My New Favorite

Move over Jon Stewart and make way for Top Gear!

May I just say, LUUURRRRVE that show! I can only applaud their make-over. A few years ago, Top Gear used to be a terribly boring show meant only for car crazy males. My cousin brothers in Bangalore would watch it and I would try too. But seriously, you had to have in your brain a) cars and b) high levels of testosterone to find that show even remotely interesting.

But now! How it has changed! Sure, there's still a lot about cars, but it can easily be brushed aside in the face of all the other things they have going on. It's cars+reality TV+comedy all rolled into one. Last night, they had a race to the North Pole. Then they had a version of the winter Olympics with cars. Last week, they had a race through Africa in a car that had to be built/made in Africa. All highly entertaining stuff. It's a bit like one of Michael Palin's shows (Pole to Pole or Around the World in 80 Days), but with 3 Palins, instead of just 1!

The best part of it is, there's no back-biting among the three heroes of Top Gear: Jeremy Somebody, James May (I know his name because they showed his wee wee (as opposed to just wee) bottle up close. I guess they didn't want to pollute the North Pole, so they had to wee wee in a bottle) and Hammond SomebodyElse. They all seem to be pretty good friends, even though I think James and Jeremy like to pull Hammond's leg a lot, probably because he's much younger than them. What a change from American TV! You will NOT find a single show, reality or otherwise, without a great deal of bitching and back-biting people on American TV... unless it happens to be one of those evangelical ones, in which case you reserve the bitching and back-biting for other religions.

The show airs on Monday nights on BBC America- perfect, because I come back groaning and moaning in pain from my yoga class and I need distraction. And it goes on from about 8:30 to 10:30pm, which is again perfect because one hour is too short and I find that I can't stay up later than 10pm nowadays.

Which is actually one of the reasons why Jon Stewart and Co from Comedy Central have been falling in my books- they air at 11pm, by which time I'm usually fast asleep.

RK would say that the reason I like Top Gear is because I am an Anglophile at heart- one who prefers BBC to CNN, British comedy to American and so on. Really now, who in their right mind WOULDN'T prefer BBC to CNN? But here's the proof that I am not endorsing Top Gear just because it is on BBC: most of the shows on BBC America are quite TERRIBLE- Dr.Who (bad acting, horrible plots), Mistresses (Bold and the Beautiful made over with British accents. Could we please stop sleeping with everybody around us?), Robin Hood (bad acting, horrible plots) and so on and so forth. So see? These are my negative controls.