Will this be the last series for Top Gear?

Richard Hammond, Jeremy Clarkson, and James May during the controversial Burma special.

The controversial but hugely popular motoring show returns to British screens this weekend, but will this be the last series? Jack Carfrae investigates

What's 13 years old and constantly getting into trouble? No, it isn't a teenage boy, though in a lot of ways it's pretty similar - it's Top Gear. Strictly speaking, the world's most popular motoring show is closer to 40, having started life in 1977 as a relatively serious programme that reviewed cars and looked at motoring issues, but its 2002 reboot brought the personality-led studio format we know today.

Success duly followed, and the show is now said to have around 350 million viewers a week in 170 countries. UK ratings hit 8.13m in 2007, when the opening show of series nine featured presenter Richard Hammond's return following his near-fatal crash in a drag car, along with footage of the event. And numbers around the 6-7m mark have been commonplace ever since. The subsequent popularity of worldwide live shows and merchandising has made Top Gear one of the BBC's biggest earners.

However, despite its continued success (or perhaps because of it) the format has remained static, and there have been a growing number of controversies that would have seen lesser shows axed. Fresh in viewers' minds will be the recent Christmas special, where the team travelled though Argentina in three old sports car. Jeremy Clarkson's Porsche 928 bore the number plate H982 FKL, which locals interpreted as a not-so-subtle reference to the 1982 Falklands War. The crew and presenters maintain it was total coincidence, but not everyone was convinced, and the team was forced to flee the country, with a police escort staving off angry, violent gangs.

That wasn't the only time Clarkson was in hot water last year. He made a public apology in May after outtakes from a former episode surfaced online, in which he appeared to mumble a racist term when comparing two cars, and there have been countless past quips covering everything from prostitutes to Nazis. It's led to suggestions that the new series may be the last, but we've heard this before. So how much longer can the show really go on before it's deemed too tired and risky for the BBC to bother with? Quite some time, apparently.

"It's got a lot of life left in it," says Chris Curtis, editor of Broadcast magazine. "It's still BBC2's top rated show, plus Kim Shillinglaw [the new controller of the channel] is a fan, and Top Gear makes a load of money for the BBC worldwide. It's got a lot going for it on a practical level."

"It surprises me," admits Top Gear's executive producer, Andy Wilman. "If you'd asked me 10 years ago if [the last series] would be as big as it has been, I'd have said you're mad. Shows, particularly of this nature, don't go on for this long - but here we are and it did. The last series was monster for viewing figures; it was about 10m a week when you count iPlayer and things like that."

Figures aside, Clarkson's frequent hullabaloos regularly lead to calls for him to be sacked or lynched and many believe his mouth will eventually get him, and the show, the chop. But the current stance of the BBC (and the money the programme makes) suggests he's safe from the executive boot, at least for the time being.

"The BBC is being a bit more confident and proactive now," says Curtis. "It's prepared to stand up to its critics. While Clarkson has had his knuckles wrapped several times, it's still one of the most successful shows and they're going to stand by it."

But what about the common gripe that after 13 years, the format is dated and the programme has moved away from its car show roots to light entertainment and pure silliness?

"Top Gear is a loose format," says Wilman. "It's three blokes in a studio, plus the Stig, and the attitude is the same every time. You know there'll be cocking around, you know there'll be gorgeous cars - you don't know if we're going to go to Chernobyl or somewhere like that, and that keeps it alive.

However, that is a curse as well because people expect more and more each time. Once you've built a space shuttle or put a Toyota Hilux on top of a building that's due to be blown up, you can't top that. You'd have to drop it from space.

"If you do something similar people go 'oh, you've run out of ideas,' but they watch the same challenge on The Apprentice and they don't complain."

A bigger threat to the show than format or controversy is if one of the presenters were to leave. "It's the chemistry of the three of them that makes it work," says Curtis.

"It still feels as though Clarkson is kind of the spiritual leader, so if he got bored one day and said 'I'm done', that could well be it. But that's true of a lot of shows, it's often that talent that makes it. And nothing's been said publicly to suggest Clarkson's going to walk away."

Wilman admits Top Gear is unlikely to get any bigger and the challenge he and his team face is to keep the programme buoyant, which he thinks is a generational thing.

"We've got a mental age of about nine as a show, and each year you get new bunch of nine-year-olds coming through," he says. "I don't think it'll get any bigger but, then again, I didn't think it'd get like this."