Andy Wilman on Top Gear’s India special: Wednesday 28 December, 8pm, BBC2

I walked away 12 minutes in, no effort made to do anything new, as many ohers have said scripted tosh.
A terrible waste of money, give it up chaps if this is all your capable of.

Sorry Andy, but this was tired, staged and lacklustre piffle. Not enough adventure, driving and scenery and too much staged, scripted goofiness. Compare this to the Vietnam, Botswana or North Pole trips and quite frankly it was an embarrassment, not only to British television, but to the magnificence of India. What a waste of an opportunity. This would have been served better if you have just done a travelogue, an A to B race with the chosen cars. It’s all becoming too obvious and boring. If this is Top Gear of the future, then make the next series the last…. OR buck up your ideas, ditch the woeful pranks and do a serious, meaningful travel/driving adventure that engages the audience.

I am sorry to say that this special was very, very poor indeed. You simply re-hashed all the old gags from the Vietnam, US and Botswana trips, in the hope that us regular Top Gear viewers may have undergone some mass frontal lobotomy programme and wouldn’t recognise the ‘copy and paste’ effort your India film turned out to be.

I turned over after 20 minutes and then came back to the recording the following day just in case…. Sad to say that it has now been deleted.

Come on Andy Wilman, where’s the intelligence gone? This is childrens TV.

Can we please have less staged pubescent squabbling and have proper intelligent car based dialogue, less wanton destruction of our motoring heritage (why don’t you smash some Mercs or BMW rubbish?) and spend less time on cheap laughs and behaving like teenagers.

This India effort was really poor. James May is an intelligent man (not sure about Hammond, was when he first started but since series three has regressed into a child), this really was beneath James and painful to watch.

As for Clarkson, is this really the same person that gave us the superb docu on Brunel a few years ago? This is BBC2, we want informative entertainment like the previous specials again please, or time to move onto Pick TV.

twas simply awful.

I really love Top Gear. I have watched all the specials so far and even recommended them for my friends to watch (I live in Germany).

However – the India special was the worst special/TG episode ever. What happened to all the joy that you guys used to experience and mediate while you were actually driving a vehicle? Where is your taste for beautyfull scenery gone? Why is it that you failed to capture the beautyfull landscape of India? Where is your great taste for cool music and editing? I really dont mind that you stage scenes – thats what you do when you produce a show. At least you always succeeded in telling a nice story. But sorry – where is the story in this special?

Im very disappointed…

Same old cr@p…. TG you are Bull****

Huge top gear fan here, have seen every single episode. Watched this the day it was aired… I enjoyed it but agree that some of the jokes were too staged/unfunny and all the other specials were far better than this one.

I came on here to see if it was just me… I thought maybe I’d missed something and would find lots of people saying how great it is… but sadly it seems I’m not alone – everyone thinks the same as me.

Why bother staging things and trying to pass them off as actual happenings – when clearly they’re not.

Why try to make out that the presenters are speaking natrually when clearly they’re following a script (that whole thing about the aircon working in the RR by James was so clearly scripted so that it would be broken by the others later on).

Sorry, but I like others have been a huge TG fan for years and I also think this is the beginning of the end…

Turkey !!!

i think the standardwas set so high with Bolivia and Vietnam. I enjoyed this episode, I dont think it was as bad as others on this message board seem to think. It wasnt the best, it was average, but to me average top gear still has me smiling throughout and chuckling. I mean, I laughed from the start when Mr. Cameron said “stay away from India!”. Who cares if it was staged? its funny stuff. I thkn lots of people enjoyed this special,but only the whiners have taken to the message boards…

I had been really lookin’ forward to this Top Gear special.
What a disapointment. I wonder if JC said at the end of filmin’
” and that is how we do s**t ”
Didn’t make it to the end of the program myself, maybe I missed some good bits but seein’ as there had been nothin’ like ‘good bits’ happenin’ up to the point I turned it off, I really couldn’t say.

There isn’t very much to add that others haven’t already. I feel like I’m watching the show in it’s last death-throes. It’s become an insult to it’s glorious past. That’s pretty hard to admit and it’s coming from a die-hard fan. If you can’t quit this staged, badly-acted droning then just end it altogether. We’ll try to remember it for the great moments, not this awful, empty farce of itself. The jokes are tired, yes, but most of all, the presented look tired and bored. They try to keep the thing going with this toe-cringing, scripted bull, being pretty bad at it.

I must say it now, the garden party scene (I’m still trying to strike that one out from memory) made me groan with embarrassment and sadness. Look at those once great guys, once the source of so much laughter and inspiration, clinging on to their hollow caricatures… This great beast is dying right before our eyes.

Can we not have a comment from Andy Wilman, JC or someone else from the crew to explain/justify the turkey pudding we witnessed the other night and give us some reassurance that they take all the feedback onboard and will try harder next time?

Come on, face your audience!

Even Dave would turn this one down.

could at least got the union flag the right way round on the roller…since the show was promoting british stuff

enjoyed the episode,but was not anywhere near as good as previous trips.Its time to get back to what TG is all about.More motor content,and less staged pranks.Sorry guys,not your finest hour.

I just felt they ran out of ideas and were vomiting up old gags

I am an Indian student studying MSc in the UK and I was really excited before the episode started as I expected some really exciting stuff on the so called ”India Special” episode… After half an hour I was wondering what the hell was going on??? And at the end of the show I was left with two emotions ”offended and insulted”

When so many people have been done over by the financial meltdown, and are still struggling with lost jobs, pay cuts or reduced hours, lugging 21K’s worth of metal and a massive crew across the globe just to engage in some scripted destruction seems out of step with the zeitgeist.

I think the scene where the Delhi elite turning up in their flashy cars and not looking amused AT ALL with the puerile antics of the infamous 3 really says it all – Regarding Britain’s standing in the world today and the emergence of the Far East as an economic powerhouse.

It’s sad to think that the Great Britain now has to go cap in hand to India and China for investment as the Euro is goes down the drain and America continues to struggle to get out of their own debt mess…

The level of stupidity, masquerading as humour really was too much. The scope to make a really good programme on a journey of this magnitude was sadly missed. I have really enjoyed some of the TG specials, but this was not one of them. Please can we get back to the quality of the specials such as North Pole, Bolivia or Botswana – where the programme was about the journey, not about a buffoon and his 2 sidekicks..

I’ve watched all episodes of TopGear more than once. This one had to be one of the most boring episodes overall.

ok. i think i’ll just stop watching top gear now. been thinking of doing that for a while, but this india ‘special’ has finally made me make up my mind.

goodbye, top gear.

People sure do cry a lot.

enjoyed the special and would just like to point out if you sing nan nan nan nan nan nan narn nan nan nan narn narn bread in to your sound hound app it actually comes up with hey jude, thats all.