The Guardian Blog has a review up about the latest season of Top Gear. Stuart Heritage has it basically wrong: Top Gear has always been about the films, not the structure of the content.

I’m not a driver. I don’t really care about cars, except in terms of design aesthetics and environmental engineering: how much should a door weigh, how should a display look, how should an engine cut to battery power? Even these I take notice of mostly in terms of how they imply usefully-general design principles.

Top Gear is about aesthetics, but not even car aesthetics, really, unless you’re a hardcore driver*. It’s about the aesthetics of the films — the segments themselves.

Whinging that the show is formulaic is missing the point: the formula is a structure within which the hosts, particularly Hammond in the last episode of series sixteen, play with the aesthetics of film and video.

Top Gear is one of very few shows that has both a distinctive look in terms of colour grade, polarization, vignetting, and visual effects, AND is willing to experiment stylistically (in the latest series intentionally using ancient media to signal nostalgia). Even the “star car” laps are an exercise in motor sport editing.

Top Gear is a weekly short film festival with three competitors constantly trying to one-up each other. If you don’t like the format of the show, perhaps you just don’t like the show. Waiting for some unspecified change, again, misses the point: the show is constantly changing — just not in terms of the writing, which (because it’s a review show about cars) is, yes, fairly restricted (tho Clarkson the Autopoet has had his gems).

And speaking of Hammond: the reason for his “silly haircut” might have something to do with the extensive brain surgery he underwent after his 288 mph crash.

* Someone who can translate BHP development, torque, weight, and stopping time into meaningful choices.

Here’s Clarkson‘s piece on the new Aston Martin V12 Vantage. He’s one of my favorite writers.

A bit of autopoetry — the car as a melancholy requiem for pastoral England. Really strong symbols there: Rolling green hills, deer, poppies (right before pictures of “veteran” cars from the lineage). Very affective, very touching.

I’d never seen Groucho Marx so today I watched a little You Bet Your Life on Youtube (great concept for a horror short — I’d be surprised if it wasn’t already Twilight Zone‘d).

The bookending car ads are tops, daddy-o. This is how Chrylser should be advertising now, fuck all those “me too” commercials and car designs. I love the Hanna-Barbera look, plus that carbuying couple in the second one is super creepy. Mr. Deepvoice and Ms. Stareyes impress the neighbors in their abstract housing project!

You Bet Your Life is like Mad Men — mostly you watch it to marvel at how much people used to smoke and how much men used to get away with wrt women. Groucho’s wisecracks are a pleasant bonus.