Another quiet week at Top Gear. We've just finished shooting our Cheap Alfa Romeos Challenge, Top Gear vs The Germans is also in the can, our new character has just shot his or her films, and in the edit suite I'm very happy with our We Can Make Better Police Cars piece.
Richard's just shot a birthday tribute to Touring Cars, and Jeremy's fiddling with his CLK Black film, cos he's not happy with the structure. There was a scary moment when he said he'd found some music that would improve it, but fortunately this time it wasn't a 16 minute keyboard solo from the 1970s, and it actually has improved it, not that any of us in the edit will ever tell him.
He heard it during a piano recital at his daughter's school - this is how Top Gear works you see, we're all terribly sophisticated really - and I think it's composed by the same bloke who's music we used for the last 30 seconds of the Greatest Driving Road film in the last series.
Elsewhere Lord Stig has come out of suspended animation and whacked in his first lap time of the new run. It's for the
F430 Scuderia and bugger me, glue down any ornaments on top of your telly.
I've also ordered a new air conditioning unit for the studio, which like every other one we've tried, probably won't work. So if you're in the audience for this run, try and faint quietly, because it breaks our flow when you crash to the ground.
Then, towards the end of the week, Jezza told some socialist hippies at a book festival in a field that he'd driven at 186 mph through the Limehouse Link.
Now the thing is, you'd need a frigging Tardis to do 186 mph in the Limehouse Link, but nevertheless all hell broke loose and the Daily Mail Outrageometer burst a blood vessel, with loads of other papers close behind demanding JC's head.
There were even two paparazzi dispatched to sit outside his house, which seems a bit of a waste of a day for the poor chaps, because if Jeremy gets the urge to pop into town, he's hardly likely to come down his drive in a Top Fuel Dragster.
Obviously we've now sacked him and he's at the dole office, but what's depressing about all this to me is that we're in danger of becoming a country where it's a crime to be fatuous, to make mischief or just practise the fine art of talking bollocks.
Soon everything we say will have to be the flat, down the line facts of the truth - no hyperbole, no white lie, no 'it was this big' nonsense from the amateur angler - just state things the way they are, like the instructions on a washing machine.
Making mischief frees the imagination, it quickens the pulse. It should be taught in schools. Watch that film Big Fish and you'll see what I mean. in
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