Jezz and Co take their foot off the gas

opened its new series with a fun fact from Jeremy Clarkson: “That thing between the anus and the scrotum is called the perineum.”

That’s funny because I always thought it was called Richard Hammond. BANTER! Oh well, I’m sure Jezza, James and Richard won’t mind. Those lads (aged 54, 52 and 45) love a bit of spontaneous piss-taking.

If they didn’t, why put it into the scripts?

Don’t get me wrong. I still love Top Gear and I’m delighted to see it back for a proper run of TEN episodes.

However, the first one felt more like a tribute act than the original TV bad boy. It was Top Gear by numbers.

A wacky race across a pretty European city? Check.

Some grumbling about speed cameras? Check.

Hammond getting semi-erect over a supercar that only he, May and Clarkson could afford? BBC pay cheque check.

The funny thing about that last item was Hammond’s complaint that the car – a Lamborghini Huracan – was too brilliantly engineered.

He said it was not crazy and unpredictable enough to be a proper Lambo and had clearly been designed to sell to a global market.

Some might say Top Gear has the same problem. For the first time, this series is being broadcast live across the world so those lucrative foreign audiences can watch it at the same time as us.

Perhaps that is why the first episode felt like a greatest hits album. They were playing it oh so safe.

This might also explain why the usual foreigner-bashing was kept to a bare minimum.

Or maybe that was because their jolly was to St Petersburg, in Russia. It’s one thing to mock a Mexican or rile a Redneck but quite another to rankle a Russian, eh Jezza, even if you are best mates with our PM?

Take the piss out of Ruskies on their home turf and our boys would have been thrown into a Siberian labour camp before you could say “Perestroika”.

Or indeed “perineum”.