By the time you’re reading this, my much-troubled Richard Hammond documentary should finally, touch wood, be out.
I wanted to make this a Twitter thread (that wasn’t originally anywhere near this long, don’t worry), but given how long it would take even in a reduced form and the headaches I’d endure in getting it posted, I decided why not here? More than high time to kick off the dust anyway. This is going to be quite a bit inflammatory, but not unwarranted. I’ve needed to get this completely and totally out of my system for a very long time now. I do not dish out slatings to those who don’t deserve it. That’s not the way I roll. I give everything and everyone its fair chance.
I dedicate this article to a certain former Top Gear writer and his deterministically-named brown-nosers like Ant Brown, who I’ll call ‘Berkshire Ant‘ from here on in if he decides to come up with any snappy reprisals, with whom I might have been friends with in another life due to the fleet of cars he maintains, but his flagrant lack of respect for his fellow man and inability to learn who I was speaks to the general mediocrity of his journalistic skills, integrity, and reveals the sort of person Mr. Brown is. And out of principle, I do not deal with disgusting, feckless cretins like him. No matter what cars he owns or stories he writes, I have a beyond zero interest in associating with him, and that’s the bottom line on that particular time-wasting tosser and any other two-bit pulp peddler who wants to cowardly drag dirt on my name without directly confronting me or at least bothering to learn who I am first before you go pathetically on the attack. Scripting and producing a 2 hour long video documentary as a one-man production team takes a hell of a lot more effort than puttering about some B-Roads in a shonky old motor for some irrelevant magazine read by a couple hundred coffin dodgers who gave their Rileys to the scrappy in ’09 for a Ford Kuga. That’s really all I’ll say about him, since it’s not good to fret about every last little coat-tail rider green with envy that you’ve made a bigger impact in 2 years than they have in perhaps 20 or more.
You made it personal with that little quip – ‘odd-bod’ I’m sure you thought was scathing. I’ve never read anything you’ve ever wrote, yet if a friend of mine told you you were crap, I wouldn’t take his word at face value. I’d still assess it for myself. But no. You’re just a lackey. You’re undeserving of any respect.
I do want to iterate I have nothing personal against him per se; merely that his decision to partake in a personal attack against me has forced me to yield an appropriate response to stick up for myself. I’m simply treating him with the level of respect he prefers to treat others with. Furthermore, I could easily be writing about any of the other sanctimonious autocoprophagists that dangled from Porter’s original self-righteous post like a bunch of digital dingleberries. The only reason I singled out Brown in particular was because it was the first reply that popped up and that was all I could stomach. And for those wondering, I don’t do blocking. If you’re the sort of insecure little egotist that doesn’t like having your bullcrap challenged, that’s your problem, not mine.
The state of car journalism on the whole is a disgrace these days anyway. People like Ant Brown would not have had jobs shining shoes in the days of Setright, pre-fame Clarkson, Cropley, Meaden, Barker and Metcalfe. Licking them would have been too good of a privilege. I will not name specific examples to avoid triggering a bigger flamewar, but you know the industry’s in its death spiral when we now have people whose job it is to market hulking great 5000lb electrified SUVs as they rust and rot on dealership forecourts are having to result to more unsavoury means of making a name for themselves because no-one’s bothering to follow their main hustle.
And why should they? Most of you have the same damn opinions as everyone else. We’ve already had to put up with two decades of revisionistic “Malaise Bad!” droning even though the Mustang II was the highest-selling Mustang for a single year in its six-decade history in a manner which many of these publications fruitlessly try to explain away as people thinking they were getting its predecessor and helped to save its nameplate, all the while having zero problem with the mere existence of the Mustang “Mach-E”, and now we’ve got people like Doug Demuro from their highly American-centric perspective crowing that there were no good cars issued in the 1980s. So many articles filled with the same misinformed opinions and legends passed off as ‘fact’ telling readers about stuff they otherwise learned in error years ago. If, for instance, you still believe John DeLorean, the man that designed the GTO and Firebird was a cocaine trafficker who turned to a life of crime after his cars struggled to sell – congrats, you bought the US Federal Government’s story hook, line, and sinker, as did every other journalist who continues to peddle it. DeLorean was not the sort of man who would have become a crook.
All this endlessly milquetoast “the past sucked” drivel seems to stem from a need to draw attention away from the fact that the 2010s were generally devoid of interesting cars outside of evolutions of cars already introduced the decade prior, and that the 2020s are proving to be the worst decade for new cars in the 140 year history of the automobile. In the first two – three years of the decade alone, we’ve had Dodge effectively commit suicide, Ford kill its family saloon and hatchbacks to focus on more on crossovers in between bouts of stabbing its longterm fans in the back by using hilariously out-of-touch memes (and BMW following in an even more braindead manner after charging their drivers to pay for features they already owned), Alfa Romeo suffering an aneurysm shortly after its owner and shelved what could have been among the most important drivers’ cars of the century for some motorised slop, Seat’s special snowflake luxury brand Cupra oxymoronically proclaim you didn’t need to drive to enjoy driving (hint: you do), and angry journalists (and I use that term on EV lobby shills lightly) who had never worked an honest day in the automotive industry mald in unison that Toyota, the biggest car company on the planet, had “no idea” what they were doing when they decided they wanted to break away from the pack and focus on development of hydrogen fuel cells (and not because they were hitting a little too close to home). Chinese manufacturers are back to their old tricks now that they own half of Europe’s carmakers, shamelessly ripping existing designs off, except now they’ve got the tech and the safety to match the looks at a price they can undercut Western manufacturers at due to making everything themselves, and we’re effectively rolling out the red carpet for them.
Modern cars are a shitshow, and the people that write about them aren’t far off.
It’s a real shame, too. From the ’50s to the ’90s, if you got a job as an automotive journalist, it was a job you held for life and one that commanded a great deal of respect. You would never want to quit. There was so much variety. Seemingly-humdrum family saloons and hatchbacks powered by rotary engines. Road-going homologation specials that would bite your head off at a moments’ notice. Utes, along with an Australian car market that actually existed (as well as a thriving British one) that made the driving experience a noticeably different one depending on what part of the world you lived in or vacationed to. Scientific experiments like the Chrysler Turbine, GM EV-1 and coal-powered Oldsmobile that sounded like a fighter jet. SAABs whose quirky appearance, robust build quality and green aviation-inspired cockpit made you feel like you were in a fighter jet. There were objectively bad cars like your Yugos, FSOs and Allegros you either had to royally slate or justify by stretching the truth to its tearing point yet in the funniest way possible, still had some form of character, and if you lasted long enough and did your job to the best of your ability, you’d be rewarded with the early 2000s supercar boom that our non-crippled economy helped to beget, the last of the quick cars not oriented around performing good at a piece of tarmacked German forest. At one point in time, there were only two supercars on sale brand new in the United Kingdom; the Lamborghini Diablo and the Aston Martin V8 Vantage, both of which were geriatric and on their last legs at that point in time. Pundits thought the supercar was dead once those shaky stalwarts finally fell off their respective perches.
But they didn’t cause the quiet die-off of the Supercar, when only a decade earlier the likes of the F40, 959, XJ220, EB110 and the formidable McLaren F1 roamed the Earth. In the span of less than 50 months after supercars experienced their Millennial nadir, we got the Murciélago. The Vanquish, as well as the DB9 and eventually DBS grand tourers. The SLR engineered by McLaren. The Carrera GT. The Enzo and its Maserati-flavoured spawn that went on to dominate GT racing, the MC12. The new Ford GT as well as the even more exotic twin-turbocharged Saleen S7 representing the finest in Anglo-American partnerships. VAG finally dropped their bombshell of a Bugatti, the Veyron, after nearly a decade of development, and Koenigsegg set to work on conquering the world with its CC series from a carbon-fibre shed in the heart of Sweden. And let us not forget the Gumperts, the Edonises, the Paganis, the Spykers and all the other, smaller marques popping up all over the place to make sure we didn’t just have a mere handful of aging supercars in production, but an abundance of the latest and greatest in carbon fibre and unobtainium.
Likewise, in another life, I could have been an automotive journalist. A very damned good one by my own over-inflated estimations. But modern cars do not interest me. I cannot get passionate about the slow death of a hobby as it reaches full casualisation and mentally well-adjusted people like JaxsonTheFurry (who belongs in an insane asylum, the eco-fascist punk) who want to oppress us under their pale-skinned, chubby, middle-class feet think you’re Satan incarnate. Face it, the only real difference between the NIO EP9 and a Tesla Model Y is that one will tear your bones from your innards if you try to take a corner at G-Forces exceeding human limits, and the other will flip like a NASCAR at Daytona before it even gets the chance to turn at that sort of speed. We live in an era of gratuitous speed, where cars look unnecessarily angry and are unnecessarily fast even if they don’t have to be and aren’t consciously engineered to be that fast, and companies like Lotus will freely pervert their founding tenets, building cars like the Evija that would have Colin Chapman able to power the world through the friction generated in his coffin alone. The Ferrari ‘Purosangue’ is more of an automotive mongrel than any of its kind before it.
And yet people treat the slightest bad thing you say about modern cars as sacrilege, and use it to slag off any alternative choices that may pop up on the market. For instance, I know there’s a rather sad fellow on Twitter who uses every opportunity he gets to publicly slate the Ineos Grenadier from its BMW powerplant to its lacklustre sales figures while viciously defending (heh) the new Land Rover Defender, which he just so coincidentally happens to own.
No shit. It’s like pointing out more people will eat a Big Mac than a sirloin steak today, or that more people will listen to a Taylor Swift song than one from Toni Halliday. Quality does not beget popularity, even if it’s the same type of product. Casual car consumers are a dumb, fat bunch of money-wasting troglodytes who want a car with a commanding road presence, yet a colour that does not stick out in a crowd because they’re already focusing on maximising the resale value as they aimlessly hop to their next one, as part of a bigger obsession this generation has with the future to come, as opposed to living in the moment. They want the ability to go off-road, even if the only off-roading they’ll do is the occasional grass verge. They want a “work horse”, even if the only work they’ll ever do with it is haul a few measly tins of house paint and some pre-cut 2x4s. And they want something that looks “new”, even if the present day GR Corolla, one of the few good cars on sale today, looks like it could have conceivably come out alongside the Mk2 Ford Focus RS 15 years ago.
Add to that the fact INEOS have never built a car ever, and don’t have any of the brand and model heritage that a comparative giant like Land Rover does, and I think they’re doing a marvellous job appeasing all the necessary regulations yet building a car with as few compromises as possible. They didn’t (and will likely never) buck to trends the same way Land Rover did. Besides, mind telling me how well Jaguar’s doing these days? Interesting how the downfall of the brand almost directly correlates with the replacement of the old XJ with a platform that dated back to the ’60s with a newer version that looked like a cheap imitation, followed by a more complete freefall once the successor to that car came out that was ‘XJ’ in name only before its total discontinuation a decade later, leaving the brand without a flagship saloon for the first time since the end of World War II.
Cars like the Defender and Nissan Juke are perfect for people who want the convenience of cars, but don’t actually like them. Come the year 2124, there will still be many original series Land Rovers in fully-functioning condition, a rare few perhaps on their original mechanicals and underpinnings. There will probably be a fair few Grenadiers kicking about, especially if they get a more bulletproof engine fitted and the build quality improves. But the only 2019-onwards LR Defenders you’ll see at that point in history will be in a museum, a dusty barn, or heritage examples kept running out of a foundation’s pocket. It is simply not a car that’s built to last a significant amount of time, like many modern cars are. They are designed to satisfy crash and emissions regulations, last the required tenure of its first owner (i.e. ~6 years, with some of the earliest examples just starting to have their first hiccups), then gradually break down during the next 3 – 10 as its subsequent owners take far less care of it. Until it ends up in a scrapheap and recycled into a bunch of Pepsi cans. Because car manufacturers have now more or less perfected the planned obsolescence cycle by making engines impossible to work on, self-repair voiding the warranty, and alloy wheels along with complex bodywork that’s colour-coded even at the lowest trim levels so if you so much as scratch it, you’ll need to fork out for a new part instead of rubbing on some T-Cut.
So now we come to Richard Porter.
For me, this is where this whole petty feud ends. If he doesn’t have anything nice to say at this point, to hell with him. I’m done playing nice. If the aforementioned writer sees the documentary about his former colleague and likes it, good on him. Bad blood’s hopefully over. If he doesn’t, that’s once again his problem. I think the key part he should take on board is that ultimately, no-one asked for his opinion, and that differs to what I did since I offered mine with the intent of undoing as many injustices as I’d witnessed regarding the TG/GT split in 2016, from the reviewer collusion to certain media outlets going miles out of their way to shit on everything the team did and downplay the success of TGT as much as they possibly could. And I think my video was a resounding success in that regard, given that it now has close to two million views.
If he’s going to keep playing his poker face and pretend he’s immune from criticism, then everything after this line is still relevant. I’m covering all possible bases and even if he turns face, what I’m saying is no less true. As a person, he seriously needs to grow. A middle-aged man who’s hopefully built up a least a few hundred grand after a lifetime’s worth of travelling around the world should not continue acting like the early 20s sardonic satirist he was during his cheese sandwich munching SniffPetrol days. Those days are long past, as are the jetsetting 20s and 30s he got to experience from Auntie Beeb’s nurturing teat. He isn’t getting another job like it in his lifetime, and he knows it.
The thing that left me scratching my head the most is why he seemed so offended by the video. It’s not like I trashed him or anything. I merely offered my own perspective on why Top Gear since 2016 simply failed despite the British MSM’s very best attempts to venerate it as anything otherwise, or even “better” than the CHM era (not in a million years). I know the hosts and crew were pressured into being publicly accepting of their replacements, and I know a good deal of hard workers like Iain May stuck behind to stay on Top Gear, but that doesn’t make it any less atrocious, nor its legacy any less non-existent. In this world, you don’t get a medal for making a TV show and getting a few million people to watch it, whether you pay off BARB or not.
And the thing is, I probably wouldn’t have made the video it wasn’t so blatantly obvious what side the mainstream British media outlets were overwhelmingly on.
Take the following news article for instance.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/watch-richard-hammond-squirm-phillip-6439454
If you legitimately think this article from The Mirror is fair, unbiased journalism – but one example of HUNDREDS written by shameless BBC pawns like Nicola Agius between 2015 and 2020 or so, you’re a moron. The only “squirming” I can convincingly see is Agius wondering how she has to write the article to get the paycheck Dear Auntie promised.
It’s weird and pathetic how so many British news outlets were OBSESSED with knowing either how much The Grand Tour cost to produce, or how many people tuned in to watch it, the latter a completely pointless statistic since it wasn’t shown on TV. But it didn’t stop them from crapping out hundreds of articles forcing such a non-existent narrative into the public consciousness. That TGT was somehow an expensive flop that no-one watched. That the discerning, thinking man who wasn’t a “listless zombie lad” as per The Gnardiau’s constant gnashing instead tuned in to BBC and watched Flop Gear instead to see Chris Harris get a watermelon dumped on his head and Paddy McGuinness act like he was saying his final goodbyes to a family member after a spot of drifting.
Yet as I proved, more people were watching Grand Tour related content on YouTube, an even playing field. No-one apart from the most staunch, dyed-in-the-wool fans were talking about Top Gear anymore. FinalGear became a ghost town of the same handful of users talking to themselves. TopGearBox shut up shop. Interest in the show had reached a historic low.
And in the end, I was 100% right; with or without Flintoff’s injury, Top Gear could not have continued to sustain itself on a cavalcade of good publicity, schedule manipulation and almost certainly skewed ratings if the show itself had little to nothing to offer of actual substance. Unless something drastically changes, Top Gear is dead, and it was a televisual grave plot it had been tripping around for a good 2 – 3 years prior.
I sincerely hope Chris Harris is able to wash away such a stain from his career after such a promising start to the previous decade. Professional wrestlers know it better than anyone else – you can be the biggest underground sensation, but once you’re in the big time, it takes an army to re-establish you as a top talent. And sadly, that army royally failed him. He should have been made lead presenter from day one, and given appropriate company such as Harry Metcalfe, Tiff Needell, Sabine Schmitz, really anyone else except for who they actually picked. Well, maybe not anyone. As funny as it would have been to see Cunk on Cars with Diane Morgan for instance, it needed to be someone with an actual interest in the automotive hobby. Like Jay Kay, Guy Martin or Ross Noble. Steve Coogan would have done quite nicely too, even if he did become a bit of a bleeding heart in his later years and refused to return for a third crack at the Reasonably-Priced Car. Because the BBC tried putting in nature presenters like Kate Humble and Julia Bradbury after eschewing James May in the past, and it didn’t work.
So many countries that adapted Top Gear for a local audience don’t seem to understand that You. Can’t. Put. Career. Entertainers. In. A. Car. Show. And. Expect. It. To. Work.
As I quite rightly pointed out in my video, neither Clarkson, Hammond or May were entertainers at first. Clarkson maybe, but he was always more of a journalist at heart. The other two were strictly journalists until they started having fun on Top Gear. It took years and hundreds of episodes for the three presenters to fully grow into their characters and develop the right sort of chemistry. The BBC tried to fast-track that process 3 times, and though at one point it seemed they might have been on the verge of cracking it with the Harris/Leblanc/Reid & occasionally Schmitz line-up, yet the Beeb continued to make some fatal, elementary flaws. Six episodes a year, for a start, is nowhere near enough the amount of episodes and time together a broadcasting team needs to truly fluourish. Clarkson, Hammond and May were doing three times that from ’03 – ’05, and then again in ’07. Four years. 72 episodes versus 24. Which team do you think are going to have the better chemistry?
And the reason they only made six episodes a year? Because the BBC had got it into their heads that Top Gear was still going to be a major force on the global entertainment scene. Every episode had to be a visually stunning spectacle of carefully co-ordinated stunts and choreographed sequences in exotic, faraway countries, as it had been in the past and was what they were used to. The BBC regurgitated ludicrous claims such as Evans being “more popular” than Clarkson simply due to the mere fulfillment of pre-existing contracts, a popularity claim that was laughably smashed once Amazon Prime launched.
But what the BBC needed to do was to acknowledge it was never going to reach the heights of CHM ever again, and start downsizing. I absolutely could have done better if they’d put me in charge. Focus on building a loyal audience of 2 million viewers. Two series a year of 8 – 10 episodes apiece. Ditch the guests a lot earlier than they did, since when we had got used to the likes of Tom Cruise, Will Smith and Ed Sheeran gracing Dunsfold every other week, no-one wanted to see Professor Green, Professor Purple, Romesh Rangadangadingdong, some royal nepo babies or Vicky McClure (I still have no idea who she is) wrangle a Toyota around a rallycross course.
Because at the end of the day, the only people that killed Top Gear were Tony Hall and Danny Cohen. They made a choice to cut their nose off to spite their face in the name of pitiful moral grandstanding, a policy they oddly never followed through with before. Yes, Jeremy had a punch-up with Oisin Tymon (who went from producing Top Gear to just Gear), but I don’t recall him imposing that ridiculous “final warning” clause upon himself. That was the BBC’s doing. And nothing they say or do will ever get back the hundreds of millions of pounds those two cost the corporation simply because they couldn’t stand a programme that was increasingly at odds with the BBC’s core values effortlessly dominated the ratings whenever it was on. The programme singlehandedly dictated iPlayer, not some poxy live episodes of EastEnders. They cost the show valuable ratings, firstly by denying a move to BBC One (which it honestly deserved after 2007), then by purposefully pitting it against Call The Midwife. The BBC tried every trick they could to downplay or kill Top Gear’s stride, and they couldn’t.
At the crux of it all, the only thing I can think of that got Dicky Boy hot under the collar is the fact my modern Top Gear video, with no promotion, made by a guy working out of a dingy council house on a dodgy computer with a Chinese microphone that even after literal hundreds of pounds of investment, still has its occasional hiccups, made a video that got 10 times the views than one made by Richard Porter released the same week. Richard. Fucking. Porter. Arguably the sixth biggest figure during 2002-era Top Gear, not just beaten out but humiliated by a mere fan. And for whatever reason, that just didn’t sit right with him. Childish considering the tens of billions of times his work’s been watched in the real world, but some people just can’t be helped. They have to have everything.
And if he really wants to know why my video got that much more attention than his did, I’ll tell him why. It’s nothing to do with people rather hearing a “pretty lie” than the “unfiltered truth”, or whatever crap rationalisation he came up with.
Because he’s not original. If anything, he’s antiquated. He’s writing for TV, for YouTube. And YouTube is a whole different kettle of fish. Your real-world credentials don’t mean much here. No-one wants to see a Y-Lister sit on a greenscreened couch and reminisce about the good old days 20 times a year because thousands of other people are already doing it. You’ve got to procure some interesting content to talk about. People aren’t going to give you your roses just for existing. And my God, do you have a lot to talk about.
Break back into the BBC’s vaults and put either of the Top Gear studio format pilots up, along with a breakdown. Do that and you’ll get 10 million views in a matter of days. You can thank me when you do and it plays out exactly as I foretell. Or how about some of the scrapped films? The full metal jacket Fiat Panda that got shelved two series in a row? Jezza’s Lotus Europa S road test? The Unfunny Bus? The forever unfinished grand tourer film that ended in the Punch Heard Round The World? Hell, crack out an album of production stills from the early days along with a semi-interesting story and you’ll see millions flock.
But you’re not original. Without the Three Amigos by your side, you’re just a mere writer. And not even a great one at that.
When you take away the segments Clarkson devised, you come to realise Richard Porter really isn’t that good of a writer. He can write snide stuff perfectly fine. It’s all he spent his career writing, which peaked around the time of his laughable feud with F1 commentator James Allen. But when it comes to anything that isn’t Top Gear, a property that he’s coasted off for about 10 years now given his lack of subsequent on-screen credits, he just isn’t that good. His writing is as one-dimensional as they come, and that’s if you’re even able to pick out what he actually wrote.
No man in the history of British TV, bar Jimmy Savile perhaps, has probably been protected as much as Richard Porter. His career literally begins and ends with Top Gear, starting with its 2 and a half year capsizing to the bottom after Clarkson called it quits, and ending with James May getting sloshed by a fishtank and questioning his will to live (and even if he didn’t write that one, he still wrote the “Unscripted” episode, the biggest dog turd in the show’s run bar none). His IMDb page says it all. One credit on Last Man Standing, remember that show at all? A singular credit on Hold The Front Page during its critically-panned maiden series before they had a change in personnel. A Lotus documentary that I can’t imagine is particularly different to the many others that already existed, save for all the celebrity cameos. And I’ve basically summed up 90% of Porter’s entire writing career. If he was something special, we’d have seen it by now.
The Petrolheads game show bombed (even if I do want to watch it for posterity). The India Special is pretty much unanimously considered the worst Trinity-era special because of how plainly scripted it was. About half of Series 18 was painful to sit through, but Porter, the man whose duty it was to make sure only the best writing gets into episodes of Top Gear, was somehow unable to realise how bad it was until it was already in the can. The Grand Tour had a lot of seasonalized rot and the show lost a lot of its viewerbase until they finally managed to crank out Season 3 by which point, Porter decided to stick a knife in the whole thing and call the entirety of The Grand Tour a flop, distancing himself from it. Yet, as soon as Porter left, the show’s quality noticeably improved by a lot for its third season. And don’t take my word for it, take IMDb’s. Take FinalGear’s. That last, mad eight episode run from Well Aged Scotch – Funeral For a Ford was utterly phemonenal, world-class television, and if you switched out the average but certainly passable The Youth Vote for An Itchy Urus, you’d have probably the best 8 episode run or “season” throughout ALL of Top Gear and Grand Tour’s histories combined, rivalling only Series 10 in terms of consistency. And yet it only happened once Porter had left the writing team. It’s almost as if when you cut off the dead weight, things tend to get better?
The celeb junk was gone – it ate up a chunk of time in the first season when it was only funny once or twice, and ate up even more in the second season when they did it for real. That was an immediate improvement. Hull’s very own Abbie, who decidedly wasn’t a Stig in the way Mike Skinner was shoved down our throats as the ‘Anti-Stig’, became one of the ‘boys’, her best showing coming during the Sea To Unsalty Sea film. She wasn’t shoehorned in our faces like the BBC probably would have done, and in all honesty, was probably under-utilised when the dust settled. The films dropped a lot of the cringeworthy over-scripting that had reared its ugly head around the time of the previously-mentioned Series 18 and just told it from the heart. And the overall quality of Grand Tour’s third season beats anything flogged to us as Top Gear post-February 2016.
You know, it’s strange. I always used to think the first two seasons of Grand Tour were sub-par due to the good old “Thunderdome Syndrome”, where a non-American production gets a fat wad of American cash and greatened creative liberties, and it ends up spoiling what was brilliant under financial and creative restraints previously imposed on them because of their need to “go large”. Or perhaps some backstage BBC wrangling where you couldn’t even call landscape ‘beautiful’ without their lawyers ringing you up. Or simply because they’d got rusty, having produced only 16 episodes of Top Gear since the beginning of 2014 when in past years, they’d have normally cranked out around 36 – 39 in that same amount of time.
But now, I don’t think it was so much that, as it was the TG/GT crew vesting so much of their trust into Porter’s writing ability after so many years of top quality scripts that they couldn’t conceive he was among those holding the show back from attaining its maximum potential by sticking to the same few canards he’d used his entire career, unaware that the world had largely moved on and people didn’t want to see films like the eco-friendly Land Rovers or doomsday vehicles “comically” blown up by a tank anymore.
Would we have seen a similar improvement to good old Top Gear had Porter left around Series 16? James May’s Cars of the People was produced by Tom Whitter for instance, and despite only featuring one host and being much more car-centric than its parent show (along with a few destructions that are gratuitous and somewhat painful to watch), was comparable to if not actually better than Top Gear at that point in time.
And truth be told, how much of Top Gear did Richard Porter really write, versus what he claimed responsibility for? Of course he wrote a great deal for it, but most of the show was already written ‘in spirit’ years before he first hopped on-board. Motorworld featured Jeremy Clarkson touring the globe’s various car scenes, which when you watch the likes of Iceland or India for instance, obviously show the blueprints for the many specials they would go on to do once the team reformed as Top Gear in 2001. It was Clarkson together with director Brian Klein who wrote his first few home videos, with staples such as using an airfield to drive as rambunctiously as possible or destroying bad cars/caravans in increasingly inventive ways. All of that was done back when Porter was still trying for his O-Levels.
The challenges? Not really, Clarkson’s 2000 home video At Full Throttle featured a challenge where Clarkson and Vicki Butler-Henderson had to spend £500 on tuning a car to be as fast as possible and seeing who could win in a race. Again, the prototypes had already been built. Porter cannot take credit for that either. As an aside, it’s actually funny how much Porter hates Series 8’s radio show challenge and considers it a “shark-jump” moment in the overall canoncity of the programme, an opinion he’ll be reluctant to find is shared by precisely one person in the entire world, himself, along with the few upset biddies who rang the station to complain. From the vast majority of fans’ perspectives, that was one of a handful of highlights in an otherwise wayward and unfocused Series 8 that leaned a bit too hard into the theatrics of things, and makes me wonder if he’d been there “at the meetings”, as he so proudly proclaims, and tried to veto the film at every possible step. Know that whenever you choose to listen to it, as I often do, Porter pulls out an eyebrow hair.
The Hilux film? Nope, that was Jeremy and Andy’s, as were a lot of the ideas from those first few series (basically anything that involves “Can X do a Y?”). One thing I did notice during my many readthroughs of And On That Bombshell was Porter’s tendency to use the royal ‘we’ a lot when talking about the programme’s early years, as though he didn’t feel comfortable with directly taking responsibility for films such as the inaugural cheap car challenge from Series 4. And of course, Top Gear Live was Clarkson and Philippa Sage’s brainchild.
Star In A Reasonably-Priced Car? Just watch some of Clarkson’s renowned unhinged celebrity interviews from his titular talkshow. Then add a car to the mix. Not exactly difficult to come up with.
Sure, Porter can take credit for singular films, but at that point it’s not so much a controlled mastery at writing TV shows as it is shooting fish in a barrel and having an unseasonably-long purple patch. Your luck’s going to run out eventually, and run out it did, as we frequently saw starting from Series 17 or thereabouts.
The individual car tests themselves? Again, Porter wrote them, but Clarkson had been routinely writing the best material of his career from ~1995 – 1998 to the point he got bored of it all and contributed to his January 1999 departure from Top Gear. No different from the Youngs taking over Brian Johnson’s writing duties at AC/DC once he’d already given the world his Hells Bells, Back in Black, For Those About To Rock and Heatseeker. The voice is still there, belting out the equivalents of Thunderstruck and Rock N’ Roll Train at the top of his lungs, but the brain has written all it can. All Porter can really take responsibility for is devising the character of “The Orangutan” that Clarkson started to become around 2004 or so once TG started embellishing its content and widening his mass appeal. He was already an extremely charismatic personality to start with, but he’d grown tired of all the superlatives and comparing the newest econoboxes to a celebrity’s distinctive features.
Ah, the Three Car Comparison test, which in my latest video I gleefully credit to Porter. But even then, he outrightly admits he copped that idea from Channel 4’s Driven. So… inspired, but not inventive.
The News. This might as well have been called “Top Gear presents SniffPetrol”, but then again, when you’re a writer, half of what you create’s impact is in the delivery, and who delivers it. A point I’ll make in a future non-TG video talking about my Top 30 UK-based comedians, if Graham Linehan could have presented the material he wrote for Father Ted and IT Crowd by himself, he’d have been one of the funniest men on the planet. But he recognised he wasn’t cut out for it in the way his contemporary Chris Morris was.
And early on, as a fun little fact I’m sure Porter is itching to have wiped off the internet, among the few surviving live reactions to the first ever 2002-format Top Gear episode, a good deal of the critique was levied against the “stilted, scripted News program” that some eagle-eyed viewers noted had been taken more or less verbatim from the issue of SP written after the German Grand Prix. So even the one thing that was totally Porter’s invention from day one before the hosts grew into the segment and made it their own… was the one thing most people complaining about the changes made to Top Gear didn’t like.
Of course, I jest. At the heart of it all, it will not take away that Porter was an immensely talented visionary in his prime who got the privilege to work with three of the hardest-working, hardest-fighting men in show business. The 21st Century equivalent of The Three Stooges. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. He was not Clarkson. He was not Hammond. He was not May. He wasn’t even Andy Wilman. And in Top Gear’s overall hierarchy, those four reign supreme. Those four elevated good scripts into great ones, bad ones into good ones, terrible ones into inoffensively mediocre ones, and pushed diabolically awful ones like “The Unfunny Bus” off the screen altogether. Of course, as the years went by and Porter likely wrangled more and more of his creative control past the crap detection radar given his increasing seniority (or should that be senility?), some utterly garbage films like the Sweeney film and Mobility Scooter challenge (which aired one after the other in two death blows that could have ended Top Gear in earlier years) started to creep up on screen, when in the past they’d have been unceremoniously chucked in the bin and spat on for good measure.
Stuff that actually should have been filmed, like Richard Hammond reminiscing over the cars he grew up admiring, were instead relegated to the Magazine when back in the days of Series 3 through 5, they would have aired in normal episodes. It’s doubly annoying since had the BBC devised the concept of “Extra Gear” a little earlier in history, we might have been able to get mini-films like these featuring the trio that we could have cut together into full “episodes” to help numb the aftertaste of those bad films.
So, I’ve expressed my opinion on what I think of Richard Porter as a professional, but what are my personal thoughts on Richard Porter as an individual?
I think he’s a sad little man of fastly-shrinking relevance who realises he peaked in his early adulthood on a show he legitimately had no technical right to be on, and he’s taking out his frustrations on the people he knows he owes his livelihood to because no-one gave him the humbling he sorely deserves. That’s it. I think it stems from the fact people like Alex Mills got a bigger following and synonymity with ‘Top Gear’ than Porter did back in the day, and his ego sadly couldn’t handle that. He invited Mills over to the UK and made sure the pair didn’t get the chance to see eye-to-eye as a sort of sick little way of flexing his muscles. Because if it was a genuine mistake, Porter would surely have invited him back at a later date, or at least spoke encouragingly of him on his Twitter. Yet all I could find was complete radio silence for an entire decade until after Mills’ death. He’s not mentioned, nor is FinalGear, in Porter’s autobiography. He obviously did not think very highly of him. And when Porter got tired of The Grand Tour and it ended up performing much better from a critical standpoint without him than it did with him on the writing staff, that was the final indignity. I think Porter is sick to death that people only know him from Top Gear… because that was the only thing he ever wrote that was worth a damn. He probably had aspirations of writing for a major motion picture or bigshot black comedy like Bottom or Brass Eye. But he never did get those gigs.
If you’d like to do some independent research and impartially disseminate Porter’s words for yourself, the Internet Archive offers a copy of Porter’s autobiography for free.
To conclude, Richard Porter’s contributions to Top Gear were vast; no-one can realistically deny that. The show’s success wouldn’t have been the same without him. But last September, he made the fatal error of biting the hand which kept him fed for many years.
And when I say that, I am not talking about myself. I am not that egotistical. Top Gear’s fanbase was alive and kicking many years before I made my contributions towards it. It’ll live just as long as Monty Python’s has, if not longer due to the sheer wealth of material to go around. We will forget many TV shows come the year 2100. Top Gear will not be one of them.
No, I’m talking about each and every one of you. The Top Gear fans who tirelessly work to keep the show alive even though its last episode now aired almost a decade ago. Not many British TV shows from the 2000s are still shown on TV these days, but there’s one glaring exception that pops up on Dave near enough every single day since its launch in 2007. The programme that became so synonymously intertwined with the name of that channel that it fruitlessly spent millions of pounds in the late 2010s to change public perception away from merely being the “Top Gear channel”, only to then sell Taskmaster to Channel 4 and relapse back into what it always did best. And truthfully, that’s all Dave ever has to do. It’s not competing with Bravo or Men & Motors anymore, those channels are long gone (and sorely missed). Of course, it would help if they varied it up a bit by re-showing Motorworld, Car Years, and perhaps even some classic, pre-2002 Top Gear every once in a while (like BBC Four has done successfully for TOTP), but that would require balls, something lacking among those who operate the UK’s digital TV channels these days.
If someone like me, who’s put in TENS OF THOUSANDS of hours researching and documenting the history of Top Gear is unworthy to talk about his show, it means you all are, and I don’t like that. Every last one of you helped make the show as special as it was, and you do not deserve to be so callously cast aside. I do not devote that many hours of my life to making stupid mistakes like those Porter claimed. The only way I can possibly make mistakes is if the statements given to various mainstream news outlets in the first place were farcical or untrue.
By disrespecting my work in the way he did, it means he only thinks WORSE of people like you. That’s the grim truth. And if Porter wants to gatekeep the people who can talk about Top Gear to a small circle of people who worked on TV, that’s his choice. It’s a dumb choice, but one he has the right to make.
And as you’ll come to see in my upcoming video about WhistlinDiesel on my other channel, one I’ve been itching to make on that little cousinrutter for 2 years now, as well as future pieces on urbanists and environmentalists, no person should ever deign to waste their time trying to appease, fraternise with or respect people that hate you for what you are, or what you like. You do not have to give them the time of day, and you absolutely should not be pressured by anyone, not even your closest friends, into tolerating or pretending to like fetid donkey’s asses because they’re ‘kewl’ or whatever some Vitamin D-starved, shut-in goon addict with no motivation in his life tries to sell you. That’s learned behaviour you’re taught in school and similar places – that everyone has to have a good point. Sometimes in the real world, the opposing view doesn’t actually have a point, and when they don’t, you show them the door and politely instruct them to walk out of it, or physically kick them out if need be.
For whatever reason, Porter chose to die on one of the stupidest hills he shouldn’t have even been on. My video hardly concerned his years working on Top Gear, and had much more to do with properly slating everything that made a mockery of his work by a corporation that can only suck the fun out of everything, ran by out-of-touch blowhards and pearl-clutchers who like the smell of their own farts.
Instead, Mr. SniffPetrol saw the video as though I were somehow insulting him.
I also noticed, after my follow-up video in December questioning whether or not Top Gear was finished, DriveTribe uploaded a video whose thumbnail basically answered the question posed in mine. I’m not that neurotic, maybe it was a coincidence or a even a callback made in positive jest. But I would not be surprised if they too took their shot at me. If DT genuinely did join in with the dogpiling, that’s even more pathetic but ultimately none of my concern. If it isn’t any of the Big Three or another historical alumnus like Tiff Needell, I really don’t care for what any of them have to say.
There was no need to ever make the 2016 onwards version of Top Gear, and it was a lesson the BBC harshly learned in one of the worst ways possible. There was enough Top Gear around without them gleefully parading the IP like a dead kitten for 6 years.
For a start, there are, by my account, 176 episodes of Top Gear once you include the six COTP episodes and all the other weird little specials they periodically put out. 176 hours more or less exactly once you remove both credits and add back in any extensions. For a 42 minute long American series, that’s the equivalent of 250 episodes, or 11 full seasons with change to spare. Most shows don’t even make it to half that amount of episodes before they’re pulled off the air.
And that’s before you factor in the hundreds of extra hours of content, cameos, Grand Tour episodes, home video exclusives and wealth of literature that exists for each member of the Holy Trinity. Top Gear, for all intents and purposes, is complete. There are no more cars being made that will be worth talking about.
I will never be arrogant nor self-centred enough to consider myself a ‘#1 Top Gear fan’ or anything like that. I’d be flattered to hear it, but truth be told, we all are. Whatever part of the journey you joined Top Gear at, we rode together as equals.
We made Top Gear.
The show probably would have been a success regardless if FinalGear existed or not. It definitely would have survived without Richard Porter. But it would not have conquered the world the way it did without either of those ingredients.
Porter wrote the episodes, Mills and his associates shared them. We painted the entire internet with Top Gear. We made sure that if you were even the slightest bit interested in cars, you knew about Top Gear. That was our job. We were never paid to promote the programme.
That was us. Our work. Our doing.
To my knowledge, Richard Porter has never ONCE directly mentioned Alex Mills’ name, not even after his 2019 passing, which again to me is another sign he does not like you. Mills’ level of devotion to Top Gear made mine look casual. There will be no-one as dedicated to the show as he was. Even once my dream of documenting every second of the show and it’s lineage is completed, that will never happen. It is not a mantle I deserve. Sure, as I pointed out at the end of my Hammond documentary, Porter invited Mills over to England once, but that was a largely empty gesture given he didn’t even bother to meet him.
If anyone was a #1 fan, it was him. And how Porter treated him was absolutely despicable. You miss the person that helped to put your show on 300-odd million televisions around the world and probably just as many computer monitors and phone screens, you bloody well invite him back and take the time out to thank him personally and apologise for your past indiscretion. You give him the most expensive bottle of fermented grape juice you can lay your hands on, and cobble together a care package of stuff no-one else in the world has seen, like perhaps the original 2002 pilot episode and some stage pieces. You do not go “oh no, anyway” and then proceed to forget about him for 10 years until well after his death. It was the least he could do to thank someone as venerable as Mills.
Because if it wasn’t for what Mills did all the way back in 2003, uniting all the little communities with a passing interest in Top Gear under FinalGear’s roof, that show does not reach a fifth of its worldwide cumulative viewing figure. That’s how influential it was, and may his soul graciously rest.
For as long as he lives, Richard Porter, along with the rest of the Top Gear team will forever remain in Alex Mills’ debt. Acknowledging that or not is not a choice for him to make. He’s the reason behind much of Porter’s current net worth. He’s the reason Top Gear got a proper US broadcasting deal through the launch of BBC America in 2007 (as well as its failed 2005 Discovery run). Why SBS in Australia picked it up in 2006, as well as BBC Canada. Why the European branch of Discovery made sure to monopolise the broadcast of Top Gear in as many European countries as possible, so whether you lived in France, Spain, Germany or Italy, you’d be watching Top Gear on a channel owned by Discovery. Because they didn’t want the IP falling into other channels’ hands. That’s why BBC Entertainment/Knowledge snatched the IP from TVN and their “Turbo” station in Poland despite high ratings, because that was one of the rare moments the corporation dropped the ball and they were intent on not making the same mistake again.
Jeremy Clarkson was already famous long before FinalGear was established, and yet he knew how instrumental Mills was. Of the entire Top Gear camp, he was the one person who did not have to pay any sort of tribute. And yet he still did.
Because he recognised Mills for what he did, and for that, he is even more of a legend than I previously estimated him to be. He is one of the greatest figures to ever roam the land of British television. For he not only knew the ins and outs of how TV worked, but he also appreciated the little guys that helped him along the way. He didn’t ignore them or kick them to the side.
People who were otherwise divided in so many ways, be that geographically, spiritually or linguistically were all equally united by Top Gear. And that’s what I want to re-affirm in my videos – the sheer importance Top Gear’s online community had for its respective TV show.
I want to tell the real, authentic story of Top Gear from the perspective of US, the viewers. A perspective that is rarely ever told and even if it is, usually told badly and inaccurately by morons/hacks like Tuna No Crust. Not some distorted TV land fiction cooked up for the official record that “Top Gear was on the up anyway” or whatever the likes of Richard Porter decides was the canonical reason Top Gear became famous the world over. Until he admits, in writing or spoken word, that FinalGear was the reason above anything else Top Gear became as big as it did, you cannot take him seriously as a writer. It’s all he has to say, but it seems it’s very difficult for him to actually admit it. Yes, all we might have did was sit behind our computer screens and make comments over every episode as they aired as well as share recordings of them, yet we were just as important as the people who made it.
I never went to Dunsfold (because I was a kid, and tickets were not offered to those under 18). When I was close to actually taking the plunge in mid-2013, given the two year long waiting period, I would likely have ended up on the set of an Evans episode, so I consider my hesitance (which was made due to my worries the show would be cancelled by then) the dodging of a metaphorical thermonuclear bomb. I didn’t work on Top Gear (again, because I was a kid). But I sure as hell watched it. I talked about it with my friends. Even from a raggedy sofa in East Yorkshire, I felt a part of it. Like it was my own little thing.
A lot of people who watched Top Gear had similar sentiments. With hundreds of hours of pure garbage on our screens every week, this was the single hour 15 times a year that we got for us. I think a commonality between a lot of Top Gear viewers (that certainly doesn’t apply to everyone) is that we didn’t like a lot of what else was on the TV.
In an intoxicating mist of “Wife Swap House Swap ‘Come Dine and CountDown With The Stars’ RuPaul Drag Race’s Got Talent On Ice Live”, Top Gear was there to cut through all that neo-televisual monotony like a razor blade and remind us why the TV licence was still worth paying for.
Richard Porter helped to create something special, an experience that was unique to anything else on TV and still is 20 years on. If he can’t see that or appreciate that, that’s purely his loss and not my fault at all.
But I’ve been watching the programme ardently since June of 2004 – the 1st, to be precise. Over 20 years almost exactly to the day. Because it was the Monday after its maiden airing, taped overnight while I slept a mere six days before my 7th birthday. I regularly visited FinalGear from as early as 2007 once I got an internet connection. I got my mother to subscribe to the TG Magazine. And from there, Top Gear completely changed my life.
Why is it so wrong for me to simply state my appreciation, as well as my disdain towards the BBC attempts at perverting that?
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