Are you looking for some high-quality retro motoring content to distract yourself from the banal, menial tasks of the day? Look no further than this – a recording of Top Gear’s 2006 takeover of BBC Southern Counties Drive Time Radio.
As part of the second episode of the show’s eighth season, Clarkson, Hammond, and May hosted the station’s early evening slot to find out, as they were so often inclined to do, ‘how hard can it be?’
Quite hard, in fact.
The effort was characteristically ambitious but rubbish in the best way as the three of them broadcast to over 250,000 car radios across the Sussex area with Hammond taking the role of lead host on account of his local radio background.
It served only as a short segment in an action-packed episode that saw reviews of the Chevrolet Corvette Z06 and Jaguar XK, a race between a motor-powered Kayak and a Tomcat rally car across an Icelandic Lake, and Gordon Ramsay in the Reasonably Priced Chevrolet Lacetti.
Richard and the Kayaker in Iceland (© Top Gear / BBC)
The film opens with a scene straight out of The Office. A pre-show production meeting in which absolutely zero valuable information or work is produced leaves the trio with little beyond their own improvisational skills to guide them through the next three hours behind the microphone.
Luckily, on 26 April 2006, there was plenty to fill the airwaves with. Home Secretary Charles Clarke was facing calls to resign after admitting to releasing 1000 prisoners onto the streets rather than deporting them and the Daily Mirror had published an exclusive story of MP John Prescott’s affair with his secretary. If you were tasked with inventing headlines that would make compliance lawyers wince at the thought of Clarkson debating them on a live broadcast, these would be perfect.
Jeremy also took charge of traffic management with what he deemed a brilliantly innovative system of CCTV cameras hooked up to an in-studio monitor that allowed him to commentate the M25’s various junctions like a sort of low-rent Martin Brundle.
Jeremy debuts his traffic management system (© Top Gear / BBC)
Fantastically nostalgic sports chat involved talk of Michael Schumacher’s return to form at that year’s San Marino Grand Prix, Thierry Henry’s potential transfer from Arsenal to Barcelona, and a fiery exchange between May and the BBC’s local cricket reporter who became incensed at James’ lack of understanding of this most English of games.
Other moments of brilliance came from Hammond’s £5 a-pop jingles, public callers who seemed evenly split on loving or loathing the trio’s takeover, and a news report of some local vandals in Cambridgeshire who allegedly stole a 92-year-old woman’s front lawn and packed it into her wheelie bin, somehow.
The full recording is about as close as we’ll ever get to a podcast with the original Top Gear trio and serves as perfect background noise while you pretend to work through your various tasks of the day. You’re welcome.
