Top Gear is the last-bastion of the smug, dated middle-aged lad. Chris Evans is perfect for it

My memory is playing tricks with me.

I thought, for a moment, that I recalled a time – 1980s, 1990s – when people were beginning to recognise cars for what they are: vastly expensive, life-reducing, jam-attracting, carbon-spewing child-killers.

That they were also the self-esteem substitutes for phallo-challenged males was too obvious to even bother remarking.

It felt like we'd reached a fork in the road as far as the motor car was concerned, and that a groundswell of common sense regarding the future of the planet was taking hold.

Around the same time, a certain DJ and TV presenter called Chris Evans was emerging as the nation's lad-in-chief, and for a time he was as fashionable (and soon after, as deeply unfashionable) as Britpop, Guy Ritchie and Loaded magazine. Anyone with half a brain acknowledged that he was a good businessman, but their whole brain also knew that his squeaky voice, smug delivery, witless banter and plastic persona were deeply unattractive, and sublimely and consistently unfunny.

So it has been strange to watch and listen to the whole saga of the death of Top Gear – and the passing of three other males who would in more enlightened times have been roundly denigrated as throwbacks and bores - and the fake drama about who would replace King Jeremy of Oxon and his trusty aides. And then, yesterday, to cream it all, we had the anointing of said Evans as the great red-haired hope of the BBC.

As you can tell, I have nothing against Chris Evans – well not too much. I was born and raised in Burtonwood, just across the Lancashire border and a spit away from Warrington, his hometown. As a north-gazing St Helens visitors, I knew nothing good would ever come out of Warrington, to the South, or Cheshire for that matter: Evans, Katona, Waterman, Brooks/Wade. Need I say more?

I’m not even that bothered about the £5m Evans is purportedly going to be paid. It’s the cars that worry me. Top Gear was, is, and always will be a huge waste of time – not of money, because it recovers that thanks to its legions of desperate viewers, a great many of them overseas (I suppose, compared to Italian game shows featuring grey-haired men and silicone-pumped dollies, Malaysian quiz shows and Aussie political interviews, Top Gear might almost be watchable).

Chris Evans with his 1974 Ford Escort (Photo: Rex)

But, for all the boom-armed cameras, tinted skies and other filmic effects, the programme remains a bastion of something tired, dusty and essentially pathetic. Its survival, or rather its resuscitation, is symptomatic of the same kind of creative vacuum that leads to all the prequels, franchises and unexciting disaster movies that come out of Hollywood, all the dreary reality rehashes that are spawned by Channel Four, and all the political specials on the BBC being fronted by a grey man in a suit, ideally one with the surname Dimbleby.

Whoever is in charge of commissioning the new Top Gear – and this time we have to suppose it goes right up to the Director-General Tony Hall – is completely bereft of vision, imagination and artistry.

An hour of primetime TV on any major channel is a near-sacred thing; why fill it with the same old formula (even if one of the new team of presenters is reported to be female)?

Is some famous faces behind windscreens the very best that the state broadcaster can do? Was this what Hall and all those legions of production staff dreamed of doing when they did their degrees and training courses? Isn’t it vital that television points to the future and takes risks?

Doesn’t everyone on this island know that the car should be well and truly over as an object of mediated arousal?

Perhaps not. Perhaps the Evans-Top Gear annunciation is evidence that, once again, midlife and oldie managers have had their say and gone for the past, the spent, the familiar. Perhaps it is evidence that, despite numerous reports of his demise, the British lad is far from dead. He just got older and even more boring.

Chris Evans in his TFI Friday heyday (Photo:

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Yet the debate about whether the car is the most evil invention ever is still a live one. The automotive giants, like the tobacco ones now taking a deserved kicking, spend hundreds of millions of pounds on sponsorship, advertising, product-placement and lobbying to murder that debate whenever they can.

Top Gear is an advert. That’s all it is. The busted caravans, the rusting joke Chevettes and Robin Reliants, the trips to Vietnam – they’re all ruses, distractions, so much fluff around the central object – the car. Watch one of the “old” episodes – they’re always on, somewhere, like whatshisname the Tory politician and his lovely train journeys – and instead of watching JC and his sunshine twins, watch the assembled piston-heads and headettes that surround the presenters and their big metal toys.

They laugh at absolutely everything, they completely go along with all the bluffs and ironic asides, they agree with every snide remark, every crass putdown; if they started genuflecting and licking the floor it couldn’t be more obeisant and snivellingly sycophantic. The CEOs of Ford, Daimler-AG, PSA Peugeot-Citroën, not to mention Shell, BP, Elf and all the others, must be giggling and wetting their seats, slapping their chauffeurs on the back as, each week, this morons’ mass at the temple of unconditional car-worship opens its doors to the global congregation, subtitled or translated into multilingual formats, and replayed and recycled till the last parking space in eternity is filled and the last particulate finds a nice corner of a rickshaw drivers’ lung to nestle in, somewhere in Mumbai.

Former Top Gear hosts James May, Jeremy Clarkson and Richard Hammond (Photo: EPA)

The brighter kids know this. They discuss it at school. They know the car – from some angles – is just plain evil. The slower ones know the car is boring. Even the naughty ones know its only use is out on the road, with music or a friend.

The middle-aged and old men don’t seem to know any of this at all. They want to watch Chris Evans driving round in circles in the Home Counties and talking to American actresses on settees and being flown to Mongolia and Morocco and Morecambe. They should at the very least rename the show Reverse Gear. Or Bottom Gear. And relocate it to pay-per-view.

I thought – I really did – that the BBC existed to produce balanced programmes that were, in some measure, in the public interest and had a duty to spend the licence fee in a way that reflected the best use of its creative resources. As I said: my memory is playing tricks on me.