Top Gear – the BBC programme about cars, hosted by chimpanzees, and avidly watched by pond life (my opinion, of course) – has had its fair share of rows about whether some of its stunts are real or not.
The latest one comes after the producers admitted that they set up a traffic jam and used driving instructors posing as learners.
The instructors pretended to be practising reverse parking in close proximity to each other, while James May was held up in his Ferrari California Spider (worth £5.6m).
Personally, I don’t really care if Top Gear fakes its stuff or not. Real or pretend, it conveys the wrong image to people of limited intelligence in the first place.
But I’m surprised – well, not that surprised – at driving instructors prepared to push the image of learners being a nuisance in order to appear on the show. I guess that we shouldn’t forget that there are plenty of driving instructors out there whose only interest in life is cars, and the announcement of a new series of Top Gear is enough to cause them to wet themselves.
Appearing on it would be like having sex for them (albeit, without any other organic life form being involved). I wonder if they got paid?