There are so many myths about Top Gear – but I’m the one who can tell you what’s really true and what’s made up nonsense
THERE are so many stories we know for a fact are true.
Keith Moon, from The Who, drove a Rolls-Royce into a swimming pool.
Keith Richards from the Stones snorted his father’s ashes, thinking they were something else.
And John Bonham from Led Zeppelin once used a fish he’d caught as a sex toy.
The only trouble is that these are urban myths. They’re all embellishments.
Which is a polite way of saying they’re all made up.
Then you have the well-known story that Bon Jovi had it written in their rider that they wanted all the blue M&Ms removed from their dressing rooms.
That’s not true either. It was Van Halen.
And it wasn’t the blue M&Ms they wanted removing. It was the brown ones.
Urban myths are still being perpetuated today.
We are told over and over again that Donald Trump wears nappies. So that must be fact.
And we know also that Joe Biden once soiled himself while speaking to the Pope.
Did he? Yes, because everyone says so.
The trouble is that everyone says Mount Everest was first climbed by an Englishman.
And that Vikings wore horned helmets, and that Christopher Columbus discovered America.
But none of these things are even remotely accurate.
All of which brings me on to a fascinating interview this week in which the American podcast legend Joe Rogan was chatting to former Top Gear host Chris Harris.
Chris opened up on Freddie Flintoff’s accident and what the ensuing months were like for those on the show.
And I must say, it was a riveting listen.
People still believe, for instance, that we did the H982 FKL number plate thing in Argentina on purpose.
But then talk turned to the story that I wrote a road test of the first ever Tesla before I’d driven it.
And that the breakdown we showed on television was fabricated.
There are lots of made-up stories about what happened when I hosted Top Gear.
People still believe, for instance, that we did the H982 FKL number plate thing in Argentina on purpose.
And in the big scheme of things, it doesn’t matter.
But it does wind me up something rotten when Joe and Chris perpetuate the myth that my Tesla road test was unfair.
And the fact is, Elon Musk took the BBC to court on the matter and lost. He lost the appeal, too.
I know no one believes me.
In the same way that no one believes Mick Fleetwood when he claims he never snorted cocaine from the back of Eric Clapton’s dog.
But it’s true.
On Top Gear we cocked about and upset a lot of people over the years.
But our road tests were always scrupulously fair.
SCIENTISTS announced this week they’ve developed a kind of ointment which makes skin temporarily transparent.
Yup. You can now be the invisible man.
Doctors are super-excited, saying it will allow them to see into the human body but there are other applications too, such as when your wife comes looking for you in the pub. And you’re not there.
Ange can just boogie off, for all that I care
DEPUTY Prime Minister Angela Rayner was roundly criticised this week after footage emerged of her dancing in an Ibiza nightclub.
Many pointed out that at a time of great austerity (unless you’re a train driver), she should be at work and not throwing shapes on a Spanish dance floor.
I don’t agree with that. Politicians are allowed to have time off.
Plus, if in a nightclub, it means she’s not in her office, dreaming up some more socialism to foist upon us all.
I wish she, and Sir Starmer for that matter, were away a lot more – 52 weeks a year would suit me just fine.
However, what does puzzle me about the footage is that she’d been at work all day, flown to Ibiza and headed to the nightclub where she was filmed at four in the morning.
Hmmm. I don’t know about you but if I’ve put in a full, proper, hard day at work, I get home, have a glass of wine and conk out at about ten.
I certainly do not have the energy to get on a plane to Ibiza then go clubbing till the wee small hours.
Which brings us on to Sanna Marin.
Two years ago, the then Finnish Prime Minister was filmed dancing at a private party and was forced by public pressure to take a drugs test.
She passed, of course, and I’m sure Ms Rayner would too.
Errors are sub optimal
IF a movie is good enough, we will all tolerate the odd gaping hole in the plot.
Armageddon for instance, where the radios didn’t work when Bruce Willis needed to be cut off and then miraculously worked again when he needed to speak to his daughter.
Or that door in Titanic which was obviously big enough for Rose AND Jack.
Or the gravity in Gravity, which somehow materialised to make sure George Clooney died.
The list goes on.
But this week, it reached new heights.
As I enjoy anything with a submarine in it, I sat down in a state of glee to watch a Japanese mini-series called The Silent Service.
Where I was expected to believe that the government in Tokyo didn’t know whether one of its subs was carrying nuclear weapons.
I’m afraid I switched off after two episodes and rewatched The Shawshank Redemption, pretending not to notice that Andy Dufresne couldn’t possibly have reattached that poster after climbing head-first into his narrow tunnel.
007? Try Dr no more
ALL week people have been wondering what’s happened to James Bond.
They’ve said that three years have now elapsed since his last outing and, so far, there’s no script, no budget and no replacement for Daniel Craig.
Well, here’s the thing, guys.
If you’re all 007 fans, you must have noticed that at the end of the most recent movie, Bond – how can I put this? – died.
So unless the next movie opens with a dreamy shower scene, which would never work, we are going to have to accept that the franchise is done.
I READ the report into the Grenfell fire with much interest.
And I listened to various politicians making solemn noises about how it will never happen again.
Really? I only ask because I’m writing this in my London flat, which is in a tower block that has cladding that’s deemed to be unsafe.
And I’m not alone.
Thousands of others are in the same boat.
So I’m sorry, Sir Starmer, but it could happen again.
Right Eton mess
SEVEN years ago David Goode, an organist and music teacher at the farm where they breed prime ministers – it’s called Eton – was warned about the nature of his internet searches on the school computer system.
But obviously the warning didn’t work because it’s emerged that four years later, he was still at it, merrily searching away for “cute Thai boys” and “gay little boys” and “Algerian gay boys”.
It makes you wonder.
Was he an organist, or an onanist?
Whatever, he’s now been banned from teaching for life.
Good thing too.
I wouldn’t want my kids being taught by someone so daft that he used a monitored school IT system to look for porn pics of boys.
Even when he knew his bosses were on to him.