Top Gear hits the repeat button

Here's hoping the outdoor festival add-on to the Irish Top Gear Live show will bring something fresh, because as far as the indoor 'live' show goes, we've seen it all before, writes PADDY COMYN

JAMES MAY recently described Top Gear as a “car-based sit-com” and this is about as accurate a description there is for what started off as an innovative formula for a tired car programme and has turned into a global phenomenon. With an audience of around 350 million worldwide and another world tour of Top Gear Live underway and coming to Dublin next week, there appears to be no applying the brakes to the Top Gear juggernaut.

We are in Birmingham, to see Top Gear Live, the motoring circus which rolls into Dublin on Friday, November 26th. It is the third year of the show and this year it moves from the leafy enclosures of the RDS to the vast expanse of City West.

Clarkson won’t do print interviews. He will only do radio or television interviews. Presumably because his words are broadcast in the way he delivers them, leaving no room for interpretation. That leaves Hammond and May. We’ve asked for James May and we’re given what we want. For ten minutes anyway.

We are in their world now. Seemingly cloned, blonde, pony-tailed girls, wearing crew jackets and clutching clipboards yield the power here. It’s their rules. James May sits in a room, behind a shutter, guarded by some more PR Storm Troopers. The clock is ticking.

As soon as I sit down, the affable May, who speaks an octave lower than his on-screen character, speaks of his love of Ireland, his fondness for a pub outside Dublin that he can’t remember the name of, and Lillies Bordello. And he’d like a coffee. And I’ve yet to ask a question. Tick, tick, tick.

So how does the Top Gear Live show keep the formula fresh when it is comprised of pretty much the same ingredients? “There are limits to what we can do because we only have an arena, although in Ireland it is better because we have an outdoor festival bit, so you get lots of skidding, noisy stuff, but in the arena you have to be quite creative because you can’t put on a Formula One race on stage. There is some precision driving and it’s a mixture of dare-devilry and surreal rock concert.”

May appears to be genuinely surprised by the mania that surrounds Top Gear, both as a television show and a live event. “I am absolutely baffled by it. I don’t think about it because it could be a bit dangerous, but I wake up and I forget that I do Top Gear. When I remember I think that it is something quite inexplicably big.

“People say that we have good chemistry, but we are not the only people on television with good chemistry. Maybe it is our treatment of the subject or the self-deprecation, I don’t know.” Turning to that Radio Times interview, where he described the show as becoming like a sit-com, May sits up. “We have said before that it is a bit like The Goodies or Last of the Summer Wine but it has cars in it, which is a subject we happen to love and take quite seriously.”

It is obvious that Top Gear as a show has evolved – some might say regressed – over the last number of years. But what is clear is that this is down to the development of the relationship between the show’s three presenters.

“What the viewer has seen is the development of the fairly complicated and slightly spikey relationship between the three of us. That has been happening for real. We have gone from three blokes who were thrown together to make a programme about cars because we were all interested in it and had something to say about it, to being three blokes who spend far too much time together and bicker quite a lot and who are looking at new ways to address their subject.”

You could sit with James May all day long. But the clipboards are swarming and my 600 seconds are up. Anyway it’s showtime and time to find out just how they are addressing those new ways in the live arena. This will be the third time I’ve taken a seat for a live Top Gear show. Corporate seats, front row, no queueing. I haven’t paid my own money to be there. But hundreds have. They’ve queued outside, are wide-eyed and expectant.

The video screen that sits behind the stage is spectacular. And ideal for the displaying of commercials: the one for Jeremy Clarkson's new DVD and Top Gear's new DVD. The first real action is of synchronised Citroëns spelling out an advert for Citroën, followed by a Skoda vRS in a live performance of their latest television commericial. The adverts aren't so much a prelude to the show as the opening act.

Without spoiling it entirely for those who do attend, the way that the Stig’s departure and his replacing is addressed is laugh-out loud funny, but you can take it that Stig is back.

But after that it was all very familiar. Our three heroes enter to the usual razzmatazz. There are stunt drivers who drive inches from each other, brilliantly. This time the Ford Fiestas have been made to look like space shuttles. They won’t ever collide. But I’m starting to wish they would. Because this would be different.

There is lots of fire. Lots of loud bangs. There is Cool Wall, again. Cars from sponsors roll out and the audience gets told by Clarkson and Hammond what to think of them. There are three “electric” vehicles that are made from household applicances which the presenters race about. Stig makes a return, and comes to the rescue of a kid who steals his Dad’s car to go night racing (way to go on setting an example guys).

There is a musical interlude where some – admittedly – amazing cars drive about, before the presenters decide which is the best of them. Amazingly, inexplicably, car football features. Again. It was fun the first time it featured on the television show in 2005 and brilliant the first time it featured on the live show in 2008, but now, albeit with the clumsy Reliant Robin used, it is just lazy.

The show in Ireland should be better. It must be better. There will be an outdoor track that will feature some of Ireland’s best driving talent and that will give people something to watch aside from the Top Gear Live show itself which at this stage is now the annual pantomine for petrolheads. Kids will love it, as will first-time viewers. But third time around, the arena show is perhaps a victim of its own success rather than evolving because of it.

Quite what the general public are likely to make of the pricing structure of the show remains to be seen. While the Irish organisers have added outdoor performances which include races, monster truck and powerbike displays, the fact that the cheapest ticket to see the Top Gear theatre show is €59 means that to see the show itself is an expensive day out. And that is if you want seats at the back. If you want better seats you can pay up to €84.

Families don’t fare much better. There is a parent and child ticket which costs €89–€110 for one parent and one child under 14 but it is only valid for the Sunday show at 12pm. Outside of that then you pay as normal. So, Mom, Dad and two children could end up paying at least €236 for anything but that single Sunday show. And that is before the booking fee if you use Ticketmaster, which adds another €5.95 per ticket.

That means that aside from the Sunday show at 12pm, when you can buy the parent and child ticket, the cheapest it will cost for a family of four to see the Top Gear theatre show is €259.80.

Organisers say that the tickets are selling out fast. But for those who have already seen the show, there are lower priced tickets available at the door to pay into the festival itself, because if you have been to the live show once you really don’t need to go again.

• Listen to our interview with James May on the Motors podcast at irishtimes.com/motors/podcast