>>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).

I imagine that's something that any network/company looking to snap the three blokes up will have to bear in mind. Where exactly is the dividing line between what is BBC IP and what belongs to Clarkson and Wilman. If the Beeb really is serious about continuing the series, then there's going to be a godawful mess trying to transplant the original crew to a new series.

>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.

Much like the US version, which I've seen plenty of advertisements on Hulu for but can't bring myself to watch them. If I ever feel the itch, I just spool up some of the old seasons of the original.

>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.

Would not surprise me that we're hearing in a year or so about how, in desperate need of a move to keep the show afloat, the Beeb lets him back in with a "very final warning."