Rebooted Top Gear eyes Asian adventures, and Chris Evans promises to visit
Host can’t wait to take the show on the road as reinvention of BBC bestseller comes in for some predictable flak from critics
Fasten your seat belts, Hong Kong. With the BBC’s revamped Top Gear due to begin airing in the city soon, its new host is vowing to bring the show to a country near you.
“We’d love to go to Asia,” says Chris Evans. “We had to get these programmes made as quickly as possible,” he says of the first series of six programmes, “but we will come, I promise. If you are a car nation, then we are coming to get you.”
You can tell you’re in a post-Jeremy Clarkson age as soon as you enter the catering tent at Dunsfold. The breakfast table is adorned with platters of fruit, bowls of organic yogurt and a carton of soya milk. Surely Clarkson would never have stood for this New Age nonsense.
The controversial former host still casts his shadow all over Top Gear – part-car show, part-sitcom, part-travelogue. After all, it was because of a well-documented fracas in March 2015 that I, and journalists from as far afield as New Zealand, South Africa and Mexico, have been invited to the racetrack to get a taste of the new Top Gear era.
In case you have been hiding under a rock somewhere, let’s get up to speed: when Clarkson discovered that hot food was no longer being served at his hotel at the end of a day’s shooting, he reacted by punching his producer in the face. He was eventually sacked and his co-hosts, Richard Hammond and James May, sped off with him for a lucrative deal with Amazon.
