It's the end of a decade. Which means even more Best Of countdowns for your money. No surprise that Beyonce's Crazy In Love has been widely touted as the song of the last ten years or that the Bourne franchise, Mulholland Drive and There Will Be Blood have topped best film countdowns.
But this week Channel 4 released the results of a public poll of the decade's defining television shows. Conducted with the help of Yougov, Channel 4's poll revealed the favourite TV of the decade. And what was the result?
Top Gear.
A series as old as Elvis's grave, Star Wars and Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's The Sex Pistols.
So, in a decade which saw the world of TV turned on its head by Big Brother, in which talent shows became our favourite Saturday night entertainment, in the ten years which gave us The Office, Shameless, Mad Men, House, Lost and Curb Your Enthusiasm... In the decade of The Wire, The West Wing, The Sopranos and The Thick Of It and (love them or hate them) Sex and The City, Little Britain and Location, Location, Location, we 'the Great British Public' have chosen a 33 year old series which appears to be weekly coverage of old blokes going REALLY FAST in cars. No, I mean REALLY fast in, like, cars.
What does our love of Top Gear say about us? Perhaps that we're not as modern and liberal as we like to think we are? After all the BBC is still making - and we are still tuning in to watch - what is essentially Jeremy Clarkson's souped up soap box. Clarkson is nearing 50, pro-fox hunting, anti-smoking ban, he disregards climate change, insults the Scottish, the Welsh, Malaysians, Chinese, the blind, Germans, women, homosexuals, activists. Clarkson is the figurehead for a nation of Daily Mail readers, people who know little but spout a lot.
Earlier this year Jonathan Calder compared the Top Gear holy trinity of Clarkson, May and Hammond to Last of the Summer Wine characters. But to me Clarkson and co are overgrown schoolboys given a large chunk of our TV license money to grunt around a race track growling about horse power. We all went to school with a Clarkson. The boy who was loud-mouthed, arrogant, who thought he was tougher, cleverer, better looking than everyone else. Who everyone disliked but nobody stood up to - purely because he was bigger - who pretended genius level intelligence by arguing with teachers, who never noticed the rolled eyes and sneers or, if he did, didn't care. (Hammond meanwhile is the boy who dresses in his dad's leather jacket and still wears his hair in a rat tail, spritzs on too much Lynx and smokes roll ups. May, with his careless appearance appears the most intelligent of the threesome, at school he would have sported a non-school-issue blazer in slightly the wrong colour, snail trails on his cuff and pens and protractors in his inside pocket, he would have smelled of hamster and had an acned face only a mother could love. An unlikely collection of misfits - individually annoying, together detestable.)
Why the arrogant, smug Hammond has become a sex symbol is even more unfathomable than Clarkson becoming the mouthpiece of a generation (a generation of disgruntled granddads who still feel uncomfortable in the presence of 'blacks' and complain about the Polish 'coming over here, taking our jobs'). But there's no accounting for taste so all I'll say is this: if he wasn't on tele would you ladies get your knickers in a twist when he scuttled past you, all limp hair and cowboy boots, filling his trolley with Grolsch in Morrisons?
Our decision to vote for Top Gear as the favourite television show of the decade perhaps suggests that the production team who spent five years of their life creating the cutting edge David Attenborough documentary Planet Earth needn't have bothered, that Mitchell and Webb's Peep Show talents were wasted and that Dr Von Hagen could have just opened the bonnet of a Maserati Granturismo, dribbled in to it a bit and rubbed his thighs, Vic Reeves style, rather than attempting to 'educate, inform and entertain' (that's the Beeb's mission statement, believe it or not) rather than wasting a perfectly good dead body on us. Apparently we'd have been as happy watching a Ford Escort Mk 2 set on fire with a flamethrower followed by that episode of Only Fools and Horses where Del Boy leaned on the bar but the barman had opened the door bit so Del-Boy fell over because there was nothing to lean on and we all laughed loads. Welcome to the 21st century.
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