Richard Hammond; What a drag!!

The reason I thought I hated Top Gear was because I am a technophobe who would buy a car based on its colour and other minor aesthetics, rather than the engineering prowess under the bonnet. I have been humiliated in PC World and smirked at in The Car Phone Warehouse by refugees from boy bands more often that I care to remember. My worst experience was when I spent a night trapped in a hostel in Argentina with alien beings from Geekon. My Olympus Trip camera didn't make it across The Straits of Magellan after being saturated in what seemed like a scene from Moby Dick. Fortunately I came across a group of experts who took great pleasure in helping me out of my predicament. I paid the price in more ways than one

As I sat forlornly with my stricken camera in the hostel four English blokes came bowling in carrying two photographic tripods. I asked them if anything could be done about my camera explaining the events that rendered it unserviceable. One asked me if I had taken out the batteries straight away. A man of my advanced years owning an Olympus Trip especially in the midst of such natural grandeur was humiliating enough, but staring up four superior sets of nostrils from by sedentary prone position admitting that I hadn't, made me feel that my inferiority complex was largely due to the fact that I am actually inferior. They looked at each other with knowing smirks and I could almost imagine a communal bubble above their heads with the one uniting thought "What a dick- 'ead." One of them without a hint euphemistic sensitivity pronounced "It's toast mate." As they wandered off another said "I got a camera for sale, 300 pesos and it's yours." I purchased the said camera simultaneously joining the digital age. My discomfort was not over as he repeatedly gave me directions on how to use it, barely concealing his disdain at my ignorance.

These four blokes were the type that would argue and pontificate vociferously about the best route from Milton Keynes to Chipping Sodbury as if was the Gettysburg Address. Later in the evening while they were discussing manly subjects I was playing with my new camera hoping to change the conversation where my star would rise in the firmament and I could redeem my flaky image, but trying to find a link from the specifications of performance cars to the post-modernist approach to Pre-Raphaelite painting, proved elusive.

You see it's not Top Gear I really dislike, as I would like to improve my practical and technical knowledge, it's the irritating, superior, smug, smart-arse presenters. James and Jeremy are ex-public school who were probably driving mummy's MG by the age of fourteen. They are big boys with big toys looking down their noses at Proton and Toyota drivers who not having the benefit of a rich and privileged background are more concerned with reliability and paying off the instalments. Richard Hammond must be on regular and high doses of Prozac to maintain his excruciating wide eyed cheeky chappy image. Keith Moon would have looked lethargic in comparison. He's the sort of Phil Collins of the otherwise ex-Charterhouse members of Genesis and he doesn't seem to mind being treated like Clarkson's fag.

Don't get me wrong I'm happy he's survived the crash. However the way he's come up smiling and relatively unscathed from a 300mph crash may elevate this irritating little hobbit to A list celeb status who will be foisted upon us daily, especially after the Beeb's blanket (excuse the pun) coverage from his hospital bed. They even covered his hospital transfer live. The Queen Mother didn't warrant such devotion. The serious side is that the salivating reaction to powerful cars by boy racers to menopausal men will be glorified by the fact that Hammond has proved that speed doesn't kill. If you can walk away, metaphorically speaking, from a 300 mph crash what's the point of obeying a 30mph restriction?