The vote splitting the nation ... who’s worse, Evans or LeBlanc?
Crikey, what a week or two of staggering headlines, a tsunami of news. For a start, Coronation Street is to screen six times a week! Might as well just stick a CCTV camera in the rovers return and leave it running.
The biggest shock of all came as Matt LeBlanc, one of the 47 or so new presenters on Top Gear (BBC2), announced that he would walk away from the series unless co-star Chris evans was sacked. This dramatic stand-off was immediately dubbed LeBlexit, and it has split the nation.
it’s becoming obvious that many licence-payers want to see evans kicked off the show. They find everything about the man irritating — his mouldy grey beard, his 110db whinging, even the way his jeans don’t quite reach his boots.
From the earliest days of filming, we heard rumours that, despite his extensive personal collection of classic cars, evans wasn’t actually a very good driver. The truth, though, was worse than that: he wasn’t even any good as a passenger.
German racing driver Sabine Schmitz made him throw up after a couple of high- speed laps in Monterey, California. evans took revenge by making us all feel queasy, as he used the show to brag about all the hugely expensive cars he owned, such as the 1976 rolls-royce Corniche that he smarmily showcased last week.
He has driven Top Gear’s viewing figures down to their lowest ever levels, amid constant allegations of
SPOILED BRAT OF THE WEEKEND: Prince Louis was treated to acrobats and fire-eaters for his sixth birthday in The Musketeers (BBC1). Better still, he watched his nasty uncle (Rupert Everett) fall flat on his face. And he still looked miserable. What would it take to make this little monster crack a smile?
tantrums and bullying behind the scenes. A job advert for a new producer last week warned candidates must be able to ‘manage their own emotions in the face of pressure, setbacks or when dealing with provocative situations’... such as a barrage of deafening abuse in front of all their colleagues.
it’s behaviour like that which, it seems, has goaded LeBlanc to quit unless evans goes. But here’s the dilemma — because Matt is awful too.
Whether behind the wheel, as he was when driving the Porsche 911 r in the final episode, or lumbering round the studio, he looks and sounds like a life- sized puppet carved from raw beef. Now we know why he was so good as Joey the talentless actor in Friends: it was sheer typecasting.
To make it worse, half his lines are catchphrases from the Jeremy Clarkson era, like that weary catechism about the show’s ‘tame racing driver... all we know is, he’s called The Stig’.
The rest of his script adopts the same sarky style. it might work if delivered in an ironic, knowing tone, but poor old Joey recites the lines as though he hasn’t a clue what they mean.
The whole series has failed because nobody at the BBC understood why, at its height five or ten years ago, Top Gear was so great.
evans, LeBlanc and their innumerable sidekicks tackled childish challenges, tested earsplitting supercars, and raced across glorious landscapes — but they did it all so fervently.
The old Top Gear, with its eternal schoolboys running amuck, was a spree. even when they were driving to the North Pole, or provoking a second AngloArgentine conflict, it was just an outrageous lark. Under new management, Top Gear has become so pompous that it disappeared up its own exhaust pipe.
Still, evans wasn’t the biggest tyrant on telly over the weekend. That honour went to Wu Zetian, a former concubine in the court of the Chinese emperor around 650AD who became the only woman ever to rule the country.
China’s Forgotten Emperor (C4) told how she murdered her rivals by letting them bleed to death in vats of wine, and killed her own children rather than allow them to grow up and threaten her power.
This could have been fascinating, with a strong presenter to tell the story. instead, we got silent costume drama and talking heads, like a badly made documentary destined for school classrooms.
even the title made little sense. Wu was an empress, not an emperor — though Leftie TV types think that word, like ‘actress’ or ‘waitress’, is somehow sexist. And she might be infamous, but she certainly isn’t forgotten.
She was Chinese, though. The show got that bit right.