Chris Evans and New Top Gear

Love it or hate it, you can't ignore BBC Top Gear and its new incarnation has certainly provoked a huge reaction right from the start, culminating in Chris Evans's recent resignation after making a single series. The show has always had a very vocal fan base, many of whom have been very quick to criticise everything the new presenters do and had already written off the latest series as a failure before it even aired simply due to the absence of Jeremy Clarkson. I took a more open-minded approach and tried to watch it without letting my preconceptions of how it used to be influence my view too much, but I do feel Evans may have made the right decision as despite his best efforts he just didn't seem to gel with the show and wasn't the right man for the job.

Evans did too much of this weird gesticulating and shouting.

Much of the criticism has been aimed at Evans personally rather than at the show as a whole, and his shouty delivery is the main point of contention. Should anything else really have been expected of him though? It's not as if he was a new face trying to establish his personal style, but he is a well-known presenter who has behaved the same way for many years in his other television shows and on the radio, so why should he be any different on Top Gear? His Radio 2 breakfast show has been similarly criticised for being too exuberant for early mornings, so this just seems to be the way he is, like an excitable puppy craving and revelling in the attention he gets. In this respect he is actually not unlike Richard Hammond, who coincidentally also started his career in radio and displays similar traits of over-enthusiasm.

Try as he might though, Evans just doesn't have the eloquence of Clarkson and tends to express himself by shouting instead, which quickly became tiresome and annoying. He may be a boorish oaf, but for all his many faults Clarkson is a fine writer who has an excellent way with words, and his witty delivery was sadly missing from the new show. Don't forget that Clarkson and James May both have a background in serious magazine journalism, whereas Evans started out in the world of radio where very different skills are required. Evans is supposedly a keen and knowledgeable car enthusiast but that just didn't come across in his rather banal commentary and when he did quote a fact he sounded like he read it in a book and was just repeating it word for word without really understanding it. 

I can't make up my mind about Matt LeBlanc and it somehow doesn't seem right to have an American presenting what has always been essentially a British show. The chemistry between Evans and LeBlanc really wasn't there, perhaps because the latter doesn't always fully grasp the subtleties of British humour and each nationality's cultural references may not mean much to the other. When doing pieces alone without the forced interactions with Evans he seemed more comfortable, albeit a bit smug and over the top in that typically American way. His delivery is surprisingly wooden for a successful actor, but nonetheless easier on the ears than Evans's gratingly loud voice.

Chris Evans doesn't seem to have the driving skills of his predecessors; say what you like about their presenting styles but it's clear that Clarkson and Hammond are very good drivers and even May, despite his 'Captain Slow' nickname, knows how to get the best from a car. He is also reportedly very difficult to work with (although the same could be said of Clarkson), and LeBlanc allegedly threatened to quit if Evans stayed so the presenters clearly don't have the same comfortable relationship as the 'three amigos' and there must have been a lot of behind-the-scenes turmoil. One also has to wonder if Evans spread himself too thinly by taking on the high-profile and time-consuming Top Gear role on top of his many other commitments and risked burning himself out through overwork.

Not a Reasonably Priced Car.

Moving on to the format of the show itself, the 'Star in a Rallycross Car' section has lost its appeal as it isn't a reasonably priced car any more but a proper competition car, a full rallycross-spec John Cooper Works MINI worth around 30 grand. What little entertainment remained in this tired segment came from seeing these stars in a bog-standard road car that they would probably never otherwise be seen driving and was completely unsuitable for racing with no sporting pedigree. The new format is now little different from the myriad of other shows where celebrities try their hand at motorsport and has just become a vehicle for the guests to promote their new film, album, show or whatever else they might be doing.

The biggest problem with this Top Gear was that it hadn't changed enough and continued too much as before. The set dressing, logo, theme music and the basic premise all remained exactly the same, and the new presenters seemed to have just been dropped in as direct substitutes for Clarkson, Hammond and May. The Stig's role was unchanged, the challenges became ever more contrived and less amusing and there was just too much silliness and self-indulgence for the sake of it, the very same criticisms levelled at the later years of the Clarkson era. Combine this sameness with the negativity towards Evans and his co-presenters and it's easy to see why this series was a disappointment to many.

Chris Evans playing the role of Jeremy Clarkson was never really going to work, and recycling the same old running jokes such as the constant mocking of Reliant three-wheelers did nothing to help his cause so he was basically seen as a poor impersonation of Clarkson. I can fully understand why the programme makers played it safe though as audiences are comfortable with the show and were very resistant to the change of presenters alone, so bigger changes would have alienated too much of the fan base and taken it too far away from the show they knew and loved. The problem with that approach is that this incarnation of Top Gear is and forever will be synonymous with Clarkson, Hammond and May, so anyone else stepping in would be seen as pretenders to the throne and compared unfavourably with their predecessors.

If the BBC still want a presenter called Chris they could always bring back Mr Goffey!

Unlike many of today's young fans, I am old enough to remember the original Top Gear from the pre-Hammond and May days when Clarkson was accompanied by the likes of William Woollard, Steve Berry and Tony Mason, and it was nothing like the current show. Before complaining about Evans and company, maybe this new generation should go back and watch some episodes from that time, with Chris Goffey waxing lyrical about something mundane like the boot space in the new Vauxhall Cavalier and Quentin Willson giving a very detailed in-depth buying guide to second-hand people carriers. In those days, Top Gear was unashamedly a serious and largely humourless car show that was actually aimed at informing typical car buyers, so fans of the current 'entertainment' format would no doubt find it mind-numbingly boring and plead to watch the Evans show instead.

To be fair to Top Gear and the BBC, this series was still much better than most of the alternative motoring shows on terrestrial channels. The original format lives on as Fifth Gear with former Top Gear presenters Tiff Needell and Vicki Butler-Henderson and is frankly a bit dull these days despite efforts to liven it up with races and challenges that just make it seem like a poor man's Top Gear. Then there was the truly woeful Classic Car Rescue featuring loudmouth cockney Bernie Fineman suffering a series of obviously staged setbacks, and Channel Five's dire Classic Car Show, a sound premise ruined by the choice of presenters: Quentin Willson has become an insufferably smarmy arrogant git and Jodie Kidd's delivery is more wooden than a timber yard. Kidd was one of the many names in the frame as a potential Top Gear host for this series, so one hopes she is not in the running to replace Evans as I fear this would be the death knell for the show.

In conclusion, I feel the new Top Gear would have been considered a pretty good show without the previous incarnation to compare it with, but it just couldn't live up to its predecessor's formidable reputation and that inevitably influenced judgement. Chris Evans's excitable and shouty presenting style really doesn't suit a show like this and quickly became annoying, so his decision to step down from this much-hyped role was probably the right one, but it begs the question of who will replace him. Apart from the new presenters, the show just wasn't different enough and I think that hampered Evans and company as it is still so strongly associated with Clarkson, Hammond and May. It's a controversial suggestion, but maybe the BBC should have dropped Top Gear altogether after the loss of the brand's public faces instead of continuing it in an inferior form that could never live up to the hype, and doing a great deal of damage to Chris Evans's reputation.