Kamikaze driving, laboured jokes... Jodie Kidd is perfect for Top Gear
Like vampires or zombies or the Rolling Stones, there’s no getting rid of the Top Gear trio. Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May have sworn to keep performing live, despite Clarkson’s sacking from the show.
This summer they’ll be revving supercars and blowing up old bangers at arenas from Norway to Australia. And you can be sure they will still be doing it as octogenarians, racing their mobility scooters and chuntering the same old catchphrases, like Monty Python on wheels: ‘ Some say . . . All we know is . . . And on that bombshell . . .’
But we can be grateful that, apart from the nightly repeats on BBC3, they are largely gone from the Beeb. Quite apart from that infamous fracas in the bar of the Simonstone Hall hotel, the show desperately needed to evolve: its format wasn’t so much rigid as ossified.
Trouble is, its hardcore fans loathe any sort of change. The next presenter will have a tough time coaxing several million petrolheads to leave the sheds and garden workshops where they’ve been sulking for weeks, to watch a revamped version.
One name heavily favoured is former model and horsey type Jodie kidd. The daughter of a showjumper, she has the same posh-but-rebellious credentials as Jeremy: she went to a West Sussex boarding school once ranked the worst in Britain. Jodie is currently fronting The
Classic Car Show (C5) with motoring journalist Quentin Willson, giving viewers a preview of what her Top Gear rebrand might look like.
The good news is that she drives like an italian cabbie after two espressos and a slug of grappa — foot down, tyres squealing, slewing through bends and overtaking in charioteer style. Jodie is Ben Her.
But the bad news is that her jokes and banter are so laboured that they’re painful to endure. And her Hooray Henrietta accent doesn’t help — she pronounces ‘nuclear’ as ‘noocular’, for instance.
The Classic Car Show tests and celebrates motors that most of us couldn’t have afforded when they were new. Decades later, they’re within the budget of many enthusiasts — though there are few worse ways to invest your money than to buy an ancient heap of tin.
This time, Jodie and Co were looking at Bond cars. Ben Collins, a stunt driver on the 007 movies as well as being a former Stig from Top Gear, tried out a Fifties Aston Martin DB2/4, the world’s first hatchback. it’s good to watch a presenter who can actually drive, instead of a sarcastic narcissist with a weight problem.
But all our Bond daydreams were wrecked when Quentin took the ultimate Bondmobile, the Aston Martin DB5, for a spin. When the car first went on sale in 1963, he told us, it cost £4,000.
That was twice the price of a Jaguar e-Type, for half the performance: ‘The steering is dead and lifeless, and you don’t always know what gear you’re in.’
Jodie, meanwhile, was testing a white Lotus esprit, like the underwater model driven by Roger Moore in The Spy Who Loved Me. That would have been handy in
The Island With Bear Grylls (C4), where 14 women were shipwrecked on a jungle outpost in the South Pacific and left to survive on their own for six weeks.
An undersea sports car would have been just the thing for some of the girls to pop out to the nail salon and get their roots done. Hairdresser Jayde, aged 25, managed just three nights before grabbing the sat-phone and begging to be rescued. The constant damp of the rainforest had turned her skin all wrinkly, poor pet.
Others were made of tougher stuff. ‘My mouth feels like Gandhi’s flip-flop,’ grumbled 45-year- old Georgie, as she scrambled over rocks in search of fresh water.
The oldest in the team, Fi, 58, did what none of the men in the previous night’s show had been prepared to do: she took charge. A self-confessed Little Hitler, she divided the group into two teams and struck out in search of a safe campsite.
Hours later, of course, the women were hopelessly lost, with no men to ask for directions. it’ll be fascinating to see how they cope.