Top Gear - Back in the Fast Lane : Best of BBC Series 1 & 2 [DVD]

Product Description

A ‘90s special containing all the best bits from the brand new first and second series of the nation’s favourite motoring show presented by outspoken pundit Jeremy Clarkson. Includes guest appearances by Harry Enfield, Jonathan Ross, Jay Kay, Steve Coogan, Anne Robinson and Tara Palmer-Tompkinson.

Highlights include reviews of Aston Martin Vanquish, DB7, Pagani Zonda, Lotus Elise and Esprit plus ‘Doughnut Grannies’, ‘Plane vs. Car’ and ‘Bus Jumping Over Motorbike’.

From Amazon.co.uk

Having ceased to take itself seriously, Top Gear has now become the definitive weekly fantasy fix for petrol-heads everywhere. This compilation from the first and second series of the revamped show is mainly a chunk of four-wheeled fun that descends, more than occasionally, into downright silliness. Who would have it any other way? Unusually though, the cars are very nearly upstaged by the string of surprisingly good celebs who are wheeled on to fill the guest slot. We get Jay Kay, Harry Enfield, Jodie Kidd, Anne Robinson and many other luminaries. Several make genuinely funny contributions to the show, such as Jamie Oliver (who sends himself up something rotten while trying to prepare a salad in the back of a VW camper van as it careers around a test track), Patrick Stewart (Clarkson: "You're the most famous guest we've had on". Stewart: "This must be a terrible show, then.") and Boris Johnson, who admits to once having used a mobile phone while riding a bicycle. In the midst of all this, the programme still somehow gets around to beating seven colours of brake fluid out of assorted Jags, Lambos, Astons and so on.

There are some show-stealing stunts-cum-sight gags, too, such as the reversal of Eddie Kidd's classic bus-jumping bike stunt that sees a bus being "jumped" over the same number of bikes. Buses, of course, stay in the air the way bricks don't. The caravan-towing speed record attempt is almost serious, except Hammond checks the small print and sees there's no restriction on what you can use to move the caravan. He chooses gravity and drops it from a crane.

On the DVD: The Best of Top Gear also includes a fact file that gives the spec of each vehicle and a rather unexciting photo gallery. --Roger Thomas