legs made famous by The Morecambe & Wise Show of the late 1970s. Many of the presenters were graduates and it is noticeable how many different names and faces were tried and tested, with nearly 20 main presenters over the course of Top Gear’s first incarnation.
After the series had been running for a decade, a new face in the production team arrived and proved to be a major factor in the evolution of the show. Jon Bentley was an Oxford University graduate in Geography, who had initially taken a post-degree job working for Ford as a graduate trainee. He told the author how this eventually led him to working on Top Gear: ‘I’d wanted to work in industry and had been passionate about cars from an early age. Frankly, [working at Ford] was a bit dull – I had to work out things like how many windscreen wipers were required a day in the Cologne plant. It was like all your worst nightmares about the car production line, where you’re sitting there putting on the same bolt over and over again, but behind a desk. You end up looking at one tiny thing and never get to see the whole car.
‘So I thought I should look for a more interesting job. One Monday, late in 1983, while scanning through the “Media” section of the Guardian, I saw an advert for a researcher’s position on Top Gear so I applied for it.’ Despite this, Bentley does not pretend that at the time he was a die-hard Top Gear viewer: ‘I couldn’t say I was a fan when I started working on it, because I hadn’t really watched much of it – I was at the age when I didn’t get round to watching telly much. Fortunately, when I was preparing for the interview, I discovered the Ford press office had copies of the programme on VHS. I didn’t have a VHS player but a friend did, so I was able to make a critique of three or four programmes before my interview. I also approached another friend of mine who was working on Blue Peter and spent a delightful Saturday afternoon attending a recording of that show by way of preparation.
‘If anything, I think my boss counted my Oxbridge background against me but I came across as hugely interested in cars. I wrote things on my application form like the fact that I had several thousand car brochures – which was absolutely true. Back at university, for my rural geography dissertation I’d interviewed all the inhabitants of a village – the Top Gear producers liked that – and the combination of being able to mention sufficient eccentric statistics to demonstrate an interest in cars plus the fact that I’d done quite a few media related things (some journalism at college and an interest in photography) all added up, and they thought it was probably worth giving me a go.’
He remembers being thrown in at the deep end with a rather peculiar first assignment: ‘It was very boring – the sort of thing that shouldn’t really have been on the programme! I went up to Lancashire to investigate a company that had devised a tool for the home motorist to extract dents: you screwed a device into a hole in the wing and pulled out the dent. I don’t think we should have done the item but I remember driving up the M6 in a rented dark green Sierra, thinking, “This is a wonderful way of earning a living”, especially after having been chained to a desk at Ford.’
It seems strange in the media-saturated post-Millennial world that you could just apply for a job at such a prestigious programme with no previous television experience, but that is what happened to Bentley. ‘It’s never been that easy to define TV roles so at first it was a bit vague: when we visited a foreign motor show, I’d provide information for William Woollard on what to say, I’d look into stories and see if they stood up. I can remember having to drive round a director who didn’t have a driving licence. There were very few researchers on the show back then, just me and someone else. It was a very small production team.’
He also remembers being struck by the approach of the existing presenting team: ‘The existing presenters back [then] were very professional – people like William Woollard, Sue Baker, Frank Page and Chris Goffey (who was in my opinion the 1980s show’s enfant terrible).’
However, despite the obvious respect Bentley had – and still has – for the veteran presenters, as a young buck taking his first steps into TV land, he was very rapidly and ambitiously projecting his own ideas onto the show’s format. After six months his researcher’s contract was renewed and he began to offer up more and more ideas for new features. Within a year of first starting, he would be directing his own pieces on the programme: ‘I felt we needed a more opinionated, controversial and passionate view. As soon as I got established on the show, I started ringing up editors of car magazines to assess their potential presenting abilities. However, I found to my great disappointment that some of the best [magazine and newspaper] journalists weren’t right for TV – they wrote wonderfully in print but weren’t able to communicate their enthusiasm through speaking or in a way that would work on TV.’
While searching for new on-screen faces, Bentley was fast becoming a major player in the show’s directing, even though he was first offered elements of that role when still only twenty-three years of age: ‘I think it was my passion that won through – a lot of TV is still like that.’ One of his first directing jobs perhaps reflects the (initially) more staid atmosphere on the programme: ‘I did a piece about an elderly chap called Tom Swallow, who had written a motoring magazine in a German prisoner-of-war camp, called The Flywheel. He died recently and I recall hearing bits of my item on the Radio 4 obituary series, Last Word.’
Another item was inspired by Bentley’s beloved car magazines: ‘One of the great things about car magazines at the time – and you can still see it in Evo today – is the obsession with the corner on a deserted mountain road. I tried to replicate that in some of my first items by going up to the Yorkshire Dales, filming around Buttertubs Pass. There was a road test of the Fiat Uno Turbo and an item on the Naylor, which was a replica MGF made by a company in Bradford. The tests back then were more factual and less humorous, certainly.’
But it wasn’t just the content of the scripts and reviews themselves that was vastly different to the current crop of Top Gear: the actual cars they reviewed were in huge contrast to the latter-day supercar focus of Clarkson and his crew (this monopoly of unaffordable supercars on the new generation of the series is the source of much criticism, which we will come back to later). Back in the 1980s, there was no such focus, far from it, as Bentley recalls: ‘When I joined, we weren’t supposed to road test supercars at all – it wasn’t thought to be the sort of thing the BBC should do. I remember having to persuade my boss’s boss that we should be allowed to do a road test of the Ferrari Testarossa versus the Lamborghini Countach as one of my first few items, and that it wasn’t in some way a betrayal of BBC values to have cars in the show which almost all viewers couldn’t afford. My argument was always that it was more elitist to suggest that everyone could afford to buy a new Austin Maestro (which nobody seemed to have any objection to us featuring) than it was to suggest that everyone didn’t have the right to dream about owning a Ferrari.
‘So I did get to direct the Testarossa versus the Countach at Bruntingthorpe … on 16mm film! We had Chris Goffey at the wheel, and it included some shots from the side of a VW Caravelle to get some good close-up tracking and a microphone under the bonnet for some cracking wild-track engine noise. [I was allowed to do this] providing I also shot a sort of apologetic intro, which would prepare viewers for the shock that we were testing cars that cost as much as a house.’
Another contrast to the post-2002 Top Gear is that the older series occasionally looked at two-wheeled vehicles. ‘There was always no shortage of new cars,’ recounts Bentley. ‘However, I introduced a bit of bike culture with my early items as well – I can remember an eventful day shooting at a scooter rally in Scarborough – interest in scooters was going through one of its many revivals in the mid-1980s. Towards the end of the day, the scooter enthusiasts became quite lively and started throwing bricks at the camera car while we were doing tracking shots, albeit in a friendly sort of way! Fortunately no harm was done and the resulting positive piece was well reviewed by (of all newspapers) the Daily Mail.’
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