Joan Smith: Call me serious. Call me gay if you must. But Top Gear stinks
The show has become a paean to speed, risk and destruction
Published: 24 September 2006
Surrounded by puffs for the programme, the sympathy message for Richard Hammond and his family sounded a jarring note on the Top Gear website last week. It was a small injection of reality among the links to film clips in which Hammond uses cars to play five-a-side football and his co-presenter, Jeremy Clarkson, forces his way to the top of a mountain in a Land Rover. Near the summit, Clarkson throws his arm wide and asks whether viewers have ever seen a view to match the rolling Scottish countryside.
Well, yes, actually, but I got there on foot. And I wonder how many viewers really felt that the wild scenery was enhanced by the intrusive presence of Clarkson's four-wheel-drive. On Thursday, Clarkson and James May, the programme's other presenter, visited Hammond in Leeds General Infirmary, where he was in intensive care. Doctors announced Hammond had suffered a "significant" brain injury in his accident, which came at the end of a shoot in which he had been driving a 300mph jet-powered dragster.
