DRIVING: that's what it's ALL ABOUT! A blog and website for automotive driving enthusiasts, featuring my interests as I see them: news and opinion about manufacturers of interest, significant enthusiast cars, and driving them hard and well.
Plagiarize - it's an ugly word. It means that you don't have an original idea and blatantly copy one from somebody else. It is, unfortunately, a situation that has occurred before on Top Gear.
Top Gear started a new season in Europe last month and enthusiasts everywhere are working hard to see the broadcasts... by whatever means they have at their disposal. We don't want to know about illegally pirated copies and torrent downloads - perhaps if they'd skip the silly idea of attempting to recreate Top Gear for Americans and just send us the originals...????.
Season 11, Episode 1 has a typical/Clarksonian stunt involving the cast building their own police cars (at a cost of no more than 900 pounds) and equipping them (500 pounds). So few quid doesn't yield much in the way of valuable police equipment... and of course the guys aren't trained in legitimate police tactics. So of course improvisation is the order of the day. That's where Clarkson makes his mistake... blazingly stealing from the most famous movie scenes ever filmed: Willliam Wyler's fabulous chariot race in the 1959 Ben Hur.
You may remember that the character Messala (Stephen Boyd) hated Ben Hur (Charlton Heston). In a chariot race, Messala ups the stakes (no pun intended) by mounting sharpened spikes on the axle of his chariot.
As needed, Messala would bring his chariot next to an opponent...
Cutting the wheels apart.. what catastrophic results. At this point I'll stop because what eventually happened to Messala is exactly what he deserved, but too terrible to show in a family blog like this.
Getting back to Top Gear... after 10 seasons of mayhem, ideas have apparently run out. Introducing what Clarkson calls the "Bodecea Spike". Check your history books for references to Bodecea - she was one of the most famous and heroic Brits ever. But we happen to know that such a spike was in use even earlier in time, in the much earlier days of the Roman Empire.
Mounted on the rear wheels of Clarkson's police car, he attempts to catch the Stig, playing an escaping bad guy...
Ready to bring the Stig to an abrupt halt...?
Rammed into the side of the Stigs car.
The results? Here's the entire scene:
Part 1:
Part 2:
Now lets go back and watch the original Ben Hur chariot race (caution: bloody ending!). The production standards here, are, ahem, entirely different than those of Top Gear!
