GearknobOfficial
@GearknobAlex
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Lazy British bloke that rambles about Top Gear a lot. gearknobofficial @outlook .com for questions and queries.
Joined September 2023
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To go with the earlier news, here's a first real look at how the finished website's interface is going to look, with all the issues from earlier fixed. The slideshow is fully functional and automatically scales whatever image you give it.
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Rest in Peace, Top Gear.
22nd April 1977 - 6th October, 2023.
Finally pulled off of life support after 8 years of degeneration and suffering, a mere 14 days shy of the 21st Anniversary of its revival.
In a way, I feel partly responsible for its death.
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Hi all,
Been working on some videos, one of which is a ~25 minute follow-up to my previous release as well as a previously-released script.
Would have been ready for tomorrow but I'll be in Birmingham this weekend for my 2nd ever Classic Car Show. Hammond doc is imminent.
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New video out! Just a small, inconsequential one mind you, just so you know I'm still around.
Stay tuned for the next few days as my next major production, focusing on the life and career of Richard Hammond, reaches its latter stages of development.
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And in the world of TV, never say never.
Top Gear could come back, if only for just a 2 hour long TV special with not only Clarkson, Hammond, and May, but everyone else. Tiff Needell, VBH, Chris Goffey, William Woollard. Everyone who walked so that CHM could run.
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Goodbye, Top Gear. You were an awesome TV show that I feel the greatest privilege to have enjoyed at its peak. Always ambitious, and hardly ever rubbish (except for those 8 years at the end).
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GearKnob is saddened to learn of the death of Sir Michael Gambon, one of Top Gear's most memorable guests to the point the final corner, originally named Carpenters, was renamed in his honour.
May he rest in peace.
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Above all else, I feel extremely sorry for Freddie Flintoff. I genuinely wish, in the best of faith, he is able to move on from his accident as best as he can. It is not his fault at all that the BBC selfishly picked name recognition over ability to control dangerous machinery.
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Thanks for the publicity, Dick!
Until yesterday, I respected Richard Porter not only as the creative force behind my all-time favourite TV show, but as a person, since he proved even if you were a shelf-stocker at Next, you could still make your dreams happen.
I've just stumbled across a two hour YouTube video purporting to accurately deconstruct Top Gear from 2002 onwards. Reader, this video hasn't even met accuracy at a drinks party. I've never seen such factually incorrect, ill-formed conjecture. Sigh.
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I had your book constantly open as I wrote the script to that video to make sure I reported things as correctly as possible.
If I was somehow "incorrect", then I'd like you to go over everything I got wrong.
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But in all seriousness, I am glad that it's all over. There are many lessons to be learned through the BBC's farcical myriad of attempts to bring Top Gear back to an audience who only rejected it.
38 years of ever-growing success, and 8 as a televisual cabbage.
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Harris is part of the last generation of automotive journalists who truly paid their dues. He got under Harry Metcalfe's wing and fluourished. He became an online sensation, and I am certain he will find something to occupy his time. His career is undoubtedly far from over.
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At its peak, Top Gear changed and influenced hundreds of millions of lives, mine included. In the 101 years of the BBC's existence, it's on that very top echelon of British TV programmes, accompanied by maybe just Doctor Who, Monty Python, and an elite few others.
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For a start, look at who's trending on Twitter in connection to Top Gear. Two names that haven't hosted a single episode in 8 years (excluding the Schmitz tribute show).
This says it all for me, really.
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I mourned in 2015 when it was taken off the air. I mourned harder in 2019 when an era fully came to a close not long after Alex Mills of FinalGear fame's sad passing. I will mourn for the track when it is dug up and replaced with a housing estate.
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And I mean EVERYTHING. Every last word, every last line.
Because you either missed out a LOT in your autobiography, or your ability to write anecdotally as opposed to satirically is lacking a lot of dimension.
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I think my video struck a nerve with more than a certain ex-producer. I think someone at the BBC took note.
Biases aside, I feel they made the right choice. If I'd had my way, the show would have ended after the sixth episode of Cars of the People, in February of 2016.
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Chris Harris is now free to do what he wants. I'm sure, given his age, experience and expertise, he will find something in the TV and/or streaming industry that will allow him to properly carve a name for himself. Who knows, he might even appear on TGT, and I'd be fine with that.
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Ultimately, I was proven right. I think even if the BBC had a clear creative direction, Top Gear just does not work in such an aggressively anti-car socio-political climate.
The show, which was fresh and cutting edge in the early 2000s, had started to show its age in the 2010s.
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And that's okay. The fact Top Gear lasted 13 years unchanged (17 if you include the 3 years of seasonal Grand Tour episodes) is a testament to its success. How many other British shows lasted that long, producing an average of 13 60 minute long episodes per year?
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Those responsible for Top Gear's success stemmed the tide by suitably facelifting the programme and it still had its golden moments. But it was undeniably aging. I think even under CHM, it would have only been able to maintain audience figures for another 4 - 5 years tops.
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He will never be 100% the same, but for 4 years, he got to live a dream job that any one of us, myself included, would have killed for. He still has his life. That's the important part. The BBC took necessary heed without horrific bloodshed.
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Its GOAT status as a TV show is undisputed. Including The Grand Tour, with 250 hour+ long episodes and counting means it's one of the longest things you can rewatch from start to finish.
Top Gear in its current form may be dead, but its spirit will always live on.
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That respect is now significantly diminished.
In this situation, all I can reasonably do is take responsibility for my words and stand by them. I'm more than willing to intelligently debate him should the correct avenues make themselves available to me.
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The BBC made the same mistakes over and over again, and I have no pity for them. I think in the hands of Leblanc/Reid, the show might have worked if they gave it more time, toned down the budget, and cranked out more episodes to better acclimate their audience.
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But he now has to realise he's at that point in life where there's a new generation who grew up on his work and want to follow in his footsteps.
And rather than respond with venom, as I'd be well within my rights to, I'd like Mr. Porter to know a thing or two about me.
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But they didn't. They still thought they could continue in the same vein as before if you kept injecting money and big names into it. But those of us who could see through the smoke saw just how dire things were becoming, especially following Sabine's tearful passing.
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But I'm not going to hurl myself over a metaphorical cliff to try and win over your approval. Because frankly, I don't need to. My popularity speaks for itself.
If it turns out the man responsible for making my childhood is an unrepentant wanker, then that's a massive shame.
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If he ever wanted me on his podcast for instance, I'd be happy with that. I have an email. I have the audience. Tens of thousands of people know who I am. Get in touch if you'd like to (metaphorically) butt heads. Because the impact his work had on my generation is immeasurable.
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Being chewed up and spat out like this by one of the major forces who helped put it all together will never change my undying love for the show, nor my unkillable desire to tirelessly document everything there is to know about it.
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Top Gear is now firmly a part of British televisual history. Its legacy can no longer be tainted. In a few years, no-one will care about what Hall, Cohen, Davie, and all those other bottomfeeders did to it. What they did will become a footnote.
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Sure, there's soap operas. But you don't need a double-digit IQ to write 300 episodes of that dross every year.
Truth be told, it's hard for me to mourn TG's inevitable passing. For me, the programme was already dead long ago.
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Said shake lasted a grand total of 2 years and 18 episodes. EIGHTEEN.
That wasn't even 1 year's worth of episodes at the beginning of the Holy Trinity's tenure.
Why? Because the TV ratings were abysmal.
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Because I have begun to recognise my childhood dreams of thrashing country roads in a Delta HF will likely get crushed under ecofascist boots in order to "protect" the childhood of the unborn my largely anti-natal generational cohorts aren't even going to have in the first place.
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And as things fell apart around 2020 after I finished my Master's Degree, with no chances of employment and no social circles, I was basically out of options if I wanted even a remote chance of enjoying life since we had the square root of jack.
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And believe me, I tried to ignore it.
But when every media journalist and casual consumer is loudly crowing in your face that it's "great" and a "ratings hit" in spite of insurmountable evidence to the contrary, you tend to lose your rag.
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Sure, you can chalk its win down to FinalGear fudging, but what else was there in the 2000s, outside of gritty American dramas with billion dollar budgets that was anywhere near as impactful as Top Gear?
Big Brother? X-Factor? Don't make me laugh.
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And what spurred me on to produce it was this clueless moron by the name of "Tuna No Crust", in particular this video.
A guy that makes clickbait based off of poorly-researched subject matter. A channel that exists merely for view and sub farming.
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You can watch that here, by the way:
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When you know that The Grand Tour was purposefully hampered by the BBC while clueless brown-nosing buffoons like Hall and Davie praised their sad little achievements at making a show not even half as successful as the CHM era could, it becomes even more annoying.
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I had a lot of skill and potential, but nowhere to really use it. Nowhere it'd be appreciated, at least.
So I found some friends and communities. And to try and get out of my purgatorial pit, in late 2021 I decided on a "hail mary" of godly proportions.
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And I figured if someone like that could get away with making a living on YouTube, someone that actually puts conscious effort into his productions and months of research would have a cakewalk of a time.
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I remember my normally divisive classmates in Year 11 were all united in their praise the morning after the Africa Special dropped.
I remember the battleground of discussion my A2 Modern History class became the morning after the fracas occurred.
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I'd put all my chips into producing a Top Gear documentary. I'd never written one before, I'd never produced one before, and I had no idea what I was doing at the time, but I figured - if it made a few thousand views, it wouldn't have been a waste of time.
It got a few million.
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Two decades later, and our fortunes have hardly changed. I'm a 26 year old man whose only experiences behind the wheel were learning to drive in a poxy Skoda late last year. It'll be longer still before I'll be able to afford driving, even for short journeys.
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Sod WW1 or US Civil Rights or whatever the topic was that month, everyone was talking about Clarkson! It was such a surreal week. The show you'd quietly watched for 10 whole years was suddenly all your classmates and even teachers could talk about.
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Sans hyperbole, the Car Darts film changed my life, and I hope anyone connected to its production such as Porter are reading this to realise what you filmed was something truly special. Never forget that.
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Because it's simply no longer possible, regardless of how financially responsible you are, to get around by car if you're not already wealthy. This is all by design, and I will not elaborate further on an otherwise irrelevant point.
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Through the good times and the bad times, Top Gear was always there for me. It was like an elder relative who came back from 6 months of hard work to tell us all his interesting stories and impart upon us many trinkets. And when it came to an end, I was scared.
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(He moved here in '88, didn't become naturalised until '07)
My accent didn't fit in with the locals, given our doubly multicultural background. I couldn't play football, nor did I care for it. I had very little to talk about with most of my peers, outside of maybe F1.
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Because in my 18 years of existence, 11 of them had been dominated by Clarkson, Wilman & Porter's Top Gear. Without much of an extended family, the Holy Trinity WERE my extended family. And I emotionally cared about them.
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But perhaps the optimists at the Beeb had a point. Maybe they could learn from their mistakes.
And boy, did they actually try. They whittled the team down to 3 "core" members (though not the 3 I would've picked) and tried to give them a fair shake.
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But I never gave up hope.
I remember in the Summer of 2008, being thousands of miles away in the Lebanese mountains, yet the TV still had a familiar piece of home on it.
I remember, through our fuzzy, decrepit, analogue TV, watching the Vietnam Special unfold live.
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I'd never seen anything like this on TV before, and with exception of a few, I caught every single episode live from that minute on. Even when I was on a school trip to Iceland, I still caught the Bond Special that aired that magical night.
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I remember how giddy I got the night I saw Schumi unmask himself as The Stig.
I remember having the biggest belly laughs of my life watching the crew put together their attempts at the VW Scirocco advert.
I remember fondly burying my face inside every new issue of TG Magazine.
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And unlike other TV shows, Top Gear didn't just capture that magic once, twice, ten times or even twenty times. It captured it 170 times. That's a remarkable achievement in and of itself and again, Porter should be proud of that.
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Two adult manchildren were hurling cars onto a lifesized dartboard with a compressed air cannon.
Immediately she hit record and first thing on Monday morning, she made me watch it before school.
And when I saw it, I fell in love.
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When Richard Hammond had his near-death accident, I had the longest, most stressful night of my life followed by the longest day in school desperately clinging on to the belief that Richard Hammond would be okay. That people only died in movies and of heart attacks.
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And it didn't help when I watched the legacy of my favourite TV show get tarnished by an antagonistic ginger prick because the BBC now had custody of everything.
Series 23 should have been enough to convince the BBC to kill it then and there.
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Growing up in Hull, I didn't have much that I looked forward to during my childhood. We weren't rich, didn't even get a PS1 until 2004, and never travelled abroad. Once he got himself clean of "H", my dad worked deliveries simply to pay our bills.
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I remember feeling deathly ill sometime in January 2011, and spending my day crashed out on the sofa watching the India Special. It might have been the Godfather III of the TG specials, but it still perked me up.
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For a child like me, there was too much studio, not enough action. And at some point, we must have tuned out.
That all changed on the morning of the 1st of June, 2004. Six days before my 7th birthday. Having recently acquired Sky, my mother channel hopped onto BBC2.
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But in happier days, there were two programmes (three if you included F1, four if you included snooker) on TV that my mother would always record on her VHS with our Thorn CRT for my eager young self to watch. One of those was Robot Wars.
The other was Top Gear.
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But when all was said and done, I was faced with the biggest wait of my life; the 18 months between Richard Hammond saying "goodbye" to us at the dawn of my adulthood, and Hothouse Flowers ushering in the beginning of a new era over on Amazon.
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So in March 2002, when at the age of 4 and a half my mother gleefully told me that Jeremy Clarkson was coming back to Top Gear, I had the biggest grin on my face you could imagine.
But when it returned first time, it wasn't enough to captivate my young mind.
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Both of those programmes captivated me.
Hypno-Disc made me fall in love with machines. Seeing Tiff and Vicki effortlessly toss around hatchbacks and sports cars helped foster that love. When it got taken off the air in August 2001, it felt like a part of me died.
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At the very end of the decade, I remember going to bed halfway through watching C4's Greatest TV show countdown, thinking there was no way Top Gear could have won as it would have been featured well before the last 10.
But it did.
Because it had more impact than anything else.
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