Top Gear with Evans & LeBlanc: It’s a ‘COVER VERSION’ Top Gear

Top Gear returned to the BBC last night with Chris Evans and Matt LeBlanc hosting the re-booted Top Gear. Was it a triumph or a disaster?

Top Gear finally returned to the BBC last night – after its enforced absence following the departure of Clarkson (followed by Hammond and May) in the wake of Jeremy’s ‘dinnergate’ bust-up – complete with a ‘new’ format, headlined by Chris Evans and Matt LeBlanc.

The trouble is, it’s not a new format, but the same format devised by Clarkson and Wilman with a few tweaks and some new faces and, sadly, no real new ideas. Which does seem a lost opportunity.

Evans seemed nervous and intent on doing a Clarkson impression, but his metaphors just don’t have the same edge as Jeremy’s, and he seemed to spend most of the show shouting. Which wasn’t helped by the sound in the studio, which was too echoey.

The production values of the segments were as stunning as ever, it’s juts a bit of a shame the segments were derivative rather than innovative.

The Top Gun shoot-out with Evans and Sabine Schmitz in a Dodge Viper ACR and Chevrolet Corvette Z06 respectively was really just a mash-up of previous Top Gear stuff, LeBlanc’s Ariel Nomad outing in Morocco was sadly familiar too, and Reliants to Blackpool was also a mash-up of a couple of old Top Gear segments.

Even the Star in a Reasonably Priced Car returned, but as a Star in a Rallycross Car, with Evans interviewing the guests (two of them, Gordon Ramsey and  actor Jesse Eisenberg) in a studio set that hasn’t changed, was just tweaking for the sake of tweaking. It also completely lost the point of the segment – the interesting juxtaposition of celebrities in a car that’s mundane and forgettable.

And, as Evans said, they also got custody of the Stig (yet another Clarkson/Wilman creation).

On the positive side, LeBlanc managed to evoke a touch of the Joeys to convey charm and warmth, and his delivery of the scripted asides was streets ahead of Evans, a man who clearly can’t ‘act’. Perhaps they’d have been better off ad-libbing for real?

If we’d never seen Top Gear with Clarkson, Hammond and May, there would have been lots to praise, but, so far, this isn’t a ‘New’ Top Gear, it’s a ‘cover version’ Top Gear with a jobbing duo trying to recreate obsessively the work of a world class trio.

It was all a bit like watching Robson and Jerome recreate The Three Tenors.