that sense of acting all boyish and childish when the ladies aren't around. Somehow, they made a show popular with both myself, who watched them growing up when I was nine and ten years old, and with men in their fifties. The younger fans saw what fun could be had travelling with your mates as a grown up, where money and age were no longer an issue; and older fans likewise saw the fun to be had in vicariously getting away from the wife, even if the stresses of looking after children and financing family holidays made such boys' excursions unfeasible. To all men, Top Gear scratches a very particular itch - that male itch for adventure - an itch which most women and those in the chattering classes find incorrigible and irritating. My girlfriend, who had never seen the show, walked into the living room when I was watching it on the TV, and said it wasn't funny, and didn't understand why I kept laughing at the jokes. Perhaps it isn't very funny. The acting is somewhat stilted, the events feel scripted, and most of the gags are playground humour. But something resonates strongly, no mere nostalgia; something which resonates for me and for every other man I've talked to about Top Gear. Between the oddly amateurish feel for such a flagship show, the intentionally over-the-top boyish theme song, and the strange studio atmosphere of the audience towering over the cast - especially poor Hammond - as if the whole studio where a Bauhaus pub, Top Gear is quite unlike any shows similar. Clarkson has built a career upon a kind of excessive hyperbolic mode of speech, fulfilling pregnant pauses with such phrases as '... in the world', which only conjures up how classmates spoke towards the beginning of secondary school, before other techniques like understatement were learnt to be used to employ emphasis. All three of the cast are also clearly massive car autists too. There are candid moments in the US special, for instance, where the trio talk about cars exactly as I would talk about anime with my mates... that is, absolutely impenetrably. Just as my friends and I will reference old anime, studios, and directors in conversation without much thought, all three of them were referencing car names and brands I'd never heard of, each of them implicitly knowing that car's reputation, and where it fits into motoring history. And I think many men of the Hephaestian bent - those otaku who like their hobby and know their hobby - feel and understand that passion, even if cars aren't their autistic pursuit. Indeed for all the lack of polish of the show, this gem seemed to emerge from the ground without need for cutting. Top Gear has a natural passion, the passion of true car otakus, geeking out in their element, living their otaku dream. My trio went on an anime otaku trip to Japan, like so many other selfsame trios; but the petrolhead otaku trip is identical to the road trips the Top Gear specials get so well. Top Gear's a unique show, one that's come to its conclusion some time ago. As the winds began to change, and the risque laddish humour - the kind of humour you wouldn't say with the misses around - began to become untelevisable, Top Gear's days were numbered. Nevertheless for my generation of men, and the generations of men above mine, the show remains a touchstone for what manliness is and what manliness doesn't have to cease to be as you get older. Indeed, there's none other like it... in the world.