New series starts Sunday! Here’s more news from the team…

Hello there.

TG telly bossman Andy Wilman was going to write a few words about the new series today but he’s deep in the edit suite preparing the first show and can’t be disturbed, unless you’re offering a way to cut 45 seconds out of all the over-running VTs. Or some crisps. He likes crisps.

Anyway, as you might have noticed there’s a brand new series of TopGear starting this Sunday on BBC2 at 8pm if you’re in Britain, or a few minutes after 9pm UK time if you’re one of those people abroad who cheekily downloads the show off some illegal BitTorrent website. Don’t look guilty and fiddle nervously with your mouse cable. We know what you’re up to…

So, what to expect on your TV screen (or computer monitor slightly after 9pm BST if you live in Boise, Idaho) this coming Sunday? Well, we genuinely listened to your criticisms of the last series. Andy even wrote a blog about it, explaining in a very clever way why TopGear had inevitably lost its innocence. (He’s actually a very clever man, is Andy. Although you might assume otherwise if you saw him eating a bag of crisps. Imagine a pig inside a cement mixer full of Quavers. That’s what he looks like.)

We had A Big Meeting to talk about the future. The phrase ‘back to basics’ was bandied about. But the truth is that ‘basics’ for TopGear these days is as much about Clarkson, Hammond and May mucking about as it is about testing cars.

If we went back to a pure petrolhead show we’d receive as many complaints as we do every time something falls over or catches fire. So don’t expect earnest chats about double wishbone suspension and a man in a woolly pulley taking 20 minutes of your time to explain how a camshaft works. But with more of a run-up than we had for series 14, I’d like to think we’ve put more thought into this one, daftness and all.

Come back later in the week for more details. And a picture of Wilman eating crisps.

Richard Porter, Script Editor, TopGear

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