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Top Gear Xmas Special


Saint in Paradise
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It could have been such a great episode. India is a fascinating road trip and the concept of advertising British cars over there was a pretty good basis for an episode. Alas, Top Gear went and ruined with their puerile, slapstick behaviour. Hammond has got to go, he just acts like an 8 year old arguing with his older brother most of the time and apparently that's supposed to be funny. The bit where he is a valet and just chucks all the car keys in a bucket is silly and doesn't come close to being interesting or funny.

 

The only parts of that episode I found at all funny were the banners on the train "SH I.T. For your business" and rewiring James brakes to set off the horn. Even that was on the lower brow of what I'd call funny. It's a shame really because I don't think TG is tired or has run out of ideas. They are just really badly executed and resemble something from Laurel and Hardy's cutting room floor.

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I quite enjoyed it. It wasn't as good as it could have been though. The foothills area of the Himalyas look an amazing place for a holiday. I like programmes that show stuff like that. In their middle east special they showed northern Iraq (Kurdistan) and that area (including Turkey) is somewhere with so much uncomercialised history and culture i'd love to tour it.

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IMO the best road trip they have done was to Vietnam, there was very little of the silly slapstick humor used in this recent episode. They let the journey and the story of the country do most of the work and it came across fantastically well. Every road trip episode since has fallen well short of that high bar.

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It was alright, but as others have said, it isn't up to the usual standard of their roadtrip specials. I know it's all scripted, but in the past you could sort of have some suspension of disbelief that it was all actually happening, for some reason it wasn't present in this special.

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They should stop doing these "specials" now. They're all incredibly contrived now. The Bolivia special was the last decent one. That was a genuine challenge, whereas this India one was mostly full of very lame ideas, and quite a lot of it was rather cringeful - some of it because the "jokes" fell flat, and much of it was quite post-colonial patronising. They also got the name of their starting point (Mumbai) wrong - According to wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumbai

the city of Bombay was officially renamed Mumbai in 1995 - watch any BBC news report that mentions the city and they'll use the name Mumbai, yet Top Gear used the old name all the way through the programme. Either they didn't do their research properly (quite possible), or they were trying to make some kind of political/post colonial point (embarrassing if true)

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They should stop doing these "specials" now. They're all incredibly contrived now. The Bolivia special was the last decent one. That was a genuine challenge, whereas this India one was mostly full of very lame ideas, and quite a lot of it was rather cringeful - some of it because the "jokes" fell flat, and much of it was quite post-colonial patronising. They also got the name of their starting point (Mumbai) wrong - According to wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumbai

the city of Bombay was officially renamed Mumbai in 1995 - watch any BBC news report that mentions the city and they'll use the name Mumbai, yet Top Gear used the old name all the way through the programme. Either they didn't do their research properly (quite possible), or they were trying to make some kind of political/post colonial point (embarrassing if true)

 

Yeah, I had an Indian ex girlfriend from Mumbai, if anyone called it Bombay she would get a little hot under the collar.....

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