Thursday, July 26, 2007

Top Gear North Pole race - sheer quality!

Last night's Top Gear Polar Special was a treat. If you missed it, it's repeated this Sunday on BBC2 at 8pm and there are clips here. If you have BBC iPlayer you can watch it there, this week.

Basically Clarkson and May raced to the North Pole in a Toyota 4x4, while the Hamster was pulled by a team of Huskies. The Hamster deserved to win. Unfortunately Clarkson and May got their first, but not before they had been through a gruelling couple of days struggling through an ice boulder field.

Highlights were: Clarkson's innovation of a "bumber dumper" toilet add-on on the back of the Toyota. And Clarkson getting a nut frozen to his lip - he screamed like a girl (sorry girls!) until May applied some boiling coffee to remove it. Very funny.

UPDATE: The question has been raised as to whether Top Gear actually went to the "North Pole", or, assuming they did, which "North Pole" they went to. See later postings on this subject here and here.

5 comments:

  1. The Hamster's companioin skiing behind a kite to gee-up the dogs was cool!

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  2. Was I mistaken or did the SAT nav read something very different from the north Pole????

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  3. I was amazed - even took the toilet seat with them - Pity they didn't use a polar pyramid Tent which takes about 10 seconds to erect.

    Usually the vehicles are roped over thin sea ice?

    I couldn't read the sat nav reading in time but noted the celebratory Spam and found it hard not to believe!

    Hwfa

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  4. Great show, but Clarkson very annoying. Also it was to the Magnetic North pole and the geographical north pole. Still a real challenge.

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  5. I was a fan of Top Gear until they pulled that North Pole stint. It was obvious from the faces and reactions of all the people involved on location that they all disliked the "idea", yet the team went ahead and did it. THEY RAPED THE NORTH POLE. I love racing, I am involved in racing, this was nothing to do with racing, motoring, gears or testing, this was utter stupidity. Next thing, they will go test a SUV with napalm equipment in the rainforest. They've degenerated into pure and unadultered idiocy, all of them.

    Whatever the antecedents, rape is never forgiven. And this was Rape.

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