Back with a vengeance. It's been a minute.
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For those on Patreon wondering where I've been, my internet splitter broke for 2 weeks (with copyright issues costing me further), and this would have otherwise been out in time for mid/late August. There's an FAQ in the attached Pastebin link. This'll either the biggest waste of time I've put effort into to date, or the beginning of the next stage of everything I've been building towards.
The release of this video also seems to co-incide with Freddie Flintoff's re-emergence into the public eye, and this was not planned, and even if it was, as callous as this may sound, I would not have let such an occurrence prevent this video from seeing the light of day. Most of the references to Flintoff's "accident" are referring to the comparatively minor ordeal he had years ago, not his life-threatening shunt that he is presently recovering from, as that would be cruel and hypocritical on my part. I respect his perseverance, but still consider it utterly foolish.
In 2016, the BBC's attempt to bring back Top Gear epically flopped after its loudmouthed host Chris Evans couldn't keep his favourite organ shut long enough to guarantee his future on the show. Then, after a couple of years of sticking a sitcom actor in the lead role, it flopped again. After revamping everything from the ground up, the show still seems to be flopping even after putting in two comedic dregs from the purgatory daytime TV to rough-house Chris Harris around.
But why is this? Why was a show that was so consistently good for so many years in the hands of the few suddenly so bad once a few thousand extra hands were laid upon it?
Because, particularly during the 2010s, Top Gear became yet another victim of a rising, dirty practice I like to call "Franchise Hijacking". When the intellectual property owners of a specific franchise and the people responsible for making it have a falling out, or both parties feel they can mutually do without each other, the temptation then arises for the IP owner to take the franchise its creators made, and go its own way with it because they have the legal right to do so. Because when dignity battles money, money almost always wins. Why kill something when you can squeeze more moolah out of it?
This isn't new at all. In the world of video games, a team of trained rats calling themselves "Team6" produced a HORRENDOUS game known as "FlatOut 3" because of some weird technicalities involving former rights holders Empire Interactive when they took Bugbear under their wing, leading its Finnish development team to instead produce the game WreckFest, which is for all intents and purposes the real FlatOut 3. (There was also a FlatOut 4 developed by KyloTonn but the name was 110% dead at this point.)
Similarly, once Hideo Kojima departed from Konami, the latter tried to capitalise on his life's work by developing and releasing Metal Gear Survive with zero of his creative input. This game was similarly awful in spite of copious shilling from various game journo mags to the point 99.9% of the fanbase have retconned the title out of existence.
Top Gear was much the same. The show bought itself 6 years of grace thanks to the establishment of Bedder 6 in October 2006, but after the BBC bought it back wholesale in late 2012, they clearly had the idea of firing Jeremy Clarkson in its sights, especially after its "final warning" fiasco a mere 15 months later. Its biggest aims for doing this were the magazine, which remained top of its class and was only just starting to decline in popularity, its impressive home media record (impressive because they hardly released any at all, and what they did was usually hacked up for copyright), its organically-grown live show made with zero input from the BBC until 2008, and above all else, the power and ubiquity that the "Top Gear" name provided, which led the BBC to orchestrate a worldwide media empire to try and control a global monopoly on automotive entertainment, largely bolstered by the success of Clarkson, Wilman, Porter et. al.
The BBC's decision to hijack Top Gear into a new thing that claims to be original but is clearly a rough copycat of its best years rather than keep it off the air is yet another example of this, and over two hours I go through how CHM's reinvention of Top Gear in 2002 is not at all comparable to the manufactured churning out of this new version, the struggles of finding suitable hosts (and the BBC stifling any chances of legit chemistry), the endless copying from what already exists, and the ways the BBC have manipulated mainstream media reception to this version of Top Gear when quite frankly, I've made bigger splashes in a McDonald's bathroom.
