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three walking down the street are hardly going
to be mistaken for Westlife, but then you realize
that girls love men who are funny, who are a bit
nerdy-passionate about their thing, and who
don’t actually try and be attractive. I think they
also looked at their partner on the sofa, Stella can
resting on his beer baby, looked back at the telly
and thought, “I haven’t done so badly after all.”
Obviously, the kids were there for the Lam-
borghinis and the stunts, which had now grown
from a bald man with a bad wig in a convertible
to playing darts with cars, sending a Mini down a
ski jump and trying to launch a Reliant Robin into
space. I believe kids also loved the fact that Rich-
ard, James and Jeremy, besides having the same
mental age as them, are intrinsically mean to
each other, just as kids can be in the playground.
As the audience grew in number and type, so
did the size of the Complaints Bag, with more
and more angry letters landing on my desk
demanding that we stop arsing about and get
back to doing proper tests of sensible cars for real
people. We made a Wall of Complaints as a home
for the best and most vitriolic ones, and Jeremy’s
response was to invent the fictional character
Mr. Needham, who would write in every week,
demanding the said sensible test of a sensible car,
and then we’d give him the Fiesta attempting a
beach assault with a company of Marines. Every
problem, basically, was dealt with in as daft a way
as possible. Perry, our black-suited Stig, asked for
a massive pay rise so he had to go, and hence he
met his demise off the end of an aircraft carrier.
Looking back, I wouldn’t say we were clever
enough to plan all the good things that happened.
Some stuff was just a happy accident. We went to
Florida and Alabama to make a 25 -minute film
about buying your own hire cars, then when we
got back found we’d accidentally shot enough
stuff for an hour. The Specials were born.
I think another seminal moment in the Hall of
Happy Accidents was the £1,500 Porsches film.
That began as a small road trip to see how good a
cheap Porsche would be, but when Jeremy’s 928
conked out just over a mile from the start line,
his genius editorial brain realized that crap cars
breaking down was going to give us more enter-
taining telly than brand-new ones that worked.
Hence we started doing cheap car challenges,
with the highlight probably being James’s Lam-
borghini actually turning up to the start of the
film, on an AA loader, having broken down before
we’d even started filming.
Another happy accident was the Cool Wall,
which came about simply because we wanted
something in style terms to talk to Trinny and
Susannah about when they came on the show.
Bottom line, we were too thick to think up these
things from scratch, but smart enough to recog-
nize something when it worked.
Some stuff, though, did come as a result of
‘THE THREE WALKING
DOWN THE STREET
ARE HARDLY GOING
TO BE MISTAKEN FOR
A PRETTY BOY BAND’
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