@Mikey
Imagine, if you can, a show that is half “Now Get Out Of That” and half “Jackass”, but purely British, and filmed in the back lot of Junkyard Wars, set in the Sahara or deep in Botswana, which focuses on reviews of supercars like the Bugatti Veyron and spends most of its time getting one million dollar cars stuck in traffic because they wanted to see how handy they would be for picking up the kids after school, but the super cars don’t have enough clearance to get up the curb to the gas station, or shred their own tires on the first roundabout they find.
Oh, and they tried to launch a Robin Reliant into space on a home made rocket because it “looked a little like it might fly, and also they succeeded in launching a mini down a ski jump. Also with home made rockets. Because rockets.
Their best bit though, in my opinion, was when they’d be flown to some far off country and given just shy of enough money to by a car from a scrap yard, and told to “get home”. Invariably, they turned it into a love letter to whatever piece of crap they found that was still drivable, and then spent most of the rest of the show getting lost, sabotaging each other’s cars, infuriating the locals, and randomly exploring some of the most beautiful incredible unbelievable (or utterly lethal and incredibly dangerous) places on earth.
Rocket cars: serious business.
The show’s been recreated several times, and several places, but the “quintessential” hosts have their own show, which is only on Amazon (because reasons), and all the attempts to recreate it in America just resulted in a Car Talk show.
In its prime, it was fucking amazing.
3 rich blokes, cocking about with million dollar cars, sometimes driving them properly on proper tracks, and sometimes seeing if they can get one across a desert, or through a jungle or down a river, or through a literal war zone, and taking the task of seeing if a car could fly completely seriously, because it could be England’s chance for a real space program to show those colonists What For.
To get back on topic, they found they couldn’t kill a Toyota Hilux pickup. So they bought one and raced it, used it to tow impossible things (like a building), then drove it THROUGH the building and parked it down on the beach at low tide and let the high tide of the North Sea on it for a day, dropped a camping trailer on it, and then gave up and set it on fire. And every time it only needed a new battery and fresh spark plus and it started right up on the first or second try.
So they put it on top of a 30-something floor building on the day it was to be demolished and blew it the fuck up and let it fall with all the rubble. And when the dust cleared and some back hoes and a steam shovel had found it in the debris and dragged it upright, they put a new battery in it, hit a couple of the more bent parts with a hammer, gave it a fresh set spark plugs (which is the only maintenance any car ever really needs aside from better bigger brakes), and it started and they drove it off the top of the rubble pile.
So they built a plinth for the truck and immortalized it as the indestructible god that it is.
Then they bought another one and raced dog sleds to the North Pole with it. Then they drove it to the open mouth of a volcano to collect lava samples with it.
The hosts were a cock, a pillock, and a hamster. They never agreed about anything, and they never stopped making it a race with silly and stupid rules like “last one to be eaten by alligators” or “first one to get your cohost murdered” or “whoever’s mother hates the car the least” wins!
Good times.
It you’d like a sample,
it’s basically this, for an hour.
Also
Rowan Atkinson in a reasonably priced car