And On That Bombshell: Inside the Madness and Genius of Top Gear by Richard Porter

Author:Richard Porter [Porter, Richard]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409164753
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group
Published: 2015-10-21T23:00:00+00:00

An Act of Charity

The bona fide rock star was doing his best to sing the part, even though the thudding, clattering drums from behind him were plainly not in time, until finally he could sing no more. Something else had thrown him. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said across the empty studio. ‘I just can’t get this bit.’ He waved towards the lyrics written up on large boards and being held aloft in his eyeline for this rehearsal. The band stopped playing. The drummer smashed one final, arrhythmic and unnecessary cymbal splash and then dropped one of his sticks. Something wasn’t right, and it wasn’t just the gaping flaw in the rhythm section. Eventually somebody spotted the problem. No wonder the singer couldn’t get it right. The person who’d written out the lyrics on the cheat boards had missed out an entire line. The drummer dropped his sticks again. This was all going tremendously well.

As you’d expect from a public service organisation full of well-meaning people, the BBC did a lot for charity. There was Sport Relief and Comic Relief and Children in Need and, as a result, working in a BBC building meant forgetting this stuff at your peril and then wandering into work one Friday to find your desk had been replaced by Pudsey Bear sitting in a bath full of beans.

We were often quite busy on Top Gear, usually as a result of having left our homework to the last minute, and we had little truck with all the enforced jollity and zaniness and competitions to see how many newsreaders you could fit in your mouth at once. There’s a special place in hell for people who say, ‘If I put some money in your Strictly themed bucket will you stop covering me in glitter and piss off?’ Well, that’s where Team Top Gear will be.

Naturally, whenever one of these charity events was on the horizon, the Beeb liked to get all of its high-profile programmes involved. Weather reporters would make music videos, period drama characters would be dropped into soap operas, the corporation’s Middle East correspondent would be forced to front a new kids’ show called Orla Guerin’s Puppet Vestibule. I might have imagined some of this. As befitted our collective curmudgeonly attitude to this generous merrymaking, Top Gear would refuse to take part in any of these things because Andy Wilman would tell anyone who asked to get lost. He might have put it in slightly more professional language, but that was the gist of what he said.

It’s not that Top Gear was uncharitable. We often gave away autographed items for fund-raising auctions and had a long-standing relationship with the Make-A-Wish Foundation, which regularly saw terminally ill children granted their dream of a lap with The Stig. It’s just that we were normally struggling to find enough time to make our own programme, never mind get involved in other people’s.

Finally, in 2007, we could hold out no more. Some extremely senior people within Comic Relief asked very

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