Top Gear

If I asked you just what was the most downloaded show in the world, what would you guess? 24? Nope. House? Guess again. Grey's Anatomy? Hmm, you must have a vagina.

The answer is Top Gear, a show that essentially treats cars as pornographic objects. Its base audience is primarily young- to middle-aged men who want to drive fast expensive cars, but can't because they are too poor and/or lazy. Surprisingly though, women are watching Top Gear as well, although it's probably because revving engines are proven to be aphrodisiacs.

Hammond, Clarkson, May, and the Stig: Guaranteed to get your lady's motor running.

Every week, the team reviews a really fast, obscenely expensive car by driving it around their secret test track at insanely high speeds. Burning rubber and hoarse yelling is the order of the day, as head honcho Jeremy Clarkson describes each car with absurd similes and hyperboles, sometimes throwing in British slang and British cultural references that only British people understand.

The cars aren't always expensive though. Sometimes, after much complaining from the old-school Top Gear viewers (from back when they were a proper car review show), they will feature a "normal" road test. One example is when they performed a road test on a mid-range Ford by driving it through a mall. After all, it is a fairly standard test procedure in some country, somewhere. Probably.

But the real reason why Top Gear has been so popular is their infamous car-based challenges. They come in three flavours:

1. Cheap-car challenges - The presenters are given a very small budget to complete a stupidly complex task. For instance, they have, in the past, had to

• create a convertible minivan using a sewing machine
• nurse cheap, old, beaten-up supercars to a strip-club, and
• turn old clunkers into amphibious car-boat mutant things and then drive/navigate them across the English Channel

Points are sometimes awarded based on merit, although there's never really a winner because Top Gear has a tendency to be "ambitious, but rubbish."

2. Car vs Not-a-Car races - When cars were first invented back in the late-1800s, people were always curious about how a car would stack up against other forms of moving about in order to raise public interest in cars. Even though it's not the 1800s anymore, the Top Gear crew are still out to convince us naysayers that cars are the way of the future. As a result, they have raced

• an Audi vs. two climbers up a cliff
• an Aston Martin vs. a man on roller blades with rockets strapped to his back, and
• a Bugatti Veyron vs. a goddamned Typhoon jet fighter.

Anything to get people to buy into driving, right?

3. Epic cross-continental races - Clarkson takes a car and races Hammond and May, who must take public transport all along their trip. So far, they have raced

• a supercar versus a Cessna
• a supercar versus an airliner and the Swiss, for some reason
• a supercar versus a boat, and
• a supercar versus a bullet train (twice)

They've also

• driven a truck to the North Pole
• stomped across the Kalahari in tin-can cars
• had rocks thrown at them by redneck Americans, and
• crashed motorcycles across Vietnam.

So why would three middle-aged men do this to themselves? Because... actually, there's still no answer to that question. We're guessing though, that they're all young at heart. And they're all getting paid very well. And they're all clinically insane.  

Finally, we arrive at the Stig. Who is he? The Stig is the mysterious test driver that does power laps of supercars during every show around the Top Gear track. He never speaks, and never takes off his helmet. Thus, speculation is rampant over his identity, which only fuels the rumours that surround him. After all, some say that his breath smells of magnesium, and that he once punched a horse to the ground. All we know is, he's called the Stig.

Vroom-vroom, bitches.