The thing about Top Gear.

The thing about Top Gear is that you aren't supposed to get offended, because that immediately makes you An Idiot Who Should Not Be Listened To. The whole thing is conceived as being an hour-long chat between manly versions of BFFs - we, the viewer, are the fourth member of this little circle of buddies and we are supposed to be in on the joke. If someone says something you don't agree with or you don't quite understand, then in Top Gear world the correct response is not "I'm going to tell your mummy", but rather "Haha, look at your hair".

Top Gear is most definitely an entertainment show. It's the same with Saturday Kitchen - I don't expect a consumer item on the best spoons to be shoehorned between a kindly old fellow finding the nicest pasta in northern Italy and some celebrity cook making an omelette in 14 seconds. I have watched a number of old episodes of Top Gear recently and they mostly involved Quentin Wilson looking serious in a wax coat and talking about breakdown services. If I had to watch a consumer show like that about cars these days it would make me want to poke myself in the eye with a decent spoon.

We were unenlightened people back in the Nineties, half past eight on a Thursday evening just happened to be set aside for watching people drive eighteen times past a roadside camera in four-minute blocks. Those days are gone, my friends, and have been replaced with days where a comedy show combining all of the things that made Jeremy Clarkson the most money in the past 15 years rules the roost. Someday soon that show will be gone, Clarkson and his BFFs will move onto the next thing and we'll complain that the next thing isn't as good as Top Gear was now.

That's just the circle of life.