My Kind Of Gear Heads

Why is it that the British do certain types of shows on their main broadcast networks - in prime time mind you - that no North American programmer outside of some cable channel would think of running. At least until it hits big. I mean look at the record. Ball room dancing, with C-list celebrities. British. Figure skating with C-list celebrities. British. Wanna-be singers auditioning to get a big time recording contract singing pre-packaged pop tunes. British. A game show so insanely simplistic that all the player has to decide is which briefcase will be opened next and whether they'll take an offered prize amount based on what amounts are unknown at this point in the game. Well okay Deal Or No Deal was originally Australian but it and several other prime time game shows are hits in Britain, and two of those were hits in the US until American programmers decided to "improve" them to the point of cancellation. Then there are the self-help shows. The British had a home renovation show in prime time - Changing Rooms - and a gardening program - Ground Force - was there until last year. The British love cooking shows - they gave us Gordon Ramsey, and didn't give us Delia Smith (for which we should be terribly grateful - one Martha Stewart is enough, even though before there was Martha there was Delia). They even have a show about evaluating antiques - Americans were openly amazed when PBS introduced The Antiques Roadshow but the British version had been running for almost twenty years by the time the Americans caught on, and they still don't do it right.

Maybe its the way the British do shows. Take Top Gear. It's a show about cars, or as the British would put it "motoring". Now in North America this would be a half hour program on some obscure cable channel, or if the producers are lucky on a sports network like TSN in Canada. The cast would consist of two, maybe three guys who would talk ever so earnestly about new cars that they were testing. Words like "brake horsepower" and "pounds of torque" would earnestly pass their lips, and you would see earnestly shot footage of cars being driven around by people who are probably not the earnest hosts. There's no physical structure unless the show spends some time in a garage where they show you what's under the hood and maybe how you can make minor repairs. Obviously there's no live audience - why would even the most earnest car lover want to watch these guys taping their show.

Ah but the British; the British do things differently. Top Gear is funny. You know that because the live studio audience laughs and applauds. And this isn't just an anonymous studio audience that may or may not be somewhere behind the cameras. The studio portions of Top Gear are quite literally "theatre in the round" as the audience stands a few respectful feet away from presenters Richard "Hamster" Hammond, James May and "head boy" Jeremy Clarkson, listening in rapt attention to their every opinion and on occasion actually getting to voice their opinions when a microphone is stuck in front of their face, usually by Clarkson, who is the most opinionated of the lot. Apparently - for example - he recently stirred more than a little controversy when he stated that the German built Mini-Cooper should have a "quintessentially German" satellite navigation system that leads only to Poland. But then listening to Clarkson go on in this manner is part of the fun of the show. There's a news segment in which the hosts comment on press releases, suggestions for finding good deals, and the Wall Of Cool, where the hosts rate cars as "Sub-Zero, Cool, Uncool, and Seriously Uncool" based on appearance and performance - but mostly appearance.

Of course the most important parts of the show don't happen in the studio. Even these aren't ordinary. There are of course the reviews of the cars. Sure these have all the comments about brake horsepower and torque, but they seem to have so much fun driving the damned cars - hard and fast (they like cars that go hard and fast - you don't want to know what they have to say about cars like the Prius except that it is so "uncool" that it isn't even on the Wall Of Cool). They don't like cars that are boring and sedate to drive but feel mushy to drive. For that matter they don't like American cars primarily because they're American and Americans don't build "good" or even adequate cars (well actually Clarkson so fell in love with the new Ford GT that he apparently bought one - it immediately went to the "Seriously Uncool" section of the shows Wall Of Cool because of it).

But the show does so much more with its outdoors segments. There are on occasion races of various types. The show has at various times sought the fastest religion; a priest a minister and a rabbi got into a Suzuki Lianna together and met an imam there - that's not a joke, that's basically what happened. In similar race they tried to find the fastest political party in Britain, but my favourite was when they tried to find the fastest "science fiction monster" they had a Klingon (apparently there's a Klingon word for understeer), Darth Vader, a Cyberman, and a Dalek, with a special appearance from a chap in a blue police box (Colin Baker looking very much his 60 years at the time) - the Cyberman won, but the Dalek was angry because he was unable to actually get in the car and exterminated everyone but James May and The Doctor. Another form of race pits the show's host against some other form of transport. They had a race from London to Monte Carlo where Clarkson drove an Aston Martin DB8 while May and Hammond travelled by TGV - Clarkson won. One of the most famous incidents occurred when they took a 13 year old Toyota Hi-Lux truck (the type is currently known in North America as a Toyota Tacoma) and, to illustrate just how durable it was) ran it through a torture test that included driving down a set of stairs, crashing it into various things including a landmark tree (for which they were fined) hit it a few times with a wrecking ball (they didn't drop the ball into it) tied it to a jetty in the Severn Estuary where the tides were so powerful that the ropes snapped and the truck was pulled out to sea. They found it and after digging out all of the silt it still ran. In a later episode the put the truck on top a 24 story apartment block scheduled for implosion. After the building collapsed, they found the truck and not only started it up but were actually able to drive it into the studio despite the fact that the frame had entirely sheered apart.

The outside sequences do sometimes have a serious bent. Clarkson drove a Mercedes Turbo from London to Edinburgh and back on a single tank of gas to illustrate techniques for saving gas (closed windows and no heating or air conditioning, the radio is fine but nothing else like the CD player or a satellite navigation system, accelerate before you get to a hill and let the speed bleed off as you go up). He made he trip - barely. May once demonstrated satellite navigation systems by racing a homing pigeon - the bird beat him! In another sequence, Richard Hammond showed escape methods for people who are in a car that is going into the water. The recommended technique, which was to wait for pressure to equalize between the inside of the car and thene open the doors would have resulted in him dying if there hadn't been a diver with a scuba outfit sitting behind him in the car. They then demonstrated getting out as soon as the car hit the water. It was considerably more effective.

Two of the most enjoyable parts of the show are the Power Laps in which a professional race driver known only as "The sties" (but currently rumoured to be Damon Hill among others) takes a high performance car around the Top Gear test track. Among the fastest cars the Stig has driven have been the Pagani Zonda, the Ariel Atom, the Mercedes-Benz SLR McLaren, and the Koenigsegg CC8S. The other highlight of the show is the Star In A Reasonably Priced Car in which a celebrity drives a Suzuki Lianna (the American version is the Aerio) around the test track. Among the Stars who have appeared in this segment are Patrick Stewart, Roger Daltry, Gordon Ramsay (who tied with Jamie Oliver), Christian Slater, David Soul (who broke two of the Lianna's - wasn't used to a manual transmission) and Simon Cowell who has the third fastest time around the track. Two "Stars" - Terry Wogan and Richard Whitely - actually posted slower times that a Billy Baxter, a British veteran who was blinded during the Bosnian war.

Top Gear was seen on the Discover Channel in the United States between June and October 2005, and more extensively on BBC World in areas where that channel can be seen. However these were heavily edited episodes, cut down from one hour to thirty minutes by cutting out a lot of the studio segments and in particular the "Wall of Cool" and "Star In A Reasonably Priced Car" segments. This led to rather baffling credits where you'd see the name of a celebrity guest who viewers of the edited version have never seen. If this is the only version of Top Gear that you have seen, then you haven't seen the show. An hour long episode (minus a few minutes cut for commercials) have been running on BBC Canada, but seems to only be showing the thirty-two 2003-2004 episodes so far. Apparently Discovery Channel in the US will be producing their own version of Top Gear, reportedly with the British Stig as the only carryover from the original show. Hopefully in this domestic version they might consider doing their own versions of the Wall Of Cool and Star In A Reasonably Priced Car and the other segments that are cut for the half hour show. I suspect that this American version might be successful. The problem is that it probably won't be as good as the original, just as the American Antiques Roadshow isn't as good as the British (or even the Canadian), the American What Not To Wear is inferior to the British version with Trinny & Susannah (who've been on Top Gear) and Trading Spaces isn't as good as Changing Rooms was. If you get a chance to see the full hour version of Top Gear do so. You won't be as happy with the half hour version if you do.

American vs. British

Last night I watched an episode of Trading Spaces straight through. It wasn't a new one, but the one with Christopher Rich and Melissa Peterman from Reba doing each other's rooms. With all due respect to Rich, I was there to watch Peterman because her character on Reba is a hoot and probably the best reason to watch the show, although Steve Howey's character "Van" comes close. I tried to write about the experience last night but the words wouldn't come, mainly because I was trying to do a general overview of why American adaptations of British "lifestyle" shows may be commercial successes but don't work as well as the British originals - in my opinion anyway. So let me take another run at this thing.

I am not a handyman. I have tools but most of them were inherited when my grandfather died, and my brother got the better tools, like the router. The one power tool I own because I wanted to have it is a new 22 speed Craftsman cordless drill because, let me tell you, a cordless drill is the one power tool that you will use the most. Even if you live in an apartment there are screws to take out and put back in and Ikea furniture to put together and a cordless drill is just the thing. But even if I am totally inept about tools - a tool about tools if you will - I love home improvement shows. Norm Abrams is a demi-god in my world, thanks to his series New Yankee Workshop and the gang at This Old House are idols. I watch Extreme Makeover: Home Edition which is fun, and the guy they call in next Holmes on Homes (a Canadian series that features contractor Mike Holmes going into peoples places and redoing renovations that slipshod contractors have done in the first place). And of course there's Changing Rooms.

Changing Rooms is a simple little half hour series that was adapted into the hour long American Trading Spaces. All of the elements of the former are in the latter but for me at least they don't come out right. Going to an hour from a half hour is part of it. I think that the half hour format makes the show more focused and dare I say it more entertainment than the American version. Of course the American show has more of a commercial element to it. In the episode that I saw last night we watched the designers head off to Home Depot (the adult male's answer to "Toys R Us") and Pottery Barn and actually do some shopping. In the British series you might get a designer mentioning where he picked up a particularly nice bit, or a particularly cheap bit but to a North American the product might just as well be on Mars. Tell me, where do you get lime wax in Saskatoon? The interesting thing is that while the British show is shorter than the American program, it doesn't seem as forced. Fast paced yes, but not as if they were trying to overstuff it.

Of course the big thing is the personalities. Both shows had perky hosts - in the United States there was Paige Davis, while in the UK there was Carol Smillie (I say was because Smillie ended her hosting duties in 2003 after six years and three pregnancies, while it was announced that Davis will be dropped at the end of the current season). Smillie always seemed more polished. Not surprising, after all she had been the "Vanna White" clone on the British version of Wheel of Fortune while Davis was a Broadway performer with no previous TV experience. The British have always had "chippie" (British for carpenter) "Handy" Andy Kane, while Trading Spaces has gone through a succession of carpenters starting with Ty Pennington, Carter Oosterhaus, and several others. Kane tends to be calmer but can be quite sarcastic to the designers and even the "clients", but it's a funny quality.

Of course the designers are the hear of both shows. The core British designers are Graham Wynne, Linda Barker, Laura McCree and Anna Rider Richardson with Laurence Llewellyn-Bowen moving from designer to host after Carol Smillie left. The American series has had a larger number of designers although Frank Beliec, Hilda Santo Tomas, Roderick Shade, Laurie Smith and Doug Wilson have been with the show from the start. On the whole I think that the British designers aren't as flamboyant or abrasive as many of the American designers. Certainly they seem to take the tastes of the customers - the people they are working with rather than the people whose houses they're renovating - into account more than the American designers. That's not to say that the British designers don't have their stupid designs that please no one except the designer. Laura McCree's first room was a bedroom in an 18th century vicarage that belonged to an artist - she turned the room into a replica of a London squat (an abandoned building taken over by squatters) that no one liked. On the other hand no one is likely to staple straw to a wall, paper the kitchen of a teetotalling Baptist minister with wine bottle labels, or turn a family room into a home theater despite the fact that the family only had a 19 inch TV. The British designers are usually calmer and less prone to be overdramatic and tend to work more cooperatively with their teams. American teams and designers frequently seem to be in opposition to each other.

I can't really put my finger on the reason for it, but - and this tends to be common to all of the American versions of British originals - I like tend to feel that Trading Spaces is nowhere near as enjoyable as Changing Rooms. I watch the latter as pure entertainment and somehow I'm just not as entertained by Trading Spaces as I am by Changing Rooms.