'Top Gear' presenters feel our pain, despite parodying hand of Henry

JUST WHEN we thought we had heard all we wanted to hear about Thierry Henry’s handball, Top Gear has started parodying it. Presenters Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May staged the incident using Mini Coopers and a giant football last night at their opening show in the RDS.

Hammond represented Ireland and May played as France. In between was the ever impartial referee Clarkson, who once said the only thing wrong with France was that it was full of French people.

“We feel your pain because we remember Maradona’s Hand of God, which knocked us out of the World Cup,” said Clarkson, demonstrating a lot more sympathy as an Englishman towards Ireland than was evident here when England were dumped out of the World Cup in 1986.

The trio staged the first of nine shows last night, with the last three on Sunday. Though not quite the hot ticket of last year – only two of Saturday’s shows are sold out – there are still plenty of people prepared to pay €49 to watch stunts, prize cars and a lot of banter. Clarkson said they were pleased to be back in Dublin because they liked “the craic”; and it “beats Birmingham”.

The show will have some home-grown input as the dancer who opens it is Naomi Lynch, sister of Boyzone singer Shane Lynch.

She auditioned for the part of setting rally cars on fire to start the show while the flaming cars spin around her.

“It is the most dangerous show they have done yet as far as stunts are concerned. There is a sequence with four cars in a precision-driving sequence and you sit there with your heart in your mouth,” she said.

The show features the world’s first indoor loop-the-loop and the Stig leads rally drivers in ever more dangerous stunts.

The sight of some many petrol-guzzling cars – the SSC Ultimate Aero TT, Ferrari California and Maserati GT among them – in the same place is increasingly becoming a guilty pleasure with the Copenhagen summit just around the corner. “There are several ways of thinking about this issue [climate change] and one of them is not to bother with it,” said May.