Top Gear blabla

[Baphi]

Ce dimanche 23 Juillet ... le programme ...
Ils rediffusent aussi le mardi soir ...

Code : Tout sélectionner

You know the drill: Sunday night, 8pm, BBC Two. This week, Steve Coogan returns in the reasonably priced car, Jeremy drives a Lambo and all three boys have a go at building a kit car... in eight hours. Here are the full behind-the-scenes details:


People carriers
The show kicks off with people carriers, but that isn't necessarily your cue to switch off. Vauxhall's Zafria, Mercedes' B-class and Ford's new S-Max are all trying to put the fun back into driving - and James and Richard were keen to see whether it's all just marketing waffle. The only way to find out - naturally - is to thrash them round the track, leaving Jeremy to look at the boring practicality stuff back in the studio.


And now the sensible stuff is out of the way...
After all that practical family car stuff, Jeremy needed an antidote - cue the Lamborghini Gallardo. OK, the seats squeak a bit and the steering wheel appears to be covered in a bath mat, but with a 5.0-litre engine belching out 512bhp it certainly goes some.


In the news...
The boys decided that folding metal roofs are a bad idea - especially when people think they have enough time to drop it down at traffic lights, when they clearly don't.

New cars unveiled this week at the British motor show included the Chrysler Sebring and the Land Rover Freelander 2. Talking of Land Rover, Richard has just bought himself a limited edition one in yellow and had a little accident with the touch-up paint pot...

Nissan, meanwhile, has unveiled yet another special version of the Micra C+C, this time designed by Sebastian Conran, when will it end?

And finally, the Top Gear survey is underway and we want your views. Check out our survey page for details on how to take part (and win a year's supply of fuel in the process).


Star in a reasonably priced car...
This week's star in a reasonably priced car is actor and all-round funny man Steve Coogan, who has come back to beat the 1.53 he clocked in the Liana. That, and to beat the time set by buddy Rob Brydon in the Chevrolet Lacetti.


Parkour what?
Nothing to do with dodgy anoraks, this one. It's a French sport which involves lots of running and jumping - and from some pretty spectacular heights (we call it free running). Top Gear thought this would be a good idea for a race - and that James was the bloke to do it (although obviously not the running part). Our Captain Slow jumped in Peugoet's new 207 and is leaving the energetic stuff to two teenagers who know what they're doing.


Caterham chaos...
Even the Stig's tiny brain is tired of constant Top Gear track lapping, so we decided to let him out on public roads. Some said this was a bad idea and that the Stig wouldn't survive outside his usual habitat, but it was such a good excuse to have a race nobody really questioned it.

The Stig set off from Caterham's factory in Surrey and headed for the Knock Hill circuit outside Edinburgh. Meanwhile the lads, who were already at Knock Hill, had 8 hours to build a Caterham kit car from scratch then drive it over the start line before the Stig. Simple, eh?


So that's Top Gear, this Sunday at 8:00pm on BBC2 - don't miss it.

[Chris]

merci Baphi pour tes précisions

[coupefx]

And the Stig is :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2p7a9s5ud1g&eurl

[Baphi]

mouais ... il manque la fin ...

une belle page de pub FIAT !

et non c'est pas le Stig ...

[coupefx]

Ouai, coup de pub, semble-t-il, d'ailleurs la BBC aurai communiqué, que le Stig serait plutot les Stigs, car plusieurs pilotes, jouent le jeu dans les différents épisodes de Top Gear

[Benji]

Mais l'essentiel du temps, c'est Ben Collins :

http://news.caradisiac.com/Top-Gear-qua ... e-Stig-406

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Collins_(driver)

[Baphi]

Jeremy Clarkson Beatbox - Swede Mason

[Benji]

La série 13 de Top Gear est déjà finie. La 14 sera de retour en Novembre.

Entre temps, la visite des studio de TopGear avec Jay Leno.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D1B5xH3_ ... r_embedded

[thibs]

Je l'aime bien lors de l'essai de la 8 il la adorer et a dit que c'etait une des meilleur voiture qu'il ai essayé et aussi la plus belle

[Benji]

Stig: the ultimate enigma

Who is the Stig? Some say he once represented Samoa in the pole vault, but all we know is that he’s officially the greatest mystery of the century.
In a poll commissioned to promote a new flavour of popular tortilla chip, members of the Great British Public have voted the identity of our tame racing driver the biggest mystery of the past 100 years, edging out such teasers as the murderer of JFK, the existence of the Loch Ness monster and how much wood a wood chuck would chuck if, indeed, a wood chuck could chuck wood.

Stig picked up a whopping 24 per cent of the vote, making him officially more mysterious than Bigfoot, the Beast of Bodmin, Lord Lucan or the continued popularity of Loose Women.

Despite Top Gear’s best efforts, the Stig was unavailable for comment on the poll. A spokesman for our white-suited uberman said he was ‘off getting a neck massage’.

[Baphi]

TOP GEAR PE TRANSFAGARASAN

[Benji]

TOP GEAR PE TRANSFAGARASAN

Ca filme! Normalement, ils sont de retour dans un gros mois.... :

Dans le Sun, ils indiquent qu'ils ont filmé cette séquence en Roumanie, et que Clarkson s'est pris un méga-coup de soleil au passage :
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/fe ... e-Sun.html

[Baphi]

'Duel' Jeremy Clarkson DVD 2009 Trailer

Vickiiiii

[Benji]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sXp3Kc-PXw

[Benji]

Top Gear de retour le 15 Novembre à 21h (UK time)

Greeting readers. It’s about midnight, and I’ve just got in from the edit. Tonight I’ve been working on the track film for show 1, which this time is helmed by James in a couple of massively overpowered limos – thought it’d be a change from the low slung two-door stuff.

The editor and I have been chuckling over May and the Stig playing Top Trumps, a game the Stig, frankly, struggles with. But more of that a week on Sunday, when we’ll be dishing up our new offerings.

I’ll be doing a rundown of stuff that’s coming in another blog, but first we must take care of some very important housekeeping, because for this series only, we’re moving to 9pm on November 15. We had no choice really: X Factor on at the same time with the Results Show, Cowell on storming form, the whole nation glued – we know when to bravely bugger off and wait until the storm passes.

C'est pas mal 22h, heure locale, car "les cold experts disparus" et je pourrai donc regarder top gear en direct sans que ma copie râle...

[Benji]

If you’ve read the Mole’s thingy, you’ll doubtless know how the record of show one went, and may I say I concur with the ‘Bana is a good bloke‘ verdict. Not only did he stay, but he stayed and drank beer; sadly, I too saw him eat from the Terrible Buffet of Out of Date Things, so I wish him well as he heads once more for the lavatory at 35,000 feet on his long flight back to Oz.

I hope you enjoyed show one. And while I can see the pulling power of X Factor, I hope you didn’t watch a pile of Z-listers eating earwigs on I’m A Celebrity. There is a higher purpose to life than that, which is obviously Jeremy shouting “Powwweeerrrrrr”.

So here we are, series 14. You’ll have noticed there was no series preview montage for it at the start of tonight’s show. But don’t worry, we haven’t turned to crap; we just haven’t filmed enough stuff yet to make a decent montage – there are still four biggish films to shoot and, basically, we’re up to our necks.

The Christmas Special in South America took way longer than we’d planned – things went to shit out there with weather and illness and vehicle breakdowns – so the knock-on effect is big. On the plus side, we think this Special will be right up there. Let’s face it: Vietnam, funny show, but hardly pushing us to the limit, whereas this one is much more hardcore.

I just started cutting it together and the opening sequence alone, which we estimated would be three minutes or so, makes 20 minutes of telly. And the editors and I were pissing ourselves at Richard, who hates creepy crawlies, having a big crisis moment when a monster flies into his cab.

So running through the line-up, I think show one is strong and show two, where the boys build their own electric car is, I would humbly say, a belter – a little bit of magic happens when they’re all together in one car, Renault Espace convertible stuff.

Show three is, gasp, for people who like cars, because we want to explore this question of which car company made the greatest number of great cars – and we’ll be asking you for your thoughts very soon on that one. So yeah, show three is a bit geeky, and to balance that out we’ve got James’s Caravan Airship film, which will take an exalted place in the pantheon of Cutting Edge Cocking About.

Show four is Clarkson in Belfast with the Twingo, doing his road test in the sewers, in an ice hockey match, trying to catch a ferry that’s left – you get the picture. Plus for those of a mental age from one to, say, two we’ve got the airport vehicle race.

As for the next show, God knows. A right gamble there, because we’re taking on the art world by setting up our own Art Exhibition of Motoring stuff. There’s a lot more to it than that, believe me, and it should pay off. But you can’t say we’re not pushing ourselves as we go on.

Then there’s the Special around Christmas, and then the Shit Show in January, the one where we have no money left. And believe me, we have no money left, not a frigging bean, so fans who’ve been on this eight-year journey with us, stick with us that night. Car-wise, the Merc SLS will be in there somewhere and the Lexus LF-A is in the can, as is the VXR Insignia.

That’s a sort of roundup, and now we must put it all together. I’ll paint a picture of life in the edit for film geeks one day; it’s my favourite place, and you never know what body odour will waft through the door next.

Just a bit of housekeeping while I’m here. You may have read that Jeremy called the studio audience “oafs” when we gave a talk in Edinburgh this summer. Naturally the papers had a good time with that, but I just want to clarify the situation. Are the audience oafs? Well yes, they are, but it’s meant as a compliment.

By oaf we mean one of us, one of the Top Gear clan, which is basically a fashion disaster who loves cars. That’s James, that’s Jeremy, that’s Richard, that’s our office. We are a brotherhood of nerds, and long may it be so

[Baphi]

A big, fat Christmas treat

Ce dimanche 27 Décembre a 20h45 !!!

Bolivia trip ...

As I write we are in, yes you guessed it, the edit, just finishing the sound mix and the grade on the South America programme. Obviously you guys will be the judges, but we love it and we’re quite proud of it.

Visually we were blessed with some breathtaking back drops, courtesy of the Bolivian High Plains and the spine of Chile, and also the stars of the show – the vehicles, really put in an excellent performance. All the boys buy them unseen via the Bolivian internet Classifieds before they go out there, and as anyone who’s bought any car from the classifieds will tell you, you know what a gulf there can be between the pic in the ad and reality. Well, extrapolate that uncertainty a hundred times and then ask those vehicles to do a 1000 miles of rainforest, river crossings, Death Road, desert, volcanoes and dunes and you’ve got the recipe for a great car challenge.

Tonally then, this Special is a lot tougher than Vietnam and Botswana, and a lot more varied than the Pole trip. All the boys go through the mill – James with his fear of heights on Death Road, Richard with his fear of creepy crawlies (which he idiotically confessed to within earshot of us lot) and Jeremy with his fear of any sort of physical activity.

Throughout the journey nothing is easy. Even getting their vehicles off the floating pontoon they’re delivered on, and onto dry land, is a challenge film in itself. Then they have to build log bridges and cross them in the dark and so on – the shots of them getting up in the morning after four days of jungle life would make a great “Top Gear – the Shit Pinups Calendar”. And that’s before we get to Death Road and the altitude problems on the High Plains.

It’s just a great road movie, so I hope you enjoy. Spread the word though, that it starts at 7.45, not 8, because it’s a 75 minute show, so put the new Wii game away a bit earlier.

Thanks for all the comments on the last blog, which were as lively as ever, and in particular to “love2goC”, whose reply was quite humbling. Thank you to you for that.

I would just like to pick up on a particular point raised by one blogger – Viewing Figures – a subject which anyone in the office will tell you, is my forte, because any producer who says he doesn’t care abut them is a big fat liar. You pontificated at some length about how our average is down to just over 6 million, so allow me to pontificate back. Firstly, you now had to add in the HD Channel figures which are logged separately, and those are now running at around 500,000 per episode, having started on show 1 at around 300,000, so let’s average that at 400,000.

Then iPlayer. Each show averages a million views, (which apparently gives us 8 of the top ten slots in the BBC iPlayer figures for the year), so let’s be conservative and say that only half of those are people watching it for the first time. That percentage of original viewers on iPlayer by the way will be higher, because of the move to 9pm this run, but as I say, let’s be conservative.

Still, that gives us another 500,000 first time viewers, and added in with HD, a total of around 7 million, which is where we were originally. Finally, you have to add in the Disturbance Factor. We were at 9 for the first three shows, then 8.30, then 8, and so on, and those disruptive time shifts mean you still lose casual viewers, even with iPlayer around. I’d say a few hundred thousand easy – people for example who like to watch it as a family, and can never regain the opportunity.

Sorry to go on, but you don’t want to get me started on viewing figures. This also, by the way, contradicts the doom story about plummeting figures in the Daily Mail. There’s a surprise.

Anyway, see you next year and have a happy everything.

[Pascalito]

Oppppsss loupé

heureusement, pas loupé par mon enregistreur, vais le voir a l'aise tout soudain

[Benji]

Très chouette. Ça valait le Kalahari ou le pôle nord. :-)X

[Benji]

ILS REVIENNENT !!!

Series 15 of TopGear telly hits your screens this summer, and the boys are already hard at work filming a selection of mature, considered and balanced films on matters automotive for your considered consumption.

Clearly we don’t want to give away all the secrets from the new series, but with the video below spreading across the internet like wildfire – OK, maybe not wildfire exactly, but a lively disposable barbecue at least – we thought we’d add a couple more shots of TopGear Motorhome Action to whet your appetite.

The video, if you haven’t seen it yet, was taken by a young couple on an obscure stretch of A-road in the south-west of England, and is surely the most extreme reaction to TopGear ever.

Possibly the most extreme reaction to anything, ever, in the history of the universe.

Though we don’t want to ruin the final film for you, the YouTube clip appears to show footage of our three intrepid heroes in some kind of jerry-built motorhomes. And Britain’s most excitable parents.

All we know is, it bodes well for the new series. Check back for more exclusives from series 15: it’s nearly here…

Et la vidéo :