LAST EDITED ON Mar-26-15 AT 06:01 PM (EDT)
 
>there's been no word from The Stig.

That raises an interesting point, actually: Who owns the "Stig" character? The natural assumption would be that the BBC owns all the IP involved in Top Gear, but on the other hand, the Stig was specifically created by Clarkson and Wilman, and has appeared in a number of Clarkson's own DTV films.

If in fact the BBC does own the character, one wonders: If the cast does end up going elsewhere to make some form of knockoff, whether we'll see the test-driver equivalent of when David Letterman moved to CBS, and NBC wouldn't let him call the late Calvert DeForest's character "Larry 'Bud' Melman" any more. They couldn't stop DeForest from appearing on The Late Show, or even from playing exactly the same character... they just pressed the point about the name (which frankly accomplished nothing other than to make them look like petty chumps).

Ironically, Top Gear has been knocked off by its own cast on another channel before. When the original, not-funny version of the show was canceled in the late '90s, most everybody who was on it at the time (Clarkson had left it a year or two before, IIRC) packed up and went off to Channel 5, there to start making an identical program inevitably called Fifth Gear. Which, just to make the whole thing even more Ouroborian, altered its format a few years ago to be less of a magazine show about cars (Top Gear Mk I) and more of a wacky car adventure show with a Secret Headquarters for studio segments and bumptious hosts (Top Gear Mk II). I kinda liked Fifth Gear too (if nothing else, it had Vicki Butler-Henderson on it), but this reinvention... didn't work. It was awful. Textbook case study in Trying Too Hard.

Could be a moot point, given that at least one BBC exec is already hedging the corporation's bets about getting Clarkson back once the furore has blown over. Which, with modern society's goldfish memory, wouldn't require much of a time investment. Heck, they only do one Top Gear series a year nowadays and this year's was almost over. By next March, most of the world will have to check the Wayback Machine to even remember what this was about.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.