The legend of Top Gear

The description you'll find in a dictionnary about Top Gear is that it's a British car program broadcasted on BBC2 (if your dictionnary doesn't have Top Gear in it return it to the bookstore). In the real world, Top Gear is the most fun you can have from television; forget mr. Bean, Frasier, Friends, Tom & Jerry and Charlie Chaplin. Thanks to the great dr Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May, it's also the most watched show in BBC2.

Here are four facts about Top Gear, for those who don't know what it is:

- it's estimated to have 385 million viewers worldwide

- it has won an Internationnal Emmy in 2005

- it has won the Most Popular Factual Programme award in 2006, 2007 & 2008.

- it was the most pirated show in the internet in 2007

The producer of the show has also many ambitious ideas which were put to test, like the 5 epic races they did across the continent, the cheap car challenges, testing lorries, minivans and tractors, some of these ideas even became records, in 2007 they did a race to the North Pole and a drive across the South African Desert, both were done for the first time ever.

Top Gear has the Cool Wall, the lap board, the Stig, the reasonably priced car, all of which make you feel some customs to the show. And it would have been nothing without the presenters, which are successful wherever they go; Jeremy Clarkson writes books about engineering, history and cars, he also makes some DVDs and he even earns more from that than what he earns from Top Gear. Richard Hammond is always presenting national big games, he'll be doing Formula One next year and James May is as succesful as the others; he did many documentaries like James May's 20th Century and lastly James May's Big Ideas.