Top Gear

Top Gear is a car show like no other… its entertaining format has seen them tackle burning issues such as 'Can you build your own amphibious car?', 'Can you buy an old supercar for less than the price of a small hatchback?', or 'Can a stretched limousine jump over a wedding?' The answers, as it turns out, are 'only if you want to get wet', 'only if you want to break down then crash', and 'sort of, but don't park any caravans behind the reception tent'. Top Gear found this out so you didn't have to.

It's the show that says, we could show how agile this new sports saloon is with some complicated graphs and scientific charts. Or we could use it to race two adrenaline crazed free climbers to the top of a massive French gorge because actually that would be a lot more interesting and probably quite funny. Turns out, it was.

Top Gear is silly and opinionated and full of big ideas that never quite work properly or at the very least catch fire a bit before they do. But it's also wildly entertaining and never dull. At least, that's what millions of fans around the world seem to think.

Jeremy Clarkson

Jeremy has often been described as 'the most influential man in motoring journalism', mainly by himself. Estimates suggest that he is slightly over nine feet tall, owns 14,000 pairs of jeans and has destroyed almost 4.2 million tyres in his lifetime. He is best known for possessing a right foot apparently consisting of some sort of lead-based substance, for creating some of the most tortured similes ever committed to television, and for leaving the world's longest pauses between two parts... of the same sentence. He has never taken public transport.

Richard Hammond

Jeremy once claimed that Richard was born to be on TV. After a rapid climb through hospital radio and cable TV he landed his big break on BBC Two for Top Gear. The rest is history. At one point, it was possible to turn on your TV and see Richard on every channel at any time of day. Phew. Anyway, it's obvious women the world over adore him - something about his puppy dog eyes, and wanting to protect him from the nasty Mr Clarkson. Richard has not had his teeth whitened.

James May

James is a man of many and varied talents. He is the only person in the world who understands how 'torques' work, once invented a new kind of pie, and has single-handedly kept the tweed industry afloat for the last two decades. He also has sensitive hair, an array of brightly coloured jumpers, and a deep and unswayable mistrust of the French. He likes his cars in two flavours: giant luxury land yachts favoured by larger-than-life cabaret singers and dictators, and tiny cheap superminis.