End of the road for Top Gear

Richard Hammond, Jeremy Clarkson and James May's run has come to an end. Photo / Supplied

Last rites for the unholy trinity seem sadly familiar

And so it ended, with a whimper but also with many loud bangs.

The final episode of Top Gear - or, rather, the final episode of Top Gear to feature the unholy trinity of Jeremy Clarkson, James May and Richard Hammond - was a sad affair all right. Though for its fans, who are legion, the end of the Three Stooges era will of course be an outright tragedy.

For me, Top Gear was something similar to someone I knew casually, someone I had occasionally spent an entertaining evening with, but also someone who I had never really liked that much. So inevitably I come here to bury Clarkson and co, not to praise them.

But even for me, this final episode seemed a rather melancholy and inadequate farewell to an era of Top Gear which, love it or hate it, has been a phenomenon, one that not so long ago made the Guinness Book of World Records for being the world's biggest factual television show, a programme watched by an audience of 350 million in 214 territories.

Lamentably for a show that was never shy of spending a buck, this was a funeral done on the cheap, too. Events, of course, had dictated who could be there. Clarkson, having being sacked by the BBC for hitting a colleague and thus precipitating the trio's demise, was not in attendance for the in-studio links. So with Moe absent, it was left to just Larry and Curly to perform last rites and say goodbye - in an empty studio.

Unsurprisingly, May and Hammond introduced the two films that made up the final double episode with all the enthusiasm of men who'd just been told they would have to ride unicycles for the rest of their lives, but only after they'd had their prostates checked by a doctor with very large hands.

The wisdom of a 75-minute final episode, which screened on TV3 on Thursday, was doubtful. It simply prolonged the agony, and the agony was made worse by the trio's final two films being so similar in content and style that it almost felt like they were screening the same film twice.

In the first extended segment, the Stooges were playing at being "classic car" owners. Apparently such weekend wheelmen, the sorts who own modest MGB GTs (Hammond), Fiat 124 Spiders (Clarkson) and Peugeot 304 Cabriolets (May) rather than, say, $500,000 Ferraris, are to be pitied. So what followed was a lot of mocking of the "olden days", tweedy villagers and the classic cars' lack of horsepower and reliability, even after the Stooges had (allegedly) taken three months to restore them.

The second film had them mocking the lack of horsepower and reliability of three aged SUVs that they'd bought for 250 ($600) or less. After racing them around a track while towing caravans (partially destroying the caravans of course; I've seen them do this before), it ended with them racing each other cross country to a dinner at (allegedly) the "North Yorkshire Carbon Management and Sustainability Trust's annual conference". The loser's booby prize: to do the after-dinner speech. The viewer's booby prize: the entirely repetitious charade.

Clarkson did at one point (with his SUV allegedly stuck in the mud) utter the words "I hate working for Top Gear", which some might think poignant. I didn't. If he could be, Clarkson would still be working there.

But actually the whole sorry pantomime of the final did rather prove that, even if Clarkson hadn't finally succeeded (after plenty of attempts) at committing career suicide and killing the show for him and his fellow Stooges, the trio's dreary and often dodgy ladism had run its course in terms of crap jokes and stunts that they'd done a million times before.

This was a show that had become, strange though it might seem, something like a parody of its own parody of a car show.

Or, to put it in terms the Stooges might understand: why would you still want to own their model of Top Gear? Its horsepower had vanished and its three-cylinder motor had become entirely unreliable.

- TimeOut