The Top Gear Iceberg Explained

top gear is a program that means a great many things to many different people after its initial creation in 1977 the program enjoyed something of a cult status from the late 1980s onwards following the introduction of jeremy clarkson who became the show's eminent lead host throughout the majority of a 25-year stretch from 1991 until 2015 save for a few years in the middle of that originally the bbc's second attempt at a televised car magazine following wheelbase which had aired in the 60s and 70s the show would evolve to become edgier and more controversial following clarkson's appointment and following a string of disappointing ratings and hosts who couldn't retain the audience to save their life the show was eventually dropped and remodeled into a vehicle with which the likes of clarkson his producer and lifelong friend andy willman and a handful of other key individuals would conquer the world with the show would still be about cars but as time would tell it evolved far beyond the magazine format into something that was truly one of a kind now i will admit personally i'm not a fan of the iceberg format for presenting this sort of information i feel its presentation cheapens the delivery and appeals to a demographic who cannot hold a basic attention span in much the same way tiered lists do that said given their popularity and the fact this channel really needs more pertinent yet original top gear related content to help build it up only a four would turn this opportunity down as of mid-2022 no one has yet made a top gear iceberg and i feel it's more than deserving of one so that's what i did there are six layers to the iceberg in total in an image that i compiled myself in photoshop you might disagree with the placement for some of these and there's of course going to be stuff i might have missed or neglected to mention but i felt i should make one since these have endured a lasting popularity and to give me the opportunity to try something different for a change so without further ado let's take a dive under the surface for the top gear iceberg the first things i'm going to explain are things that don't really require any explanation even people who aren't fans of the show know a lot of this stuff already jessica originally composed by dickie betts for the allman brothers band's fourth studio album brothers and sisters released in august 1973 the song would be hand-picked for the original version of top gear by graham smith the son of program creator derek smith who had the record in his possession along with elton john's instrumental track out of the blue jessica would open every regular episode of top gear from 1978 until 1998 before it was replaced by a techno version created by hanson bass which was intended to modernize the theme for a contemporary audience this didn't really work and at the end of 2001 it would be phased out prior to top gear's reboot in favor of another brand new composition this time from christian henson henson's rendition would become arguably as iconic as the original version itself and is still used to this day over 20 years on from its creation even though it has seen four completely different hosting teams it is the first that it is essentially synonymous with the holy trinity this term can refer to three things within top gear and the grand tour as a whole it can refer to the free hypercars produced by ferrari mclaren and porsche during the 2010s it can also refer to the first episode of the grand tour which involved these cars being put head to head at portimao circuit in portugal but for the sake of this iceberg the holy trinity refers to the on-screen top gear presenting team which ran from may 2003 until march 2015 comprised of lead presenter jeremy clarkson and co-hosts richard hammond and james may together with the stig they would present close to 200 episodes of top gear the cars throughout top gear and the grand tour there have been many cars which have left an impression far beyond their original filmed features the toyota hilux which survived being dropped from an imploded skyscraper the other hiluxes which survived the arctic circle and an active icelandic volcano the car boats the amateur police cars the hammerhead eye eagle thrust the football playing igos and foxes and of course oliver richard hammond's opal cadet which he owns to this day though they are inanimate one can certainly argue that the cars from top gear's golden years are as much characters as the people driving them the challenges much of top gear's 2002 format success can be attributed to the introduction of challenges which debuted in the show's very first episode where richard hammond set out to see if it was possible to outrun a speed camera followed by clocks and seeing if you could run a normal diesel engine on vegetable oil as time went on these challenges became more and more elaborate and expensive moving off the test track to across the country and eventually to the point entire episodes would be centered around them in all sorts of exotic locales far beyond the united kingdom the celebrities comprising the show's third biggest sea that isn't clarkson nor what you'd tend to call him were the celebrity guests in every episode the star in a reasonably priced cars segment was devised based on the surreal idea of brian ferry being made to drive an ill-fitting hatchback which flourished from there eventually they'd get their hands on a suzuki lyanna for these celebs to drive around and the segment became something of a success particularly during the show's early days where the team had to make do with british d c and occasionally b-listers who actually wanted to be on the show and who they could have fun with once out of production lyanna would be squirreled away for only f1 drivers to use whereas the chevrolet lacetti kia seed and vauxhall astra took over in subsequent series nicknames and catchphrases even without a grasp on the source material many people are familiar with the trio's nicknames of the orangutan hamster and captain slo along with their many many catchphrases which have become a staple in not only contemporary british culture but all around the world a good show has at least a handful of phrases which define it and a great show has many but a brilliant show has catchphrases which are so catchy that people can't stop saying them and these end up becoming so mimetic they persist and linger on the internet and in common vernacular years after they were last said by people who don't even know where they originally came from specials one of the biggest attractions in regards to top gear is its special episodes the first episode to be designated as such was the winter olympics special the seventh episode of the seventh series which aired in february of 2006 though it was presented in quite a different manner compared to later specials the first special at the format we'd recognize was 2007's us special which was recorded the summer prior just before hammond's major accident over the course of the next few years the hosts and crew would continually up the ante and would turn out to be one of the show's best bits and defining features controversies since the 1990s jeremy clarkson has been a controversy magnet ever since he lambasted certain cars angering their manufacturers to no end he has been consistently in someone's crosshairs once top gear returned in 2002 this tendency spread to his two co-presenters richard hammond and james may who each said and partook in their own fair share of contestable acts it speaks volumes when wikipedia have had to dedicate an entire fully fleshed out page towards the fallout of various controversies the show embroiled itself in over the years and it would be an off-handed second nature mention of a slope by clarkson during 2014's burma special that eventually ended up sealing his fate here we go in the wake of clarkson's 2015 firing the bbc needed to find a new lead host they would settle on this annoying ginger [ __ ] who proceeded to run his mouth for a good year or so before realizing that no one actually liked him and that he was way out of his depth and expertise presenting a show as prestigious as top gear promptly leaving in a storm of tears and his own crumbling ego killing a 20-year-long broadcasting career in a matter of weeks suffice to say evans hasn't appeared on tv in anywhere near a significant capacity ever since ratings drop predictably once top gear got rid of its hosts and attempted to reinvent itself in 2016 the show would lose two-thirds of its overall viewer base falling from a peak of six and a half million viewers per episode to less than two million during the next three years boasting the show's lowest ratings since 2001. in a theory which i'll cover in much more depth during the revised top gear documentary this october the bbc would replace two of its hosts with known ratings drawers and move the show to bbc one in what is likely to be the television equivalent of a comb over but even this has eventually failed and it seems flintoff and mcginnis are next on the bbc's chopping block the corporation unwilling or seemingly unable to recognize the fact that what top gear had just cannot be replicated in a forced environment the redneck incident during the filming of the us special in 2006 the trio would stop off at state line pride a gas station located in alabama after having painted provocative slogans on each other's cars predictably this did not amuse the locals who threatened to sick the boys onto them as the trio and the production team hurriedly vacated the scene they would be pelted with stones and other missiles before escaping and removing the offensive graffiti the only reason this is here is because for some reason people thought this was fake for many years in fact people like these do exist and it seems like it would have been an awful amount of work for the bbc to go through for such a small payoff in his autobiography richard porter also affirms that this occurrence was indeed real and not falsified in any way the dacia sandero like many things from top gear the show's fascination with a cheap romanian hatchback built on top of vareno design started as a bit of a joke however what was once almost mocking derision became something of unironic admiration of the car and when renault drew up plans to sell the car in the uk the dacia sandero was issuing for the show's third reasonably priced car until those plans were rescinded citing economical factors the car would eventually be sold in the uk and become one of the best selling cars throughout the whole of europe the hype was indeed real the grand tour cutting a long story short in 2015 jeremy clarkson would be sacked from top gear as a result of the aforementioned comment and subsequent fight with his producer ashing thaiman and would be followed by richard hammond and james may along with a hefty chunk of the production crew who jumped ship for amazon the grand tour would premiere in late 2016 to massive fanfare and a notoriety for being the most pirated tv show in the world the show itself had its ups and downs and it must be said the single season per year format also didn't work in its favor as producing two a year meant the fans had a greater say on how the next series would look and the show could change accordingly by reducing this to one season per year it meant we were foisted with celebrity brain crash a joke that had thoroughly ran its course by the third episode for the entire season final gear out of respect for alex mills and the major amount of work he did for over 15 years i have decided to include final gear as part of the first layer even though the website has considerably fallen out of the public eye over the past few years and i feel it genuinely deserves this spot without this website it's probable that top gear would not have enjoyed as large an international success as it did as it spread awareness of top gear across the world at a time when the bbc had little interest in foreign markets final gear changed top gear for the better and it was a minor tragedy when the bbc instructed its ftp to be shut down in 2014 funny sponsors in 2007 top gear would partake in the brick car 24 24-hour race however due to the show airing on the bbc they were unable to solicit any actual sponsorship outside of the event sponsors such as dunlop tyres to avoid having a dull looking car the team decided to create some fake sponsors the seemingly innocuous penisten oils and larson's biscuits however once the car's doors were opened these read two completely different messages and this joke would be repeated numerous times over the years with varying degrees of maturity pre-2002 top gear finally to cap off the top layer is the pre-2002 top gear series it's fairly prerequisite knowledge at this point to know that top gear didn't suddenly pop into existence in 2002 and that there was actually a quarter of a century of prior history top gear started in 1977 as a regional exclusive series for birmingham and the midlands produced out of its own pebble mill studios before becoming nationwide programming in 1978. it then went through various minor format changes over the years before hitting a peak during the mid-1990s where jeremy clarkson had the role of lead presenter with vibrant co-hosts such as tiff niedel and vicky butler henderson to name a couple this format would come to an end in late 2001 when the bbc officially axed it we now come down to the surface for slightly more obscure factoids known only to those with more than a passing interest in the show dave in the uk there is a tv channel known as dave who launched in 2007 replacing an earlier channel by the name of uktvg2 which in turn took over from an earlier channel by the name of uk horizons who had always reared top gear beyond its original airdate since the 1990s albeit with a chunk taken out for commercials dave's first broadcasted program would be top gear and since then the channel's over-reliance on the program has become something of a national running joke top gear magazine this one's fairly obvious but since 1993 top gear has had an accompanying magazine which is presently 350 issues in those sales figures have dropped to pitifully low numbers from a five-year peak of close to 200 000 units all the way down to barely pushing 50 000 it continues to soldier on regardless of a particular highlight in regards to these magazines was the fact they would often showcase previews of the upcoming series weeks before they would air and ever so occasionally they'd show you something that never actually made it to tv kevin blick would serve as editor for the first 117 issues with his replacement michael harvey turning it into the most popular male interest magazine in the uk surpassing max power which had lorded over it for many years harvey would leave at the magazine's peak before a brief stint by conor mcnicholas would be followed by charlie turner's reign who remains lead editor to this day caravans and morris marinas is there anything more hated by the top gear crew than these two wheeled pariahs clarkson would first declare his derision for the morris marina in a late 1988 episode of top gear where he attended an auto jumble he would destroy one for the first time in his 2001 home video top 100 cars where it was used in a game of automotive car skittles the joke would progress during the peak years of top gear's 2002 return where they would form the basis of a recurring joke involving air-based piano removal services as well as being the recipient of automotive torture simply for the hell of it at the moment it's unclear where clarkson's distaste for caravans originated from and first been mentioned but particularly during the 2002's format's early days caravans would frequently be a recipient of various inventive methods of destruction from dropping one from a crane to using them in a game of life-sized conkers to shooting an old volvo from a car shooting cannon onto a giant dartboard spray painted in the middle of a quarry they also made a healthy number of appearances in his own home videos which i'll get onto in a bit infomercials particularly during the show's later years an unconventional build challenge if you could call it one involved members of the trio making a commercial or public information film such as one in favor of cycling from series 21 or their various ill-fated attempts at advertising the diesel-powered volkswagen scirocco however not many people know that clarkson had done this sort of thing before and not only that but it parodied the exact same volkswagen advert he would later parody in 2009 for the 1990s mercedes-benz s class and it came up black this is the man who married a sex kitten and she's still purring this is the man who moved into gold just before all the clever money moved in as well this is the man who is chauffeured around in an s-class mercedes-benz [Music] clarkson's punch-up i've already somewhat covered this during the explanation of the grand tour where clarkson already riddled with warnings by the bbc in regards to the content he was presenting decided to lash out his anger on a sheen tymon a senior producer for top gear who had worked for the show since the mid-2000s but what necessitates this to have a separate explanation is the circumstances surrounding what actually happened have fallen prey to myth and falsehood first of all a lot of people have the unhealthy belief that clarkson punched asheen tymon and then essentially flaunted that he could do whatever he wanted this is at least what it says on tv tropes and this is blatantly false as it would be clarkson himself who admitted to his misdeed the morning after it occurred which is a surprisingly humble thing to do knowing the consequences that it entailed and he was under no obligation to actually report himself second of all i think it's more than fair to say that clarkson was not in a normal frame of mind and even a year or two earlier this situation would not have happened his contract was due for renewal at the end of the following month which would have kept him tied to the bbc until 2018. the trio were in the middle of their biggest and final live tour within the united kingdom which occurred throughout 2015 and meant they had to keep going from filming episodes to doing free live shows a night to filming new segments for future episodes clarkson's mother had only recently died and the situation itself occurred after a heavy night of filming abandoning a film set around three grand tourists to do the studio segments for series 22's seventh episode in retrospect it's honestly amazing that clarkson kept his composure for that long bentley moors on one of the show's more minor controversies came in 2011 when for some reason top gear were not allowed to road test the then new bentley mauzan which led to the car being humorously substituted by battered old sastava things were quickly patched up off screen and to make up for this past indiscretion bentley allowed the usage of its next continental as a makeshift rally car on-screen injuries when filming with cars things are bound to go wrong every now and then top gear's first on-screen injury occurred during series 4 episode 3 where jeremy clarkson would break his finger after crashing his volvo into a brick wall in the series 8 finale richard hammond would roll his suzuki carry van onto his side which somewhat damaged his spine but this would soon be overshadowed by his near-fatal accident just a couple of months later in series 12 jeremy clarkson would be made to crash a renault magnum through a brick wall a strangely recurring occurrence to say the least with his own body taking as much of a battering as truck itself if not more so in 2010 james may would bust his head open on a rock during the middle east special which threatened a whole filming there are probably more examples out there but these are the few i can aim off the top of my head cool wall a fondly remembered segment the core wall didn't rate cars based on how good they were or how fast they were but rather the sort of person that would drive them a sort of trini and susanna's what not to wear but for cars footballers cars often wound their way into uncool territory whereas cars that were more left field would work their ways towards sub-zero i chose not to put this above the surface because during the later years the segment was quietly put to pasture initially featuring a few times every series the cool war would appear just once in series 13 before taking an unexplained three-season hiatus it then very briefly returned in series 16 and was then never seen again with top gear's sixth final series only featuring the wall as a background set piece the explanation given behind the scenes was that top gear had enough footage during its later years to no longer need a segment like the cool wall to fill in the gaps which is a bit of a shame as i'd certainly take more of these antics over the likes of mobility scooters or a clearly staged used hot hatch challenge charity specials in 2004 2007 and 2008 top gear made a few charity specials the first of these was the pilot episode for the tv game show stars in fast cars which would unfortunately go on to not feature the trio once it was picked up and was essentially a glorified version of the star in a reasonably priced car segment the second was top gear of the pops which came in as a last minute substitute for a question of comedy due to a controversy involving jade goody the third and in my opinion easily the best of the bunch was top ground gear force where the true were tasked with remodeling sir steve redgrave's garden oh there was also this from 2012 but we don't really talk about it we especially don't talk about this the tesla scandal in 2008 top gear decided to review the tesla roadster with clocks and having the cheek to lampoon the very real issues faced by early adopters of electric cars by daring to be a little less genuine over its battery level elon musk was quite displeased and evidently unfamiliar with top gear's brand of satire who often made fun of cars at the manufacturer's expense if it wasn't for the fallout that came from this scandal i would quite happily have put this a layer or two below however musk's cult-like fanbases made sure this hasn't stayed dead and buried as it should be i'm not quite sure why musk pursued it as voraciously as possible by the time the roadster made its appearance on top gear the show had long since transitioned from once ended around serious journalism into one that was much more tongue-in-cheek and to be brutally honest the fact this was ever a debacle in the first place bores me to tears the guardian throughout the previous two decades top gear has had many different forms of opposition from chief constable richard brunstrom to public transport 2000 helmed by ex-python michael palin all the way through to a horrid swedish gremlin but all of these pale to a certain newspaper famed for its many typographical errors for whatever reason the guardian has always had a bone to pick with jeremy clarkson and top gear as a whole and even two decades on from the premiere of the 2002 format this rivalry doesn't seem to be ending anytime soon english language adaptations with top gear winning a daytime emmy in 2005 international markets soon took notice no sooner than the americans who commissioned the pilot that same year but wouldn't see the light of day for a very long time as it was put on bricks they'd play with the format a little while longer before launching history channel's version of top gear towards the end of 2010 with australia beating america to the punch by a couple of years top gear usa would last until 2016 when bbc would unashamedly yoink the license for itself and launch its own version called top gear america this didn't really work and motor trend would take over production of the show the interceptors obviously inspired by shows such as the professionals the interceptors was a conceptual tv series devised by the trio over the jensen interceptor where all three presenters were fictionalized action cop versions of themselves with the predictable 1970s machismo of unashamed gratuitous violence alcoholism and misogyny what not many people know is that there were actually two interceptors movies if you could call them that the first appeared in series 17 and the second was filmed specifically for the trio's 2015 uk tour this latter movie is somewhat lost media along with many things shot for the live shows since there are no master versions publicly available so all we have are amateur recordings scene releases if final gear was one half of the driving force behind top gear's online phenomenon then the scene would be the other half for those unfamiliar to the term the scene is a collective of people who record and release episodes of tv shows that don't often get home releases such as top gear in the beginning things were hectic with jabber 355 vook and many others providing their own clips and episodes starting from 2004 uk-based scene group moo tv would take over control and begin issuing episodes in a more standard form with various others taking over in later years from a retrospective standpoint the scene was actually a bit of an annoyance as they would compress standard definition episodes originally broadcast in 576i all the way down to 352p which extended to dvd releases and meant that the grand majority of top gear fans didn't watch the standard definition series at their original release quality for many years thankfully were mostly past this stage and when the time came to doing the hd years they would just about survive in their original forms finally we turn our attention to his stigmas who in the beginning may or may not have been portrayed by formula one hopeful perry mccarthy from 2002 until the following year with the show occasionally using touring car driver julian bailey as a stand-in ben collins would take over the role after that and remain as the stig until 2010 apart from one occasion where he was portrayed by michael schumacher with collins eventually having a very public falling out and quitting in 2010 now he can take a dive beneath the surface for top gear related stuff that well verse fans may or may not already be familiar with the stig's current identity who the stig is at any given moment has always been a very hot topic with mccarthy and collins each having served the role and ask.com naming it as one of the 10 most asked questions throughout 2008 at the moment based on a faux pas committed by the presenting team as well as other corresponding evidence such as being involved in predecessor ben collins stunt driver mocumentary it seems that british gt racing driver phil keane has played the role of the stig since series 16 in 2011. of course without keane or another person actually stepping forward and revealing his identity it is impossible to directly confirm that keen has indeed played the third incarnation of the stick without sounding slanderous but i'd say it's the most likely scenario based on the evidence that we have multiple stakes continuing on with the stig for a moment it's actually not much of a secret as you'd think but the stick hasn't always been one person in late 2004 simon hocknell would temporarily play the role of the stig in order to drive the noble m400 which would be seen in the 2005 home video release revved up finnish formula one driver heiki kovalein would also portray the stick in order to do a lap of the renault 24 f1 car during the winter olympics special in 2006 the show's concluding stunt was performed by swedish athlete dan lang there is also the theory that the show never had just one stick but rather a rotating roster of whatever professional racing driver was available for a certain filming date with gt racer chris goodwin and btcc driver dan eves also named along with john oakley who performed as the stick during the top gear live shows other adaptations outside of the united states and australia there have been many other versions of top gear since the success of the 2002 version the first market to do so would be russia in since then top gear mania went into overdrive but one must understand that the majority of these adaptations range from unwatchable pastiches of the 2002 format loosely adapted for a local market to just about acceptable depending on the version and country of origin for the most part i honestly wouldn't bother with these other than to gaurphat but if i had to name one non-english adaptation that has had a smidgen of success i'd nominate the french version with racing driver luka four and bruce irani at the wheel the series is at least conscious of what it should be and this is proven by the fact it's the only international version of top gear to be renewed for more than a handful of series the same cannot be said for sky italia's utter abortion of an italian adaptation jeremy clarkson's solo home videos from 1996 to 2011 or 1995 if you count a crash compilation video where clarkson is sat in his living room the whole time serving as the inspiration for plot of an episode of alan partridge jeremy clarkson would release a home video around christmas time every single year like clockwork for 15 years straight from his time on the original format of top gear to the years he was off the show all the way through to the hd years of the reboot clockson was making home videos with his lifelong director brian klein along with the occasional featuring from fellow top gear hosts such as tiff nydell vicky butler henderson and the stig the rest of the series varies from middling in quality to pretty great in their own right but after 2009's duel which is the closest thing to a top gear vs fifth gear crossover will ever get clarkson had clearly ran out of ideas and the final two were fairly lackluster but still passable entertainment nonetheless clarkson's original holy trinity wager throughout series 21 and 22 jeremy clarkson had put so much faith into the mclaren v1 being the ultimate hypercar that he would decide to put his name on the line literally should the mclaren lose he would rename himself to jennifer by deadpool making it his new legal name however with all that ensued and top gear becoming the grand tour the wager was changed to having may and hammond blew up clarkson's 200 year old house which was something that was going to happen anyway much the displeasure of the chipping norton authorities but losing this wager meant they got to pull the trigger and partake in some of the action jason dorr if you've only ever watched the specials and repeated reruns on dave you're probably only directly familiar with three people jeremy clarkson richard hammond and james may but for a very brief stint in 2002 may was absent his spot on the roster occupied by cornish car dealer jason door who i've just made a video on ultimately things didn't work out and door was shown the door after the show broke up at the end of the year the south american connection in 2014 the true would go to argentina to film their patagonia special news which was soon leaked and spread to various interested parties who were still very angered over richard hammond's earlier comments made over mexicans not to mention the obvious optics of famous british people with outspoken quasi-nationalist views in a country of which they'd own some land hijinks would invariably ensue largely due to an unfortunate but real number plate carried by jeremy's porsche forcing the trio to abandon their cars and the special as a whole as enraged jingoists pelted their cars with eggs and stones throughout series 22 the three presenters would then proceed to wear lapel pins which displayed the chilean flag in order to tease argentinian viewers celebrity brain crash during series 1 of the grand tour a particularly time wasting segment was celebrity brain crash where celebrities were supposedly invited onto the show but would end up in circumstances that resulted in their tragic end before they could reach the studio in order to play the game the name of this game may indicate that even if the celebrities successfully made it to the machine it would cause their head to literally explode and kill them off anyway we never found out what the machine was capable of and for that reason it's all the way down the pecking order the grand tour game for years people had wanted a top gear video game and whether due to the bbc's stubbornness or the company's earlier lawsuit with japanese video game developer kemko over the intellectual property rights this never happened admittedly the grand tour game wasn't that good but a proper top gear game was something the fans had wanted for many years and to amazon's credit they certainly achieved that goal even if it was more than incidentally buggy kudos to amazon game studios for modelling a grand majority of the cars featured in the show even the older less glamorous ones making their maiden video game appearance or first appearance in a very long time trading card games along with a handful of obligatory top trumps releases top gear also had its own trading card game produced as part of top's turbo attack series which came out in 2014. this game would last for two series one before the events of march 2015 and one produced afterwards and unsurprisingly the game was quietly discontinued some time thereafter since let's be honest no one wanted a card with chris evans face on however some time before that in 2010 the bbc tried their own hand at a card game which it would name top gear turbo challenge though it was controversial from launch largely due to out-of-touch adults who were unfamiliar with how trading card games worked it quickly became the uk's best-selling trading card game but after just two years was brought to a close when the bbc decided it had run its course and didn't want to renew it which is a bit of a shame since although the gameplay was quite clunky the cards were very aesthetically pleasing particularly the rarer ones and you can tell there's at least a degree of enthusiasm put into the series as opposed to the later turbo attacks which felt more manufactured sniff petrol founded in 2000 shortly after his departure from top gear sniff petrol was a satirical motoring journalism website created by richard porter who would go on to direct many episodes of the 2002 format containing much of the humor that the series would become known for this website was how porter would be invited back onto the show after leaving it two years earlier though the website is long gone from its original format porter would go on to create the smith sniff podcast with good friend and former fifth gear host johnny smith audience member placement for many years top gear was criticized for positioning its studio audience in such a way that women with provocative features were often in the immediate background behind the presenters whether the decision was conscious or not the show would eventually parody this controversy by having male audience members dressed as the village people appear in episode 4 of series 14 which seemed to shut up this criticism for the most part mazda fireeye in 2008 top gear would be given exclusive access to the mazda fury concept car which would briefly appear in the studio during the series 11 finale before being handed over to the magazine for a test drive once the car made this magazine appearance it was promptly never seen again and for years people wondered what had happened to the car as it turns out five years later it was revealed that during the tests the fury had caught fire attempts were made to save the car but unfortunately was much too late and the fury burnt to a crisp it was kept a secret to prevent outrage but the magazine that it appeared in outright mentions on the cover that they know the stick will be the only person to drive it keanu reeves star in a reasonably priced car it's fairly well known due to his profile and andy wilman confirming it later on but among the likes of ed sheeran kiefer sutherland will smith and margot robbie series 22 was supposed to finish with matrix and john wick star keanu reeves as that season's final guest star unfortunately this never came to fruition as i'm certain it would have been one of the best from the show's hollywood years alongside tom cruise cameron diaz and rowan atkinson you can thank tony hall and danny cohen for this hammond's odd jobs it's certainly funny to think but at one point in time richard hammond's net worth was much smaller than it is now to the point that he couldn't afford his dream car a dodge charger unless he scrimped up and partook in various public events to raise capital to help in hammond's endeavors clarkson ordered members of the public to offer hammond what were often humiliating menial tasks she wants you to be her dungeon [ __ ] [Applause] now we come to talk a bit about even more obscure facts and trivialities regarding top gear before its revitalization in the 2010s the older top gear website is where many hours of my childhood went to die explosive digitally rendered deaths from the many flash games that were available to the ongoing garbage competition where viewers were tasked with sending in pictures of the worst modified cars they'd ever seen all the way through to the more interesting elements that have unfortunately been lost like andy woman's behind the scenes notes for every upcoming episode of top gear stigs are farmed in november 2010 the top gear website would release a video that was produced for that year's live tour depicting multi-coloured sticks being grown on a farm it was implied that this was how stakes were made and that a new stick would be found in this manner however we never saw a resolution to this though this plot might have been intended for something in series 16 the top gear production crew decided to incorporate the replacement of the stick for the 2010 middle east special which concluded filming in late october of that year around the same time this skit might have been filmed top gear dog for the show's eighth series the show gained a new host of sorts top gear dog or tg for short she would appear throughout series 8 before quietly disappearing off screen making her final appearance during the oil planting sequence of series 9. simply put the dog just didn't really work it wasn't good in crowds and tended to throw up every so often once hammond was injured in his crash it was decided to take the dog off the show hammond's family would look after tigie until she passed away in 2017 top gear stuntman another brief addition to the cast was top gear stuntman simpsons fans have recently joked about the omission of a map graining self-insert named gumbelly or graggle among other names but opkea actually did it for real during series 11 original broadcast there were various segments featuring the top gear stuntman when this series made its way to dvd however stuntman segments were conspicuously missing with the deletions so minimally reductive to the overall episode lengths that surely a few people felt as though they were going mad no one knows for sure why these segments were deleted but it's possible there may have been some moral panic over the danger of the stunts being done leading to their removal strictly come dancing is crap just a few months later there was also this during series 12 rather than listen to music or spoken word albums the stig would instead listen to morse code transmissions in the first episode this message would be [Music] which translates to strictly come dancing is crap reflecting the program which top gear was placed against on bbc one at the time gambon corner's original name the top gear test track located at dunsfold aerodrome in cranley surrey is perhaps one of the most famous elements of 2002 format top gear designed by lotus as a comprehensive test of a car's performance and handling the resultant circuit was essentially a large abstract figure of eight with a couple hairpin bends thrown in for good measure when the show went to air each of these corners were named with some corners becoming more famous than others such as the hammerhead chicago and of course gambon as opposed to the likes of the wilson and bentley bends which were mentioned once or twice in the earliest episodes and then promptly never mentioned again however gambon was named that way after series 1 guest star sir michael gambon propped the suzuki lyanna onto two wheels and for the first eight episodes the corner was actually known as carpenter's corner named after the easy listening band of the same name in a similar vein to the crooner curves and the bacharach bend series 9 dvd release i've mentioned this a couple times in the past but it's extremely difficult to get a hold of top gear for home viewing purposes with no box sets existing anywhere for the first 8 series even to this day which is something i still vainly hope the bbc will rectify some point in the future as we head towards top gear's 20th anniversary in the uk coverage was spotty even towards the end with certain series such as 18 21 and 22 only releasing in mainland europe and series 12 not seeing a power release anywhere however of these releases there is one which got our attention the most the only box set available of series 9 which released in germany in 2012 due to publisher d-max having the local franchise rights for airing top gear in germany off the back we knew it wasn't a perfect release since it omitted the first episode due to it featuring richard hammond's vampire crash however according to various product reviews on amazon that was the least of its problems supposedly both the audio and video quality were extremely bad for an official release with a majorly downsized picture resolution of 400 pixels as opposed to the show's original 576 and an incomplete english audio option which meant the studio links would remain in german even if you had english switched on the truth is it isn't actually as awful as we were made to believe the episodes were not 400i but rather the full 576i the episodes were dubbed in german but not so that there was an incomplete english channel all episodes can be watched in english from start to finish if the viewer decides to do so there was more noticeable compression when one compares the great adventures us special release against the series 9 box set but not to the point the picture quality looked washed out or bit crushed in any way and outside of the few minutes cut out of the episodes for arbitrary reasons is actually one of the better home dvd releases out there and i'm glad we found it the boneyard for much of the 2000s when a challenge was finished the cars were usually left to gather dust in what was called the boneyard near the top gear production offices this is how the armored fiat panda from an ill-fated segment i'll talk about later was discovered for the first time in 2009 the calls were moved away from this place partly to deter thieves and vandals given what had happened at the hillen barn in 2007 and partly so they could form part of bewley's world of top gear exhibit hangar roof logo is cgi here's something i never knew for a long time but some of you might have figured it out before you know that top gear logo that appeared on the roof of the hangar at the beginning of every early episode watch it slowly notice how it appears from nothing this means the logo was digitally added to the footage and that no one actually went up there with a spray can much to the disappointment of my inner child they don't really drive the cars admittedly this is somewhat common knowledge after a man by the name of emil bohei posted a video to vin wiki which was then quickly deleted due to an apparent nda violation where he came forth over deputising for clarkson during the niagara falls race driving the then new ford gt however this phenomenon is much older than that during series 13's final episode richard hammond does a test drive of the hsv malou and in at least one scene we can clearly see that he isn't behind the wheel furthermore it was revealed towards the end of grantor's first series that richard hammond didn't know how to drift yet if this is true this means any scene depicting richard hammond drifting his car prior to 2017 was actually done by a double going back further in 2005's intercontinental race from italy to london it was actually the stig ben collins who drove the bugatti veyron with roland french partaking in filming now of course don't get things twisted during the specials it's blatantly obvious that all three of the hosts did do all of their own driving otherwise there wouldn't be much of a point they also obviously did their own challenges otherwise they wouldn't occasionally have broken their bones but for quite a bit of the hard track driving segments as well as pick up shots for the epic races across europe where you couldn't realistically place cameramen in adverse weather conditions for several hours on end to get a three second long shot of a supercar driving past them doubles were used instead of the original hosts restoration rip-off for top gear's fifth series which had throughout the closing weeks of 2004 there was a phone-in competition where top gear offered viewers the chance to restore a car based on whichever one they voted for in the end it would be the unfortunately recently deceased paddy hopkirk's mini being the eventual winner allegedly winning by a large margin and then nothing happened people watched every episode of series 6 7 and even 8 expecting an update but nothing ever came of it some even thought the name of the competition restoration ripoff was a meta joke unto itself eventually years later sean mckellar of topgearbox.com would do his own investigation it turned out that the mini wasn't exactly what the production team were expecting the chassis did indeed belong to a car that had been raced by hopkirk at one point but the car itself had been reshelled which was a popular practice at the time this meant the show had no interest in restoring a car that wasn't exactly what it said it was and the entire competition was scrapped as a result jabber 355 founder of the website jabber's world this man would be the first to host full episodes of top gear on his website but would do so in a rather pitiful quality and with an awful watermark obscuring a good portion of the screen i won't say this man's real name though it's a very irish one and i managed to contact him via ebay a couple years back where he seemed willing to help me in my quest by stating he had access to the bbc vault and i took him up on his offer unfortunately for whatever reason he chose not to and left me in the cold i won't fault him for that decision but it's a bit of a shame that the man who started the distribution of top gear episodes across the internet couldn't also be the same man who helped to end the search for the elusive original broadcasts of series 1-3 top gear extra why did certain episodes from the first handful of series occasionally use a title card that read top gear extra as opposed to just plain old top gear in the uk top gear would air on bbc which has always been a network funded directly by the british government and airs without commercials when the time came to where the shows abroad even on channels sanctioned or owned by the bbc it had to be aired with commercials and in order to fit these programs into the 60-minute time slot they also needed to be cut what top gear extra was was a lot simpler than you might think the episode albeit still somewhat cut and edited for syndication purposes was presented in an extended form for a time slot longer than 60 minutes however for series 2 episode 8 owing to the removal of the masters of the universe challenge due to copyright related difficulties it was found out that around two minutes of original footage had been reinserted into the patrick stewart interview which had never been seen before greatest car competition during series 2's original broadcast there was an ongoing phone-in competition to find the country's greatest car of all time with the aforementioned jabber and a handful of others posting clips and full episodes this segment was initially widely available across a variety of filmed broadcasts but started to disappear once the bbc cut the episodes down for countries who aired the episodes with commercials and despite the best efforts of myself and many others we were only able to recover some of these segments typically in very poor quality that changed in late 2021 when the bbc's iplayer service uploaded many original versions of top gear episodes to the platform but even now we are still missing two full episodes episode 7 which may not ever be fully released due to the episode featuring stuart hall as guest low series 1 features a fully uncensored jimmy savile appearance so go figure and episode 8 which is only available as a jabber release and hasn't appeared on iplayer due to copyright infringement from the masters of the universe segment series 3 episode 10. if you look on certain websites you'll notice that there are apparently 10 episodes for the first four series however if you know even a bit about the actual program you'll know that series 3 ended early after 9 episodes as the show had exhausted its yearly budget at this point and yet many sources including the official top gear website itself states that series 3 has 10 episodes so what gives well it turns out the truth is a bit stranger than you may think when top gear was initially offered to overseas broadcasters in its unabridged hour-long format as opposed to the shorter 15-30 minute long episodes that have been broadcast on bbc world for a few years at that point each of the seven series available were distributed in a manner which allowed top gear to be shown in 10 week blocks for ease of scheduling the only problem with this is that there were only 66 episodes available at this point so the bbc needed to plug the gaps in order to come out with a nice round 70. to do this the bbc added three episodes to series 7 which were best of compilations of the prior 2 series and the 10th episode to series 3 which was also a best of compilation somehow likely through a non-british based source this latter episode has taken on the moniker of series 3 episode 10 even though it technically doesn't exist and is actually available on many streaming services including iplayer lost media i wasn't really sure where to put this but top gear has had more than its fair share of lost media over the years some of which is more desirable than the rest from lost episodes of the original format of top gear that the bbc vehemently refused to post online or make available in a home video release the segments that were supposed to appear in episodes later on and never saw the light of day many people have talked about these various segments from across the years but to give an example of one that i have never seen being discussed anywhere or mentioned on any site is a challenge that was supposed to have been shown in series 8 where jeremy and or james drove a piece of stadium turf all the way to germany in a ferrari 599 gtb prior to the 2006 fifa world cup this was shown on a version of the website and nothing ever came out of it now we're going into really deep territory covering topics that are not known to a lot of people and the few that actually know about them are those who are well versed in online forum law black stig is still alive in february 2009 a viral video would surface on the internet depicting the black stig from the first two series of top gear emerging from the sea the video linked to a website called blackstickback.com which was supposedly blank other than for a single line in the website's headers referencing perry mccarthy the original portray of the stick as the news randomly surfaced on various motor journalism websites at the same time as the video it seems that this may have been a viral promotional stunt by the bbc or someone who worked for them though for what purpose remains unknown perhaps they already knew at this point that ben collins was on his way out and had plans to replace him with the original blackstick who survived his ordeal on the hms invincible before realising that the white version had way too much brand identity attached to it and scrapped the idea altogether once again in favor of a second white stig perry mccarvey was not the stig now of course this wasn't exactly the case but it is interesting to note that according to a 2003 piston heads post from john rb a very well regarded figure in car enthusiast circles the stick who drove the noble m12 gto in series 1 was not mccarvey but rather noble's own test driver alan wallace this contradicts what was established in the past that there was only one stick during the show's early days and also tacks onto mccarthy's claims that julian bailey deputised for him on at least one occasion goodyear stickleback and bunsen burner usually when the top gear casts come up with a running joke it sticks and yet this one which has been said as early as the 1990s has never really caught on as clarkson explains in one of his books this name was coined by clarkson as a parody of the names of most advertising firms which incorporate various names often sandwiched by an and in this case the name was derived from goodyear tyres a stickleback fish and a bunsen burner top gear rule 34. you know the drill if it exists and yet this is about all you're going to see moving on i went on the internet mystery image many of you are probably aware of the very short-lived i went on the internet and i found this segment from series 11 where jeremy clarkson would show the other two hosts and the audience something he found online but not before shocking them with an image known as tailpipe man where a man which some believed has a passing resemblance to clarkson himself wearing woman's lingerie inserting a certain body part of his into the tailpipe of a classic range rover hence the name tailpipe man however the only problem is this wasn't the only image clarkson used as during two of the other episodes a different photo taken near the sea was shown instead it was probably something on the same level as tailpipe man with some theorising it was a photo taken while clarkson was on holiday in barbados with an unusually swollen gut but since we lack a sufficiently high quality recording we will likely never know what image was used for sure the top gear pilots before top gear returned to our screens on a permanent basis from october 2002 there were two attempts at a pilot episode that ultimately went nowhere if you read what richard porter had to say about them in his autobiography there's a few photographs that were published in the november issue of top gear magazine in addition to a few seconds long clip that was snuck into series 1's final episode but the majority of the pilots are locked away in a bbc vault and have only been seen by a select few pairs of eyes he is hoping that they get released eventually original 2002 intro sequence i plan to cover this in my eventual lost media video which has become sort of a running joke at this point but i have found evidence which confirms this introduction sequence right here yes this one was not the first originally made for 2002 format top gear and no i'm not talking about the extended version that appears in the show's first episode when i was finally able to find some of the fabled jabber releases as series 1 which had been lost for many years at this point two of the recordings from episodes 3 and 4 were instead secondary recordings made on digital channel uk horizons and as i've already posted on this channel the introduction sequence was how shall we put it a bit strange and needs to be seen for itself [Music] do [Music] for a while i thought this intro was something uktv came up with in-house until i found this a bbc world recording of series 2 episode 5. there's no intro sequence featured on this clip unfortunately but we don't need [Music] notice the music it's the exact same piece that appeared on the uk tv broadcasts which crucially means this introduction sequence did not originate from uk tv but rather internally from the bbc it means this was made before the actual 2002 introduction sequence was finalized for me the biggest clue was the clip of the rear shot of the lamborghini mercy logo which leads to the shot of the hangar before the cog which is never seen in the official intro rejected 2006 intro sequence while we're on the subject of alternative intro sequences in 2006 there were tentative plans for top gear to update not only its introduction sequence but also its theme tune to cash in on the oak and fall desk trance craze it was all the rage during the early to mid 2000s this theme tune would end up cancelled with the only reason we knew about this thing due to appearing on ian morris's youtube channel who also has a flicker with many high resolution production stills from that same era however if you bought the third volume of the challenges dvd released in 2008 and you navigated across any of the chapters this is what you would hear it's the closing beats from maurice's canned theme tune this proves that the theme tune was considered as an actual replacement and was due to be used from series 8. woollarding in the early 2010s the act of woolarding or putting your foot on a car's front bumper while the bonnet is open and turning to face the camera became something of a meme this was unusual in the sense it came from the original run of top gear and is named after host william woollard the originator of this trend jeremy clarkson death hoax during the summer of 2006 mere weeks before richard hammond's very real near fatal accident in the vampire jet car it was reported that jeremy clarkson had passed away at a cattle ranch in portugal and that the bbc were covering this up for a few days satick wouldn't interfere with the broadcast of the show in the early days of the modern internet this rumor sprouted legs once someone posted a clip that was implied to be and indeed looked like an actual eulogy for jeremy clarkson however it turns out this was simply a skit from chris morris released in the 1990s hence the older footage and had nothing to do with this rumor it was just extremely unfortunate timing that this had happened just as youtube was beginning to gain significant ground and in the days before twitter it was much harder to determine if online rumors were actually true heat's weird crush after two of the three hosts won heat magazine's weird crush of the year in 2006 and 2007 under their own merits final gear decided it was just too good of an opportunity to waste by not having jeremy clarkson win it in 2008 and conspire to do just that needless to say they succeeded and top gear successfully completed its weird crush repeat actual consumer advice this is something that has been lampooned many times in top gear across the years however i found out that if you go way back long before top gear was first broadcast in hd long before the show's first special episode and long before top gear won its first emmy you'll find this film from series 1 episode 6 centering on a group of hatchbacks for 10 minutes richard hammond simply reviews cars with no gimmicks attached there's no explosions no power sliding no crashes no humorous comparisons to cars worth 10 times its price figure just a selection of hatchbacks an overview of their features and their recommendation over which ones a consumer should pay attention to jennings and the planned operation in 1973 bbc radio 4 released an adaptation of author anthony buckridge's work titled jennings in the planned operation voicing a student by the name of atkinson would be none other than an 11 year old jeremy clarkson what this means is that somewhere deep within the bbc's archives lies the voice of a prepubescent jezza as these things usually go the bottom most level of any iceberg is filled with largely nonsensical stuff this is no exception after compiling the script for the earlier parts of the video as well as making the custom iceberg image myself i felt this was a fun way to blow off steam and cap off the video there is nothing factual beyond this point 4k episodes in the mid-2010s the bbc would experiment with 4k streaming for its iplayer service with planet earth 2 the first series to offer this around this time top gear episodes had their own watch threads on reddit and these contained links to obtain the episode somehow either through poor wording due to the reddit threads insisting on referring to these episodes as ultra hd or simple misremembrance from years later this transmogrified into a persistent rumor that series 21 was filmed using 4k cameras before being downscaled to 1080i immediately the skeptic in me was curious but had its doubts top gear had only transitioned to hd broadcasting in 2009 and even then the show would often use standard definition cameras for cockpits and other limited perspective shots as late as series 17 and possibly later still why would the bbc invest so much money into 4k broadcasting if it couldn't even show the fruits of its labors outside of a few hundred thousand people who watched iplayer and had a 4k compliant monitor well as it turns out this rumor was too good to be true ultra hd in this instance actually referred to the original 1080i releases from final gear as at the time people still oddly preferred the convenience of compressed down sampled 720p releases which almost led to the extinction of the original episode recordings were it not for the efforts of mine and several others careful conservations clarkson was replaced by a clone in 2010 this is obviously a bit of a tongue-in-cheek theory as i read on tv tropes one time to explain the show's changing tone but basically the theory postulates that the jeremy clocks and we see from series 15 onwards is a different man to the one we saw up to that point this is because during a deleted scene from the end of the reliant robin road test clocks and parks a bmw i setter into a garage however with no reverse gear in the front hinge door it is impossible for him to get out and unlike the plp 50 segment from 2007 no one is around to help him it is therefore implied that clocks and eventually starved or ran out of oxygen and that the clocks and we see in the studio from there on in is an imposter more prone to stupidity clarkson island is real or rather a clone this of course only really makes sense if you also accept that clarkson island wasn't a comedic skit from the comedy program harry and paul but it was instead a serious documentary remember towards the end of this skit the farmer calls along his equivalent of his sheepdog which lo and behold is a stig this adds credence to the earlier idea that sticks are formed and that every time you watch a repeat of top gear on dave you're actually seeing another clone fresh off the farm reenacting the events of episodes from many years gone by ashes to ash's charity special in 2008 for bbc's children in need richard hammond would make an appearance alongside d.i alex drake and dci gene hunt this means rather grimly that if considered canon which it isn't in the life on mars and ashes to ash's universe hammond most likely did not survive his vampire crash mythical 1000 horsepower mg lap in series 3 episode 7 the mgx power sv was taken around the top gear test track for a lap and after setting a lap time clockson boasted that the car could be specified to have an engine upgrade that would take the ford mustang derived v8 up to 1000 horsepower through a nitrous oxide kit now really the standard car the base model produces 320 brake horsepower this one with a few tweaks offers up 400 but they will sell you a nitrous kit that takes it up to a thousand rake horsepower a thousand however as drive tribe uncovered in their video about the sv many years later it appears the 1 000 horsepower statement was little more than a marketing gimmick and no cars were ever nor would be ever sold with this option due to its unfeasibility the joke here is that the car would actually be sent to the track with this mythical performance package and set a lap time that was so violently fast it tore open a hole in time and was never seen again ferrari on the moon eat your heart out elon musk because top gear did it first in 2007 they would put a ferrari 599 gtb on the lunar surface although tragically the footage wouldn't make it back in one piece upon re-entry with only this sliver from the episode's intro sequence surviving jason dore moved to miami a few people have noted that one of the car dealers a trio met in the united states during 2007's us special looks more than incidentally like jason door a comparison certainly helped by the fact this person was also a used car dealer of course it wasn't actually him owing to his thick accent and the fact door was presenting itv4's used car roadshow at the time but it's certainly a fun idea to think about the first yeet it's been reported on the internet that while pouring acid on an old porsche 911 during his 1998 home video most outrageous jeremy clarkson can be seen to have said he eat eat however this isn't the case as he's actually saying heat on the contrary clarkson did in fact proceed to yi to steal ball through the window of the 911 in addition to the car itself being heated onto a caravan so this assumption gets a pass jeremy clarkson is the founder of the heat a full 20 years before anyone else followed his lead he was just that ahead of the curve richard katmand richard hammond is a cat the cat from shrek too to be precise and cats as we all know have nine lives this explains no matter how many brushes with death hammond seems to have he always makes it out unscathed jc equals jesus christ come on did you really not see this one coming they have the same initials and as we saw in the middle east special clarkson did demonstrate various biblical feats such as appearing to walk on water before promptly sinking top gear is a lead poisoning documentary in the past cars weren't as clean as they are nowadays with greater amounts of lead in the atmosphere and this has been linked to a decline in mental health for adults who were around prior to the abolition of 4-star petrol in 1999. top gear gradually became nuttier over the years because its presenters got nuttier as a result of lead poisoning in effect the whole show is a documentary displaying its effects on the human mind in order to explain how top gear went from laid back reviews of the latest hatchbacks and four by fours to wilder unhinged content on the whole which often involved fire and explosions richard porter is a time lord of all the hosts and production crew who have worked on top gear over the years no one's path was perhaps stranger than that of producer and scriptwriter richard porter in the late 1990s porter had a job working at the wilmslow branch of next a british chain of clothing stores and was in no way qualified to work on a tv show however when top gear publicly solicited for a researcher to apply for the show porter jumped at the chance after fumbling his way through the interview he would be let into the world of top gear under the lead of john bentley and would be instrumental in the show's reconstruction in 2002 since then porter has essentially been present at every stage of the trio's careers and wrote an autobiography in 2015 to this effect porter's timing was overly convenient to the point his entire adult life would have likely went in an entirely different direction almost as if he knew how big top gear would become beforehand what's perhaps even stranger however is that when one looks back at the contents of the big book of top gear which used to be produced annually the first book which came out in 2008 talked about aggressive car names such as the attack hammer and iron eagle a year later when the trio made their own electric car it would be called the hammerhead i eagle frost the second book which came out in 2009 heavily implied what would happen if american movie star tom cruise appeared in the reasonably priced car and yet a year later that also happened now these predictions are weird but let us remind ourselves who wrote these books in the first place richard porter and if you go through the work he did for sniff petrol his seeming omniscience doesn't stop here take the july 2002 issue for instance where he lampoons forwards various failed projects from over the years such as the focus rs which had been delayed and stuck in production hell for two years at this point however what porter mentions in parody actually went on to happen such as the 500 horsepower ford fiesta rs which materialized as a concept in 2004 albeit with half the power also of particular note is the goal-winged ford mondale concept which came out in 2005 and was called the four diosis which served as the basic platform for the subsequent generation of mondeo more recently an amphibious ford fiesta has also been made and is known as the dutton reef to me the only thing that can explain these startling occurrences throughout porter's career is that he somehow has access to full knowledge of certain events and incorporates his knowledge in his writing top gear apocalypse is the show's canonical or true ending one of my favorite home video releases of all time top gear apocalypse released in 2010 and marked the show's first blu-ray release in the uk the whole thing was one of the most ambitious things ever made by the top gear crew and told a story over what would have happened to the show in the event a nuclear war happened with clocks and unfortunately not surviving the initial events however the date and time period in which this apocalyptic event took place was largely left ambiguous until a segment dealt with how paparazzi would fare during said apocalypse which resulted in a mock magazine being published with a cover date of 10th december 2019. if taken at face value this means apocalypse takes place well after the end of top gear but also the grand tour whose final episode aired in april of that year head cases skit is the show's canonical or true ending and to conclude the video we have these monstrosities that the itv dumped onto our tv screens in the mid-2000s where jeremy clarkson tried to get james may to impregnate him followed by rising water levels causing hammond to finally drown due to his small height and this is the part where i tie everything together because what causes sea levels to rise that's right icebergs and with that that is the top gear iceberg explained thank you so much for watching i hope you enjoyed this video and wish to see more in the future thanks once again to my patrons for making this video possible and i hope to see you all in the next video but before i finish i'd like to talk a bit about this channel my secondary channel and my aims for the future first of all i'll admit it i've been nowhere near as productive as i initially expected to be at the start of the year i've eventually come to the realization that many bigger youtubers who are able to regularly release content have an entire team of editors who work round the clock to make sure they can release crisp high quality videos on a tight schedule unlike them i'm a one-man band who scripts voices sources fact checks edits and cuts together these videos for your enjoyment and that's on top of being largely responsible for assembling the footage and pictures used in these videos in the first place as a result my production process is much slower than i'd ideally like it to be and that leaves practically zero time for me to socialize and interact with you guys as i have to go from video to video to make some form of a floating schedule with this major video out the way i'm going to try returning to discord in the next few days and maybe consider starting up a new server for these videos but i can't promise anything in this instance the video was mostly done by late july until i remembered a whole slew of other editions that i had put into the original image which i then had to record process in audacity and gold wave and then add to the video with a visual accompaniment this took the video from its original run time of 40 minutes to over 70 minutes nearly double what it originally was on top of doing scripts and work on other videos in the meantime it meant i couldn't finish it until now and i hope you all understand this i'm not leaving you hanging nor am i lazy and purposefully missing deadlines i assign myself sometimes these things just happen for some more than others and it's better to release a finished work behind schedule than it is to release something blatantly unfinished but on time my biggest problem bar none particularly in regards to the impending energy crisis and worldwide recession is money for me this is sort of a job and it's something i enjoy doing but i cannot continue to do it if the worries surrounding my living costs aren't debated i despise e-begging as much as the next person but these videos cannot be monetized directly since they contain copyrighted content from the likes of the bbc and amazon among others and as i've explained in an earlier video i never intend to hijack the overarching message of any of my videos to plug a product that has minimal relation to the subject matter at hand as it makes the content seem ingenuine as a result since i cannot get monetization nor am i interested in selling out to a vpn or mobile game my only source of income for these videos is through kofi and patreon if you liked this video you like what you've seen on the whole and you wish to see more please consider donating or subscribing that i may continue my work this also includes what i have done and i'm in the process of making for my second channel gear knob productions and if you like what i've made for this channel then you will like these videos as well please consider subscribing to that channel and watching them since it seems my last appeal fell on relatively deaf ears and i'd love to make more videos based on subjects which i am passionate about once again thanks very much for watching and i hope to see you all in the next video

Channel: Gearknob

Views: 1,018,001

Keywords: Top Gear, Iceberg, Explained, BBC, TV, Cars, Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, James May, The Stig, Gearknob, AlexTGRF

Id: UFw-4-oZDCQ

Length: 70min 0sec (4200 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 20 2022