EDITORIAL: Car-show critics quick off the mark

LOUIS PIERARD
One of the most unedifying aspects of the high-speed crash by BBC Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond was not the risk he took, or his injuries, but the enthusiasm with which the vultures descended the moment the news broke.
Hammond, the pint-sized, 36-year-old member of the Top Gear team, was trying to break the land speed record in what was little more than a jet engine on wheels at an airfield at Elvington, near York, when something nasty happened at more than 590 km/h.
Hammond was seriously hurt but he is making a remarkable recovery. Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson said that after regaining consciousness Hammond announced: "I want to do a piece to camera," and began fighting with ambulancemen who tried to restrain him. Somehow, it seemed entirely appropriate.
Clarkson's unashamedly politically incorrect show, Top Gear, which pays homage to automotive power and speed, is a bulwark of petrol-headed blokehood and delights in sticking it up establishment transport regulators and environmentalists alike.
However, Clarkson provokes rage from his targets for being irresponsible. Calls are regularly made to have the show taken off the air.
Hammond's crash was payback time. The legion of the offended, increasingly white-knuckled by the show's iconoclasm, its merciless lampooning of authority and its laddish excesses (from using caravans as giant conkers to pitting cars against trucks, aeroplanes, trains, helicopters, skiers, speed boats - in fact just about everything) suddenly had its chance.
The triumphalist, "I told you so" tone in some reports seemed to relish the imminent demise of Top Gear and wondered out loud if, and how much, the BBC would be fined for negligence.
It didn't seem to matter that Hammond's survival, and perhaps even full recovery, might have been due to the care taken during filming as the white-coats-and-clipboard brigade descended in the form of Britain's Health and Safety Executive. Whose fault was it?
Of course Clarkson and company do dangerous, silly things. Top Gear's audience takes vicarious delight in such unconfined irresponsibility. There is a liberating sense that it remains a corner untouched by the stifling influences of risk-averse legislators who are determined to ensure the precautionary principle intrudes into every aspect of our lives.
The tyranny of the lowest common denominator, which Clarkson so brilliantly defies, demands such flagrant recklessness should be suppressed because of the risk someone will be idiotic enough to try it at home.
Increasingly, the measure of sophistication in the developed world is how much we are all able to be governed by the most stupid example.
And then there's the blame game. Is it really too painful to acknowledge (or to have the decency of paying Hammond the courtesy of believing) that he was capable of a making an informed decision when he took off in that jet-powered dragster? That he submitted willingly to extreme danger with his eyes wide open and that, even if he died trying, he might have thought it was worth the risk?