Just watched latest 5th Gear. Anyone else find the new format is inferior to previous series? VBH and Lovejoy put the irritation-factor meter off the scale. VBH is so awful I have to hit the mute more often than not - especially when she screams and squeaks and has taken to gurning as well. Only Jason Barlow gets close on the annoyance front. And why is it set in a cafe? IMHO the sooner the producers bring Jason Plato and Tiff back into the 'proper' presenting role the better.
SR 71 and Wobbley, youre both spot on. I cannot bear VBH, she belongs on a mainstream childrens programme.
Jason Plato and Timothy Needell have got the advantage of being mature and have spent alot of time on the track, whereas I remember VBH in 100cc Karts years ago. then she gave it up. She is a hopeless driver and does not pay attention, instead screaming & caterwauling rather than controlling the car & explaining about its dynamics etc.
As a person I am not a Needell fan because he is incredibly rude and aloof - he snubbed me at a Motorsport event once and made a smug comment - you'd not get that from any other motor sport celeb ive ever met. I have a client who is a former F1 champion and he is more modest than you could imagine.
However i do accept that Needell is superb at his role of presenting motoring shows. He is very good on tv, has very good manner and knows how to drive as though it is second nature. For that, he gets my utmost respect as both a car enthusiast and a tv presenter. I have some of his stuff from 15 years ago, and he was just as good then.
I was about to start a thread on last night's 5th Gear too.
It is a truly terrible programme. Between her barking and squealing and his "I think it's a car, I like cars me..." comments. He's even awful on that Sunday food programme ("I think it's food, I like food me..."). AND, AND AND... How many blatant manufacturer promoting topics were there? Ooh, let's see how tough the new Corsa is by driving it over a bag of gravel. The new guy who presented that barely looks out of the womb (let alone meedjah college). He has about as much on screen presence and personality as the gum on the bottom of my shoe! Jees, where did they drag him from? And to top it all, lets try and pull a 747 with a Toureg. I have never seen so much pointless drivel in all my life. Who cares, we all know it's got a massive diesel lump up front but the car is awful. The only reason people buy it is because they can't afford the Porsche or a Range Rover.
Aah, any ideas when TG is back on? At least they have presenters who know about cars or sumfink.
Agreed, I gave up watching it a few weeks back, VBH and the other one are truly dreadful, and what is the point of destroying a car - doing it once may(?) be considered amusing, but every week its just boring.
VBH always goes on about speed and loving everything to do with motoring, but when it comes down to it she is just witless squealing cow... look at the fuss she made about riding that motorbike along the runway the other week. She once convinced a racing team running a Viper GTR that she was a good driver so that they would let her have a go in it, and then she smashed straight into a wall after about 500 yards. I always remember that incident when she starts talking as if she knows what she’s doing.
Didn't Fifth Gear used to be the proper car programme for proper car enthusiasts? They did all the "boring stuff" that Top Gear wouldn't touch. They did proper car reviews for cars that people can actually afford. Why did they start smashing cars up? Why did they give VBH more screen time (does anybody actually like her)? Why did they ever employ Jon Bentley?
I'm afraid that I really used to like Driven. Before it's final series. When Penny Mallory, Jason Plato and Mike Brewer did proper reviews for cars that people could actually afford. I loved it when they did the shootouts with 3 saloons (the Passat, Mondeo, and erm...) They actually had 3 people in the car and tried to overtake a lorry from 40mph to 60mph in a short space- it was relevant information! A bit different to most shows idea of taking their test car round the track a few times and then saying that it's not as quick as a Ferrari. They had 2 properly skilled drivers with recent racing pedigrees. Penny Mallory gave insight into how sporty a car was whilst also giving the opinion of a mum with kids! Jason Plato gave the young, single mans opinion. Mike Brewer gave the low down on costs, depreciations and other useful tips.
Find me a show on telly that is truly as good as that! Come back Driven. All is forgiven!
Bring back proper motoring shows like the original 30 minute Top Gear, which ive said this before, had humour, expert photography, cars being driven very well by proper motoring enthusiasts (Jeremy Clarkson, Tiff and Quentin) and proper facts, figures, cars being compared against eachother, motorsport events being covered properly - the Lombard RAC Rally etc.
If an event was covered theyd do it properly with the right people, and give a good account of it rather than having no-mark celebrities into a bland aircraft hanger at Dunsfold Park whilst some idiot screams a daewoo round the airfield, and the juvenile behaviour prevails to an audience of lower class chavs.
No thank you.
I used to love watching the cars being driven on proper roads to evocative music whilst Jeremy , Quentin and Tiff gave eloquent, enthusiasts accounts of them.
5th Gear started off ok but has become rubbish, and i also used to live Driven for the same reasons of Alfisti.
Maybe we have seen the end of good TV, due to todays obsession with reality shows and phone ins. Chav chav chav.
Maybe we should start our own motoring magazine and show.
I would say we would all make a sight better job of it.
Palmira, I'd gladly drive around in the latest cars for a living. I certainly wouldn't mind driving around in a few crap ones if it meant I got to drive the odd Aston Martin Alas, I fear that becoming a motoring journalist would not pay the bills by itself.
Anybody know a good looking blonde lady who knows a fair bit about cars? (Heck, she doesn't even need to know a fair bit about a cars to be better than VBH) We can stick her on the frontpage of the mag and make her the main reviewer! After that...I'll take the Italian jobs, Palmira you can take the Germans (if you like), now we need someone to cover Japan & Korea, GB (Vauxhall and Ford may be American now but they're crap enough to be British), France, and America.
Id take all of them. Id be more than happy to write for a mag in my spare time and not be paid for it. We are all capable of that, we write some good stuff on here.
I think it would be the start of a proper mag for proper enthusiasts.
Id happily review alot of the cars. At first it would be a mag based on our own writings - purely journalistic and no road tests because we arent big enough to get manufacturers to bung us cars to review.
But my view is, if we are all fed up with the current crop of nonsense, the answer is to start our own.
When we are well known enough, a publisher will approach us, and then the real car reviewing and road testing will start.
It will be a bimbo-free zone or im not getting involved.
There used to be some very good lady journalists and racing drivers around - but now the TV companies are just interested in air-headed bimbos like VBH.
Suzy Perry is much better and has a long family tradition of motor racing.
My girlfriend is an excellent driver and motorcyclist (and pedal cyclist too) and would be extremely good at reviewing cars. She is very pretty and intellectually a world away from idiots like VBH. Surely the TV companies can find better..
I was a passenger on a recent drive to the cotswolds. i never drive on my days off. She was driving a Merc E320 avantgarde and i sat in the passenger seat reading a mag and the papers. I looked up and the speedo was showing 105. I felt like we werent moving. Excellent driver, probably better than me.
Comes down to the same argument as Top Gear, producers make TV that viewers want to watch, people want entertainment, not an anorak droning on about stuff most people aren't bothered about.
I'm glad it's not just me then! Looks like I've started something here. I'll write the Honda reviews (and other Jap ones) if you like.
'Driven' and early 'Top Gear' were infinitely superior as Palmy says. And jjb - please show us the market research that denonstrates that 'TV viewers want to watch' this drivel. The opinions above only mirror those of all my friends and acquaintances. If 'people' want entertainment then every other show on TV now is a reality show and there is more than enough 'entertainment' for them.
TV is being invaded by producers with 12 yr old mentalities who seem incapable of actually commissioning research to find out what we really would like to see. Presenters are not just allowed to stand and face the camera - the camera has to travel 360 degrees around them while they are talking and then every item has a handheld camera zooming in and out and all around, as if this adds to our pleasure - well it doesn't!
Serious reviews, comparisons and facts and figures would go down very well with a lot of people - and it could certainly be done in an interesting, non-boring way.
It's time to stand up and be counted for a proper car show.
old top gear...good..new top gear..better..entertaining, fun, irreverent...sure a lot is pure fiction, but then it occupies a 'prime time' slot on a bbc channel not midnight on some cable nonsense.....5th gear is drivel, which is a shame, cos vbh, plato, needel are decent presenters who are obviously hamstrung by ch5 execs desire to make a cheap copy of tg......i like top gear...i agree with almost nothing clarkson says but find him entertaining in the extreme.....which is good...cos thats what he, and the show, are meant to do....
My mum watches Top Gear. She watches it because it's entertaining to see Clarkson and co gurning at the cameras. Back when old TG was on (Thursday nights at 8:30) I had the living room to myself. My wife wasn't interested. Now she's always there on Sunday evening at 8:00 waiting for the new TG to come on. New Top Gear is a good entertainment show about cars. It's pleasant and not too challenging. It's not a proper car magazine show. Fifth Gear isn't a good entertainment show about cars. It's not even a good entertainment show any more. They both used to be proper car magazine shows. They must have had an audience back then and I don't believe that there are any less motoring enthusiasts now than there were then. I'm worried that we'll lose Fifth Gear completely and then we'll all be stuck with Top Gear as the only car show on TV with no competition! I'm getting pretty bored of Clarkson saying that he loves the latest £200,000 supercar after a 1hr stint driving around an airfield. I want proper information on the latest cars from the mainstream manufacturers. I want to know about cars that I might be able to own. Surely my needs and wants are not unique to motoring enthusiasts? Isn't this information that everybody thinking about buying a car would like to know? The only modern show that had all of the ingredients to keep me watching was Driven. I never found out why it disappeared and I was very disappointed when it did. I thought that Channel 4 was supposed to cater for the smaller "cult" groups. That used to be their raison d'etre. Evidently motoring enthusiasts are too small a group (or don't shout loud enough, or watch enough TV) to be catered for even by Channel 4. Perhaps channel 5 will realise their mistake before they pull the plug on Fifth Gear. Just one more makeover- back to how it used to be- is all I ask.
TV stations make shows that viewers will watch, end of story. If a show gets good ratings within it's segment then they'll keep it in the schedules, if it fails to get the right viewer profile it'll be dropped or altered to attract more viewers. If people don't like it then get of your backsides and do something, make your own proposal and find funding for it.
My own view is this-who wants to see a journo road test something like a golf or Focus when if you're interested in those cars you can go and test drive them yourself and make your own decision?
I'd like to see a journo road test a focus for the same reason as I'd like to see a film review before I see a film. It tells me more than if I just went and did it myself. The journo should know more about cars than I do, can ask questions of the manufacturers that I can't and can give me an idea of what to look for that I might otherwise miss out on! Also, not everyone has the time (or the means) to find their nearest garage for every manufacturer and test drive them one after the other to compare them directly.
According to BARB, viewing figures for October 2006, Fifth Gear averaged around 0.9 million viewers and is losing ground.
In comparison, similar figures for the summer 2006 series of Top Gear were approx 4.5 million viewers, and it was almost consistently the most popular programme on BBC2 by a margin of up to 1.2 million, aside from two weeks when it was close second to end-of-series episodes of The Apprentice.
C5 might assume that people don't watch 5th Gear and decide to pull it because the interest in cars is not there anymore... when in fact it's because it's so crap that not even being about a good subject can make it worthy veiwing.
