Jeremy Clarkson is finally gone but his executioner, BBC director-general Tony Hall, has promised to continue Top Gear in 2016. With early front-runner Chris Evans having ruled himself out as a replacement host, bookies are instead backing as favourite a man most international Top Gear fans won’t have heard of: Guy Martin.
Martin is certainly a surprising choice. His charming, thrilling series for Channel 4 – including Speed, where he set out to break unusual speed records, and How Britain Worked, his hands-on guide to the engineering marvels of the Industrial Revolution – have been labours of love by a part-time amateur. To take over one of the biggest shows on TV, Martin would have to ditch his day job fixing trucks, not to mention his great passion as one of TT motorcycle racing’s top competitors.
The 33-year-old doesn’t see himself as a natural presenter, refusing to address the camera directly or watch his finished programmes, in part because he doesn’t own a TV. “Whatever happens, the truck fixing will always come in front of everything,” he told Motorcycle News last year, saying he planned to take 2015 off from filming to decide whether he wants to continue. “I’m not a TV presenter.” Still, the lure of playing with such a colossal train set could tempt anyone, and Martin has a lot of the necessary qualities. His love and deep knowledge of cars is sound: he drives a heavily modified 1967 Volvo Amazon estate, which he has taken up to 205mph.
His most recent series, Our Guy in India, saw him buy an unfashionable Royal Enfield motorbike and travel across the country to enter a race in Goa. That’s the sort of ambitious foreign jaunt Clarkson and co did brilliantly, and which made Top Gear an international hit – except Martin was uninhibitedly delighted and fascinated by what he saw. When Jeremy Clarkson went to India, he rode around in a Jaguar with a toilet fitted to the back, doing gags about everyone getting the trots.
Martin might introduce an even more radical new element to Top Gear: women. There are obvious demographic benefits in replacing Clarkson’s jowls and grey perm with Martin’s piercing eyes, high cheekbones and Wolverine side-chops. But the effect might be visible on screen too. How Britain Worked had a whole section on the importance of women to coal mining. In the last episode of Speed, most of Martin’s advisers on his attempt to break the world gravity-racing record were female, and he hit it off roaringly with French street luge champion Helene Schmit.
A Top Gear fronted by Martin, with his mix of boyish humility and insane bravery, would essentially be a show reimagined: still getting off on the growl of an engine but without all the rancid, boorish stuff.
It would, admittedly, mean instantly shedding a proportion of the audience. Clarkson freely admits that his personality was forged by bullying at his public school: to avoid being thrown into the swimming pool every morning, he learned to say the unsayable. For many fans, the sneering and bullying was why Top Gear was good. They enjoyed listening to a posh man insult homosexuals or Germans, and fully understood when he threw a tantrum because he was hungry. They might find Martin, a grown man who can cook his own steak, intimidating. He is also audibly from Grimsby, the sort of place Clarkson might dismiss in a newspaper column by claiming there’s no running water and everyone worships monkeys.
Throwing open the bedroom curtains and letting in some air would be a brave move from the BBC. But those disgruntled Clarksonites might soon be replaced by viewers who previously felt excluded by Top Gear’s boys-club bantz. It could be the BBC’s chance to atone for all the times they should have fired Clarkson before they were eventually forced to.
So the smart money isn’t on Guy Martin as the new presenter of Top Gear. But the sexy, bold, 21st-century money might be.
