Keep the Plane Flying

Andy Wilman’s recollections of car TV

Mr Wilman’s Motoring Adventure by Andy Wilman

Not all of us went to school with one of the most famous TV personalities of our generation. I may have done, but he’s not quite made it yet — and he could need some time. Andy Wilman, however, did. He was at school with Jeremy Clarkson. And a handful of decades later, after time spent deliberately failing intelligence tests designed to see if he was Sainsbury’s manager material, and a generally wasted early adulthood, the old friend got Wilman into automotive journalism and then, when the need presented itself, got him into TV as well.

Some reviewers might say something negative about all of this, but I won’t. When opportunity knocks, the best of us answer the door.

All of this is common knowledge among people who’ve seen any of the million or so Andy Wilman podcast interviews that were once scarce but now fill YouTube up.

We were almost killed: Top Gear boss shares secrets — and so on.

What’s perhaps less commonly understood are a few things that Wilman only briefly says: that he grew up with a chronic muscular condition that persisted for years and meant he spent a year essentially strapped to a metal board in a hospital bed, more or less unable to move. And that his home was at least for a time, before a step-father appeared, a violent one — a place from which Wilman was rescued, at least for periods of time, by relatives. His thanks to them are not fulsome but they’re profound. It’s something worth thinking about upon reading.

On leaving school — Repton, naturally — Wilman was sure he was going to be in a band, or be a big actor. This meant skipping university, of course, but hey, when you’re selling out wherever you want and topping charts, who needs a degree? Mick Jagger doesn’t have a degree, does he?

Wilman then spent some time doing a few odd jobs while he was trying to have an artistic, interesting, meaningful career and just found that, on a spreadsheet, meaningfulness is a nul value. So he had to think about other things, other avenues, and all that.

I think, having seen the interviews and read the book, we’re still a bit hazy on precisely how Wilman got into doing what he did. Sending an on spec piece to a car magazine which then took it, and wanted a few other things, is not frequent. And how Wilman parlayed that into other work, very quickly, for other car media — that’s been skated by. I’m admittedly not the target audience, but a little more dissection of this very generous window for entry would have interested me.

But of course, most other people didn’t go to school with Jeremy Clarkson, who was apparently nudging Wilman’s unsharp elbows quite continually and telling him all the time to get a move on.

Once Wilman is writing for Top Gear, the magazine, and Clarkson was hosting Top Gear, the pre-2002 show, the pace picks up a bit. At the expense, I think, of some early-years comprehensibility. Clarkson’s doing TV, Wilman is writing, and then, fairly suddenly and with deceptive naturalness, Clarkson is a golden goose and is given his own show and Wilman is chosen as producer.

First comes Motorworld, which is very prototypical and its influences are everywhere. And then, not long after, they make shows called Extreme Machines and The Science of Speed which I must have seen but can’t really remember. One particularly hair-raising story involves trying to get off a massive oil tanker onto a tugboat in a massive Atlantic storm. One person present actually has a heart attack, Wilman says.

But that’s in the near future. All the while, before it goes, Wilman is involved in old Top Gear, doing a few pieces to camera and working out the old BBC Pebble Mill rhythm. And Clarkson is deciding that old Top Gear does not work and becoming more convinced and eventually, he walks.

There’s a bit of jeopardy for a second as Clarkson and Wilman cook up new Top Gear. Some interesting little diversions into how things like the location and the character of the studio segments took shape over the course of the first few series. And things everyone knows a lot about, like the races, the world-bestriding specials, the ridiculous challenges, the Stig, and so on.

We pick up the action at the first series of new Top Gear having cleared the bar set up for it by Jane Root, commissioner. It was a now-near-unbelievable three million viewers. But they’d done it.

From then on, the long road almost stretches ahead of our protagonist. There are bumps, of course. But his course never wavers all that much. Wilman doesn’t like the car analogy best; he doesn’t even wax on and on about keeping the show on the road. Gerald Durrell has My Family and Other Animals end with his clan being referred too on travel documents as a travelling circus and staff, remember.

Wilman at several moments reaches for the notion of his team being a dysfunctional family — the idea beloved of insane business owners everywhere.

But his metaphor of choice is the aeroplane: getting it off the ground initially, keeping it airborne, then soaring higher and higher, Icarus-like. And then getting too high; getting potted like a clay pigeon and falling, smashed and broken, to the ground. Then the thing being rebuilt, a new name stencilled on it, sent up into the heavens again. And finally, the plane looking, not without a touch of urgency, for a safe landing.

I’m not sure I buy this analogy. Wilman insists, when giving stupid false identities to people he can’t name, ‘my book, my rules.’ Fair enough, I say. Although, if pushed, I’ve have said so monumental a couple of edifices as Top Gear and The Grand Tour were more like hydrogen blimps. Big, expensive, impressive to look at. But in need of skilful touch lest they blow up. A touch which is often present. But not always.