Top Gear attacked for drink-driving stunt
Thursday, July 3rd, 2008The world’s most watched TV show gets slammed
The popular motoring programme Top Gear has been criticised by the BBC’s independent watchdog for glamorising drink-driving.
The BBC Trust said that a special edition of the programme broadcast last July in which presenters Jeremy Clarkson and James May raced to the North Pole, broke its guidelines. The pair were shown drinking gin and tonic while driving a heavily-modified pick-up truck in a race with Richard Hammond, who was riding a sled. One viewer commented that the presenters’ behaviour was “highly irresponsible” and should not have been show before the 9pm watershed.
The programme’s producers said that the filming took place in an uninhabited area on international waters where no drink-driving laws were in force, so the presenters had not committed any offence. They added that neither presenter was shown to be drunk nor out of control, and that the drink was a prop to emphasise the difference in attitude between the two teams.
However, the trust insisted the programme “was not editorially justified in the context of a family show pre-watershed” when children were likely to be watching because it “could be shown to glamorise the misuse of alcohol”. The trust ruled that repeats of the show should not be shown pre-watershed unless this scene was edited out.
The episode also saw them appearing to blithely ignore the sage advice of Sir Ranulph Fiennes - someone who knows a thing or two about frostbite - as the trio of twit-headed kidults sniggered and biroed massive knobs on their notepads.
This is not the first time the show has got into trouble because of complaints from offended viewers. In February last year Jeremy Clarkson strapped a dead cow to his car, as part of a challenge to create a “road-kill dinner” on a USA roadtrip, prompting over 100 complaints. The programme was also accused of making light of accidents when presenter Richard Hammond crashed his car driving at 300mph at Elvington Airfield, seriously injuring himself.
