The Top Gear Story Read Free Page A

also shot a sort of apologetic intro, which would prepare viewers for the shock that we were testing cars that cost as much as a house.’
    Another contrast to the post-2002 Top Gear is that the older series occasionally looked at two-wheeled vehicles. ‘There was always no shortage of new cars,’ recounts Bentley. ‘However, I introduced a bit of bike culture with my early items as well – I can remember an eventful day shooting at a scooter rally in Scarborough – interest in scooters was going through one of its many revivals in the mid-1980s. Towards the end of the day, the scooter enthusiasts became quite lively and started throwing bricks at the camera car while we were doing tracking shots, albeit in a friendly sort of way! Fortunately no harm was done and the resulting positive piece was well reviewed by (of all newspapers) the Daily Mail .’
    Another area of the motoring world that Top Gear featured very heavily back then, but plays virtually no part in the current format was rallying. William Woollard also presented Rally Report , the Top Gear spin-off focussing on the Lombard RAC Rally. Interest was reinforced by the presence of retired rally driver Tony Mason, who had been navigator to Roger Clark in winning the 1972 RAC Rally, as well as actually competing in the race himself in other years. One notable feature saw Mason join forces with Clark to test out a replica Ford Escort RS1600 rally car in a forest.
    By the late-1980s – 1987 to be precise – Jon Bentley had graduated within the Top Gear ranks through the roles of researcher, assistant director and on to director. With theincumbent greater power and responsibility of this senior role, he felt able to instigate yet more changes: ‘I found that when I moved on to directing items that focussed your mind much more, you were responsible for delivering so many minutes of television and it was up to you to make it happen. So, item ideas were never a problem but it was more difficult coming up with ideas for whole programmes. We were [still] a very small team, about six or seven people, excluding presenters. At that stage there was the executive producer Dennis Adams, a producer, an assistant producer, one or two researchers and two production assistants. It was a very low-budget programme – we had about ten shooting days for a half-hour show in the budget and about seven editing days plus some time for research and preparation. The team did grow a bit over the years but it remained quite a low-budget programme right through the 1990s.’
    By now, Top Gear was winning substantial ratings, moving from the hundreds of thousands into 1.5 million and over the course of the 1980s and the start of the 1990s, on towards a peak of 5 million. This represented an audience share of 22 per cent, which for a BBC2 programme was superb; the show regularly appeared at or near the top of BBC2’s most popular programme charts.
    â€˜From the start I tried to improve the show’s journalism,’ explains Jon Bentley. ‘My aim in the 1980s was to try and make it more like Car magazine; that was a magazine I used to wait for eagerly and devour avidly every month. That publication was quite critical and controversial in its opinions on cars. Back then I think cars featured more in general conversation: people in pubs used to talk about whether the Sierra was better than the Cavalier – it was the most sophisticated product people used at the time. In some ways, technology has now taken the role that cars used to have. People now might have a heated debateabout whether PCs are better than Macs, or whether Android’s better than the iPhone. Back then it was about cars: a new Golf was an event.’
    Bentley’s rapid rise up the Top Gear career ladder continued and in 1987 (after a brief period working on attachment to the BBC’s Timewatch ), he became the motoring show’s producer: ‘I was joined by Ken