The Return of Top Gear

Without meaning to go back to the old days of weekly TV reviews, I made an exception for yesterday's finale of Dr Who and I shall make another today for the beginning of a new series of Top Gear. Not any old Top Gear however, the new - more serious - Top Gear (supposedly).

Far from it in fact when you consider the highlights of the programme to include:- James May driving up the side of Eyjafjallajökull (yes I did copy and paste that), Jeremy Clarkson driving a Reliant Robin and Richard Hammond's encounter with Louis Spence. Any one of those three elements would have been enough to provide the hour with it's batch of entertainment but for this opening episode, they took silliness to the extreme. Jeremy's Reliant Robin section had me in absolute stitches and despite being very clearly staged - unless that is by some miracle, he managed to overturn just as a celebrity was passing. This particular sequence was almost reduced to Benny Hill-esque slapstick and just short of the music, it very nearly was.

Whilst I'm on the subject of TV, I may as well bring to your attention the other new series that follows Top Gear which tells you how to build something new every week. This week we are given a behind the scenes tour of the (mostly) top secret nuclear submarine Astute. Nearly fourteen years in the making and costing more than one billion pounds the programme shows you the different aspects of the company BAE systems that make the sub and gives a sneak preview into the lives of some of the many staff working on the project.

What is most amazing about this is that it harks back to times gone by when factories employed a large percentage of a town - in this case Barrow in Furness - where it is not uncommon for whole families spanning generations to all work in the same place. It is really nice to know that at least somewhere in the UK, people are still making things and learning the skills that once made Britain a great place.